al-Sindi's gloss on the Sunan of al-Nasa'i

al-Sindi's gloss on al-Nasa'i's Sunan is a short commentary by Abu al-Hasan al-Sindi on the Sunan of al-Nasa'i. It explains the wording of the Sunan and clarifies rare words and grammar, and it states al-Nasa'i's conditions for including reports. ¹

The gloss says that al-Nasa'i did not include many of the men that Abu Dawud and al-Tirmidhi included, and that he avoided reports from a group of men whom the sahih compilers used. For this reason, it says, it was said that his condition for men was stricter than that of others. ¹

The introduction to the gloss relates that when al-Nasa'i had composed al-Sunan al-Kubra he presented it to the emir of al-Ramla, who asked whether all of it was sound; he said no, and the emir asked him to extract the sound hadiths, so he composed al-Mujtaba ("the Selected"), spelled with b, also given with n as al-Mujtana ("the Gathered"). ¹ It adds that al-Sunan al-Kubra contains sound hadiths together with some defective ones whose defect he did not state, that the selection called al-Mujtaba is wholly sound according to those who said so, and that weak hadiths in it are very rare, ranked with the good when nothing else exists on the subject. ¹

At the end of the photographed copy are short notices on the compilers, among them Abu Dawud, with his saying that he wrote five hundred thousand hadiths and selected from them those in his book, and al-Khattabi's remark that nothing like Abu Dawud's Sunan was written in the science of religion; al-Tirmidhi, who presented his book to the scholars of the Hijaz, Iraq and Khurasan and they approved it; and al-Nasa'i: born in 215 AH, died in Mecca in 303 AH as the notice has it, a student of Qutayba ibn Sa'id, Ishaq ibn Ibrahim, Muhammad ibn Bashshar and Abu Dawud, with al-Daraqutni's statement that he came before everyone else in this science in his time, and the story of the emir who asked about the soundness of the Sunan, leading to al-Mujtaba. ² The copy does not name the author of these notices; they are appended to the gloss in this copy. ²

The photographed copy has 148 pages. The scan is of very poor quality, so only the first cover and the opening of the introduction can be read. Nothing beyond that can be relied on without a clearer scan. ³

• The attribution to Abu al-Hasan al-Sindi comes from the cover and introduction. Identifying him with the Medina scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Hadi al-Sindi is an assumption from the person record and needs checking.
• Do not record judgements on hadiths from this copy until a clearer scan is available.