Shu'ab al-Iman

Shu'ab al-Iman is among the best-known works of the Shafi'i hadith master Abu Bakr al-Bayhaqi of Nishapur (d. 458 AH), a collection arranging hadiths under the "branches of faith"; al-Subki counts it in the Tabaqat al-Shafi'iyya among al-Bayhaqi's major books, swearing that not one of them has its like ¹.

In al-Bayhaqi's tarjama al-Subki reports that his compositions reached a thousand booklets, unmatched, and describes them as "cleanly arranged, nicely ordered works of much benefit" — Shu'ab al-Iman among them ¹. Elsewhere in the Tabaqat he quotes from it as "his book Shu'ab al-Iman, in the twenty-sixth branch" — an indication of the work's branch structure ¹.

• Text from al-Subki's Tabaqat al-Shafi'iyya al-Kubra (harvest copy AAlexandrina-150846), p. 13; the cross-reference to "the twenty-sixth branch" occurs in another volume of the set (AAlexandrina-149925) and shows the book's branch scheme; the full count and order of its branches await the book's own text.