Musnad Abi Ya'la al-Mawsili

The Musnad of Abu Ya'la Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn al-Muthanna al-Tamimi al-Mawsili (210-307 AH), the hadith scholar of Mosul and the Jazira, gathers hadiths arranged by the Companion who narrated them, as its printed volumes show, with the musnads of 'Abd Allah ibn 'Umar, Abu Hurayra (may God be pleased with him) and others following one another. ^{3 4 5}

Ibn 'Adi said: "I never heard a Musnad as it should be except Abu Ya'la's, because he narrated for God." Ibn al-Muqri' reports that Abu Ishaq ibn Hamza praised it, saying that whoever wrote it down would miss little of hadith. ⁶ Yazid ibn Muhammad al-Azdi records in his History of Mosul that he compiled the Musnad. ⁷

Abu Ya'la himself, as Ibn 'Adi quotes him, said that he held from Abu Khaythama (may God be pleased with him) his Musnad, his Tafsir and his halted reports — all of his hadith. ⁶

The editor of the Dar al-Ma'rifa edition, Khalil ibn Ma'mun Shiha, gathers evidence of how firmly the book was attributed to him and how widely it was heard: al-Nawawi quotes from it in Tahdhib al-Asma'; Ibn Khallikan says he heard it from the judge Fakhr al-Din al-Shahrazuri; Ibn al-'Adim's Bughyat al-Talab says Abu 'Ali al-Husayn ibn 'Ali al-Naysaburi heard it from Abu Ya'la in the Jazira from beginning to end and copied it in his own hand; and al-Zayla'i draws on it in Nasb al-Raya. ⁸ Al-Suyuti calls him in Tabaqat al-Huffaz "the author of the Great Musnad". ⁹

Among those who transmitted it from him was Abu 'Amr Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Hamdan al-Hiri; Dar al-Ta'sil printed the book on his transmission as "the Small Musnad", referring in its notes to the transmission of Ibn al-Muqri'. ¹⁰ Ibn Hamdan heard from him in Mosul in 306 AH, as al-Dhahabi's chain to him shows. ¹¹

Al-Nawawi placed it among the musnads, such as that of Abu Dawud al-Tayalisi, that do not rank with the five books for proof and reliance, because their compilers' practice was to give under each Companion everything he narrated, sound or weak. ¹² Its editor Shiha says the Musnad contains 7,555 hadiths ranging from sound through good to weak, mostly good, with few weak ones, and that the author rarely gives a hadith and then calls its chain weak, as he does with the hadith of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas about a man's supplication on reaching the prayer row: "its chain is very weak". ¹² These assessments are the editor's.

The editor lists among its manuscripts the Şehid Ali copy (564 folios, 611 AH) and the Fatih copy (1,149 folios, eleventh century AH) in Istanbul, a Fez manuscript, a copy in India and the Saib copy in Ankara (524 AH). ¹³ Nur al-Din al-Haythami (d. 807 AH) extracted its material not found in the six books in al-Maqsad al-'Ali fi Zawa'id Abi Ya'la al-Mawsili. ¹⁴

• Dar al-Ma'rifa, Beirut, 1st ed. 1426/2005, edited by Khalil ibn Ma'mun Shiha. ¹⁵
• Dar al-Ta'sil, in the series Diwan al-Hadith al-Nabawi (18), on Ibn Hamdan's transmission, edited by its Research and Information Technology Centre; its vol. 5 opens with the continuation of the Musnad of Abu Hurayra. ¹⁶
• Dar al-Hadith, Cairo, 1434/2013, in ten volumes, with Sa'id ibn Muhammad al-Sinnari's Rahamat al-Mala' al-A'la bi-Takhrij Musnad Abi Ya'la; its vol. 8 opens with the continuation of the Musnad of 'Abd Allah ibn 'Umar at hadith 5708. ¹⁷
• Husayn Salim Asad's edition, Dar al-Ma'mun lil-Turath, Damascus, 1404/1984, recorded in the museum from catalogues. ¹⁸