The Complete Forty Hadith

The Complete Forty Hadith

Imam an-Nawawi

Translated by Abdassamad Clarke



Translator�s Introduction

Imam an-Nawawi, may Allah show mercy to him, never intended merely to record forty ahadith in a book and release them to the public. The book which he wrote was his collection of forty-two ahadith together with the absolute minimum of fiqh and linguistic commentary which he felt necessary for people not to misunderstand the import of these ahadith. Ibn �Uyaynah said, �Ahadith are misleading except to those who have fiqh.� Ibn Wahb said, �Every man of hadith who has no imam in fiqh is astray. If Allah had not rescued us by Malik and al-Layth we would have gone astray.�

It is clear from reading the hadith literature that the Companions, who were pre-eminently men of fiqh, received their Islam by means of what we would call �taqlid� which continued to be the means of Islam�s transmission from one generation to the next. Taqlid is that people see with the eyes of the heart something so overwhelmingly clear that they imitate it, whether consciously or unconsciously. While this is not a decision to abandon the intellect, this word is usually translated pejoratively as �blind imitation�. Many modern Muslims imagine that we have a wisdom superior to that because of living in a �more enlightened� techno-scientific age. We place that concept in inverted commas because our measure of all enlightenment is the noble conduct of the Messenger of Allah @ and his Companions in Madinah, a measure which shows this age to be one of the most barbaric there has ever been.

Imam Malik is reported to have said, �Only that which was effective for the first of this community will be effective for the last of it.� For the Companions the encounter with the Prophet @ was so extraordinary that they modelled themselves entirely upon him, sometimes even in the smallest customs and actions. As every parent witnesses, that is a major part of the process by which children learn to become adult human beings. It is from the very essence of the human being. Knowledge is not merely sets of propositions. Transmission is not just to convey those propositions to another.

This is not to denigrate the author of this book or any of the noble transmitters of traditional knowledge of this Muslim community. If we were to examine the lives of the great people of knowledge of our community we would find them to have been overwhelmed by the luminous characters and behaviour of the men and women from whom they learnt. For if the sciences have not illuminated their transmitters there is little point in transmitting them. Thus we find Imam Malik, may Allah show mercy to him, saying, �Knowledge is a light which Allah places where He will; it is not much narration.� We must accept this from Malik since his capacity for accurate narration of ahadith is not in doubt, but here he is calling us to something beyond texts and certainly beyond isnads.

The unique achievement of the Prophet @ unparalleled in all history before or since, is to have transformed the lives and practice of the elite and the ordinary people of an entire city, and from there to have transformed Arabia and the world. That miracle continues in our time. Yet Madinah was the core group, trained, educated and civilised by the last of the Messengers. The next generations learnt their Islam as a generation from the Companions. That transmission was most concentrated and authentic in Madinah. �Amal is the term which denotes the actual practice of the people of Madinah. The Companions transmitted it to the Followers, and they to the Followers of the Followers. All of these generations further enriched the record of the practice by their intelligent resolution of new issues in accordance with their profound knowledge of the Book and the Sunnah. Most significantly, that record includes their mode of transacting commercially without usury, the knowledge of which sustained and enriched Muslim culture for centuries and is desperately needed by the world today. The practice of the people of Madinah of those first generations is itself the best evidence of the Sunnah because it is like a mutawatir hadith which has been transmitted by huge numbers of reliable people of one generation to equally large numbers of reliable people of the next. In this age the best result expected of the culture of the solitary narrator is the well-meaning �good Muslim� who is himself only too aware that he is ineffectual.

Malik, along with his pre-eminence as a narrator of ahadith, recorded the �amal � the practice � so that it might be a wellspring for civilisations to come, as it has been and as it will continue to be insha�Allah. These ahadith from the noble Imam an-Nawawi, may Allah show mercy to him, make most sense when set within the �amal of a dynamic and resurgent Islam like jewels in the bezel of the ring.

Two further matters in particular need to be clarified, as they constitute two of the warp threads on which the weft of this text is woven and thus all of Islam. First is the issue of sadaqah. The worst translation of this word is the Christian �charity�. It is a salutary lesson for those Muslims rushing to embrace the Jews and Christians as brothers from the �Abrahamic and monotheistic faiths� � an abhorrent concept covering over the Jews� crimes of slandering and murdering the prophets and men of Allah, and the Christians� idolisation of Sayyiduna �Isa � � that over a century ago a non-Muslim, the German philosopher Nietzsche, showed how terminally sick Judaeo-Christian culture is. Nietzsche called for a revaluation of all values. In his most thorough statement of that analysis, The Antichrist, he had also begun to declare that Islam does not share in that degeneracy. Perhaps if he had been granted more years of sanity by the grace of Allah he might have come to see that Islam is itself the very revaluation of all values for which he had called. However, we have been disappointed in some of our early translators into English who went out of their way to prove that Islam is absolutely acceptable to the Jews and the Christians. Thus these translators have wherever possible taken hold of Christian ecclesiastical language to translate the classic texts of Islam. Al-hamdulillah, more recent translators have accepted that key Arabic terms are untranslatable and that with the increasing familiarity with Arabic of English-speaking Muslims it is simplest to leave words like �deen�, for example, rather than choosing �religion�.

However, with a word such as �sadaqah�, we must remove a misunderstanding that now adheres to the Arabic word itself. That is that in current usage sadaqah is used for the extra optional acts of generosity after the payment of zakah. However, even a slight acquaintance with our heritage of tafsir and fiqh quickly disabuses us of this erroneous notion. Sadaqah is the entire zone which encompasses the obligatory zakah, the optional extra acts of giving, and other acts such as establishing awqaf endowments, but it is very often used exclusively for zakah itself. It is used in these forty-two ahadith both in the sense of zakah and extra acts of generosity.

This is of importance to us in this age because, properly speaking, the pillar of zakah does not exist. That is for a number of reasons. The first reason is that zakah is not a charity. It is certainly a noble intention to pay from one�s earnings in order to discharge the obligation that one owes to Allah, but something more is called for � a striving to recreate the authentic form of zakah. Zakah is not a voluntary giving to the poor, but rather it is an obligation of Islam. It is collected by the imams � i.e. the khalifah and the amirs of the Muslims � by force if necessary. A man may be fought and killed for refusing to pay the zakah as the Imam states so unequivocally.

The second reason is that the zakah can only be taken in something real which is itself halal and from a halal economy; it must be paid in gold, silver, cattle, or grains, etc. If the entire economy is based on usurious instruments, what zakah is possible? I must refer the reader to the works of Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, particularly The Return of the Gold Dinar, for a thorough exposition of this matter. However, in summary it is that the banknote and other credit instruments are entirely usurious even before we consider the matter of interest, and may not be used to pay zakah. Let us not be sidetracked into the fruitless debates of amateur �ulama which so plague our age. Let us instead be a little political. All these instruments are entirely the creation of the enemies of Islam and are under their control. All banks, including equity banks, which are sometimes called Islamic banks, operate under usurious prerequisites that allow them to lend money created out of nothing. Thus most of the currency of the paper-money system that we use comes into circulation as a debt to the banks. Neither the banknote, a usurious instrument, nor any kind of promissory note (in Arabic called dayn) can be used to pay zakah.

It is the individual obligation of every Muslim to restore that pillar, since zakah is an individual obligation on every Muslim man and woman. The Muslim must pay zakah in gold and silver. We need no argument for the above. If any argument were needed for the Dinar and Dirham, it would be sufficient to say that they were the usage of the Messenger of Allah and of the Companions and of all the right-acting generations of Muslims up to our day, and that all the texts mention them and all of these generations paid their zakah with them. Banks and paper money are the invention of kuffar and they continue to impoverish us. The return to the Islamic Dinar as the one world currency of the Muslims is the beginning of our prosperity.

The second warp thread of our text is inextricably linked with the first: it is the matter of leadership, authority and governance. The abolition of the Khilafah is the other great bid�ah of our time. It is an awkward fact of history that the very movement which is most vocal in speaking out against bid�ah participated treacherously with kuffar in the destruction of the Khalifate. The story of that event is for the first time clearly exposed in the astonishing The Return of the Khalifate by Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Murabit, in which he also outlines the route to its revival. The restoration of the Khalifate and its amirates is an individual obligation on every Muslim. Every single Muslim is obliged to pledge allegiance to a leader, as is established in the Sunnah, and to obey him and pay his zakah to him. That restoration will not proceed by the erection of an Islamic State, but by the compelling imperative on each Muslim to obey one worthy to lead. This is no more complicated than the issue a group of Muslims face each prayer time; someone is always found who is most fitted to lead the prayer and everyone intuitively recognises the right man. Leadership is analogous to that. If each Muslim community accepts and affirms its natural leaders, from among the leaders of the leaders most assuredly an Amir for the Muslims will emerge. This is the Sunnah of the Muslims, just as representational democracy, constitutionalism and republicanism are innovations of the Jews, Christians and Freemasons. We need no excuse nor proof for choosing the former and only a clear hypocrite could call us to the latter.

That is our situation. A pillar of Islam and the entire model of Islamic governance-without-state have been demolished, and it is the personal obligation of every Muslim and Muslimah to see them restored. It is not from the fiqh of Islam to engage in an optional act when the obligatory act has not been discharged, nor to expend energy in combating things which are disapproved when the haram is everywhere in evidence. It is a deviant understanding of Islam that levels all of these distinctions of fiqh and reduces matters to whether or not a text has an isnad. With this text we are safe, however, since it comes from a man of knowledge who was �amil, i.e. active in establishing the deen, and who was himself a noted faqih.

For this text to make sense it must not be modified to fit into the age in which we live as if the parameters of kufr were immutable, rather it must be an instrument we use in shaping the age in which we live for the sake of Allah.