Sahih al-Jami' al-Saghir wa-Ziyadatuh (al-Fath al-Kabir)

Sahih al-Jami' al-Saghir wa-Ziyadatuh (al-Fath al-Kabir) is one of the two books in which Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani published his grading of al-Fath al-Kabir, Yusuf al-Nabhani's merger of al-Suyuti's al-Jami' al-Saghir with its supplement Ziyadat al-Jami'. ^{4 3} This part holds what al-Albani judges established and usable as proof — sound and good — while its companion, Da'if al-Jami' al-Saghir wa-Ziyadatuh, holds what he judges unusable. ³

In his introduction al-Albani calls al-Jami' al-Saghir one of the richest and most easily arranged hadith books, hence its many printings and commentaries, but finds it lacking in three ways: it misses a large share of hadiths, even from the Six Books; its alphabetical order is not kept strictly; and, in his view, it contains thousands of weak and objectionable hadiths, hundreds of them fabricated or baseless. ⁵ The first, he says, al-Suyuti himself remedied with the Ziyada, the second al-Nabhani in al-Fath al-Kabir; the third, the most important to him, no one had done as far as he knew, save al-Munawi in part in Fayd al-Qadir, without covering every hadith or the Ziyada. ⁶

Al-Albani holds that al-Suyuti's sigla for sound, good and weak at the end of hadiths cannot be relied on, and gives three answers: the sigla were corrupted by copyists and printers, for which he quotes al-Munawi; some fell out in copying while others were added against the author's copy; and even were they intact, al-Suyuti was, in his view, known for leniency in declaring hadiths sound or good. ^{7 8} He gives examples where the siglum in the copy contradicts al-Munawi's own remark on the same hadith. ⁹ He explains the confusion by the book's fame and the many copyists who did not collate their copies with the author's, unlike the copyists of earlier times. ⁸

Fairness, he adds, requires saying that al-Suyuti followed the hadith scholars' rule "gather, then sift": he gathered but was not able to examine every hadith, and in other books, such as Dhayl al-Ahadith al-Mawdu'a, he himself declared a good number of them fabricated. ¹⁰

Al-Albani says he used al-Fath al-Kabir as his index, entering in it the summary of his verdict on every hadith he had examined in his books, and found that about a third, if not half, of the book had thus been graded; he also drew on more than forty volumes he had copied by hand from manuscripts in the Zahiriyya library in Damascus, the Awqaf library in Aleppo, and the Mahmudiyya and 'Arif Hikmat libraries in Medina. ¹¹ Under each hadith he gave one of five grades — sound, good, weak, very weak, fabricated — with the book of his where he discussed it, such as the two Silsilas and Irwa' al-Ghalil. ² Where al-Suyuti cited a hadith to a source other than the two Sahihs although it is in them, or to a lesser compiler, he added the siglum after the grade. ¹²

He first meant to print al-Fath al-Kabir as it stood with his gradings, then chose to split it into two books, so that a reader could tell a hadith's standing in general just by remembering which book he read it in — following those who wrote collections of sound hadiths, such as al-Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Khuzayma and Ibn Hibban, and those who wrote on weak and fabricated ones, such as Ibn al-Jawzi and al-Shawkani. ¹³

The publisher Zuhayr al-Shawish began printing it in Damascus in 1388 AH in small parts, from drafts al-Albani had not prepared for print, and later reissued it with corrections and additions, writing the new preface on 1 Ramadan 1405 AH. ^{14 1} He gives the count of Sahih al-Jami' al-Saghir as 8,231 hadiths, 3,273 from the Ziyada, and of al-Fath al-Kabir as a whole as 14,700. ¹ He notes that the hadith "Actions are only by intentions" is not in the book because al-Nabhani dropped al-Suyuti's preface, where it stood, and that in manuscripts of the Jami' some place it at the end of the preface and some omit it. ¹⁵

Al-Maktab al-Islami, 3rd renewed, enlarged and revised ed., 1408 AH/1988 CE. ¹⁶