Table Of ContentThe Complete Forty Hadith
Third Revised Edition
Imam an-Nawawi
Translated by Abdassamad Clarke
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Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd.
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Copyright © Abdassamad Clarke 1998
First published in Muharram 1419AH/May 1998 CE
Second edition Muharram 1421AH/April 2000 CE
Third edition Jumada ath-Thani 1430AH/June 2009 CE
by
Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd.
Unit 4, The Windsor Centre,
Windsor Grove, West Norwood
London, SE27 9NT, UK
www.tahapublishers.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise,
without written permission of the publishers.
By: Imam an-Nawawi
General Editor: Dr. Abia Afsar-Siddiqui
Translated by: Abdassamad Clarke
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The Complete Forty Hadith
1. An-Nawawi, Imam
ISBN: 978-1-84200-115-8 (Paperback)
978-1-84200-113-4 (Hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84200-151-6 (ePub)
Layout by: Bookwright:
Printed in Turkey by Mega Printing
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the help of two scholars: Dr. Yasin Dutton of Edinburgh
University, and Shaykh Ali Laraki both of whom gave generously of their time and
knowledge, and unravelled several seemingly intractable problems. My thanks also to
Imam Yahya Muhammad al-Hussein of Dublin for help in one particularly obstinate
passage. However, since I was unable to show the complete typescript to any of the
above the mistakes are mine, and the praise for its merits belongs to Allah.
For the third edition I must express my gratitude to Dr Abia Afsar-Siddiqui whose
painstaking attention to detail as editor and proofreader is exemplary.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Translator’s Introduction
Imam an-Nawawi’s Introduction
1. Intention
2. The Hadith of Jibril on Islam, Iman and Ihsan
3. The Pillars of Islam
4. The Decree
5. Innovation
6. The Halal and Haram
7. Sincerity
8. Fighting
9. That which I Forbid You…
10. Pure Wholesome Food
11. Doubt
12. Leaving What Does not Concern One
13. Loving for One’s Brother
14. The Sanctity of a Muslim’s Blood
15. Whoever Believes in Allah and the Last Day
16. Do not Become Angry
17. Allah has Decreed Excellence for Everything
18. Have Taqwa of Allah Wherever you are
19. Be Mindful of Allah, and He will be Mindful of you
20. Shame and Modesty
21. Istiqamah – Going Straight
22. The Obligations
23. Purity is Half of Iman
24. Injustice
25. The Wealthy and the Poor
26. Sadaqah
27. Birr and Ithm
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28. Taqwa of Allah, Hearing and Obedience
29. A Comprehensive Hadith on Action
30. Obligations and Limits
31. Zuhd – Doing-Without
32. Causing Harm and Returning Harm
33. Claimants and Counter-Claimants
34. Seeing Something Objectionable
35. Brotherhood
36. Easing Someone’s Distress
37. Good and Bad Actions
38. Optional Acts and Wilayah
39. Mistakes, Forgetfulness and Coercion
40. Be in the World as if a Stranger
41. None of You Believes until…
42. O Son of Adam
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
T
his translation was prepared from two editions: the �rst edited and annotated by
Abdullah Ibrahim al-Ansari, and published by Maktabah Jiddah, the second edition
from Maktabah al-Qudsi in Cairo.
The original intention of the Imam was to put these hadith and his explanatory text
in front of the Muslims in a way which would be useful to them, and so for that reason
we have attempted to keep this translation accurate but not academic. To that end I
have not used the Arabic script at all except in two or three places in which the Imam
explains Arabic words and where phonetics became more complicated than the Arabic.
As to the footnotes on the sources of the ayat and the hadith and for biographies of
the Companions, I have largely drawn on the notes of Abdullah Ibrahim al-Ansari
from the �rst of the above-mentioned editions.
Since much Arabic writing is concise I have added extra explanatory words in
brackets [ ] if it seemed that the words were implicit in the Arabic. Sometimes I added
extra explanatory comments of my own in parentheses ( ). If the matter seemed to call
for extra material I gave it a footnote.
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
In this edition we include the Arabic texts of the forty hadith. While doing that we
took the opportunity to update a few matters in the text, the most substantial of which
is to use the translations of the ayat of al-Qur’an al-Karim from The Noble Qur’an: a
new rendering of its meaning in English by Abdalhaqq and Aisha Bewley, published by
Bookwork, Norwich 1999. We do that because their translation is based on the
meanings always understood by the Muslims as expressed in the classical tafsir
literature. Besides that, the Bewleys are also native English speakers and this is the most
readable translation of the meanings of the Qur’an and the most direct.
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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
The most substantial change to this edition has been to name the hadith, for
example: 1. Intention, 2. The Hadith of Jibril on Islam, Iman and Ihsan, etc., and to
use these names in the table of contents and the headers to facilitate use of the book, for
it is clear that this is a book that ought to be used rather than read once and left.
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TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
I
mam an-Nawawi, may Allah be merciful to him, never intended merely to record
forty hadith in a book and release them to the public. The book which he wrote was his
collection of forty-two hadith together with the absolute minimum of fiqh and
linguistic commentary which he felt necessary for people not to misunderstand the
import of these hadith. Ibn ‘Uyaynah said, “Hadith 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-scienti�c 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 e�ective for the �rst of
this community will be e�ective 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, and 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 �nd 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 �nd Imam Malik, may Allah be merciful to him, saying, “Knowledge is a
light which Allah places where He will; it is not much narration.” We must accept this
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