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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Light On the Muhammadan Sunnah Or Defence of the Hadith Dr. Taha Husayn's Foreword “He is not to blame for the slips, to some of which I have referred, since those who are exonerated of defect or deficiency or slips being rarely found nowadays.” Adwa’ ‘ala al-Sunnah al-Muhammadiyyah A weighty effort and burden that only very few people can undertake and shoulder nowadays.

This is a book for which its author exerted a toil that can never be exerted but only by a very few people who can be enumerated in the present days, where intellectual laziness prevails, and comfort and good health be preferred to diligence and hardship and labour. Anyone reading this book attentively and deliberately, will verily observe the great deal of effort exerted by the author, who kept on, throughout long years, going through voluminous books and references.

The books which the researchers could never endure going through, due to the abundance of chains and their repetition, plurality and mess of narrations, reiteration of khabar al-wahid for numerous times at different occasions. The least to be said about reading such books, is that they cause readers to grow tired and become bored and weary.

It is hard enough for man to toil himself in reading the widely-known Sunnah books, making comparison between the traditions reported in them on the nass (text) and the asanid (chains of transmitters) with which this nass was reported, and searching after that for the rijal constituting those asanid through the relevant books.

It is sufficient to mention that the author (of this book) has read al-Muwatta’ of Malik, with Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abi Dawud, Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Sunan Ibn Majah and Musnad Ahmad. However he has gone through lengthy expositions (shuruh) for some of these books, and through many other lengthy and short books compiled on interpretation of the hadith texts, rijal of the asanid, and the Prophet’s sirah (conduct) and also the classes (tabaqat) of narrators.

At the end of the book he has recorded the titles of the books he has read and investigated attentively, or referred to when writing his book. Enough be for anyone to look at these titles to realize how much forbearance, sufferance and meditation exerted by the author, toward that which he read. This in itself indicates a strenuous effort and heavy burden that can never be undertaken nowadays but only by very few people, as previously said.