Encyclopedia of Hadith Forgeries: Sayings Misattributed to the Prophet Muhammad

The first comprehensive catalogue and study of hadith forgeries in English – an essential addition to the library of any serious student of hadith studies.

This 740 page hardback book has been over 10 years in the making and is the first comprehensive catalogue and study of hadith forgeries in the English language. The Lifting of Secrets Concerning Forged Re­ports was written over four hundred years ago by a respected and prolific Meccan savant of Afghan origin. Mulla ‛Ali al-Qari (d. 1014/1605) was thor­oughly famil­iar with the large body of critical lit­erature on hadith forgery, which he re­fined and re­or­dered alpha­beti­cally into 625 entries. Al-Qari's last work, it is the only catalogue of forgeries with both a transmission-based and content-based critique, illustrating the author's vast erudition as well as his lenient choices in hadith methodology and his classic Hanafi and Sufi views. 

Qari’s own text is in three main sections totalling 350 pages:

An introduction in seven sections
An alphabetical dictionary of forgeries (with Qari’s original 625 hadith entries in the book’s margins in Arabic) 
The combined epitome of the Manar of Ibn al-Qayyim and the Maqasid of Sakhawi in 40 sections.
The translator has added his own study of the forgery and ‘famous hadith’ genres, the life and works of the author, extensive footnotes and exhaustive indices.

The 230-page introduction in seven sections consists of:

Forgers and the reasons for hadith forgeries
Characteristics of forged content and matn implausibility
Notorious forgers
Typology of forgeries
“Famous Hadith” and “Forgery” compilations
Bio-bibliography of Mulla `Ali al-Qari
Salient Features of al-Qari’s Asrar

It also contains a full bibliography and seven indexes totalling 138 pages. A total of 3,000 reports are docu­mented in this volume covering doctrinal and juridi­cal forgeries, Shia for­geries, Sufi for­geries, racial forgeries, misogynistic for­geries, food forgeries, ‘Israelite’ forgeries, medical forgeries, sex forgeries, spurious books, spurious grave-spots and more.

This is the first and long overdue au­thentic refer­ence work on hadith forgeries in English.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Dr. Gibril Fouad Haddad holds scholarly licenses (ijāza) from 150 shaykhs and has authored dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Islamic hermeneutics, doctrine, hadith, biography and here­siology. He was hailed in the inaugural edition of The 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World as one of the clearest voices of traditional Islam in the West. His recent works include The Four Imams and Their Schools, Sunna Notes III: The Binding Proof of the Sunna (with Ibn Hajar’s 50-page com­mentary on the hadith of islām, īmān, ih.sān) and The Muhammadan Light in theQur’an, Sunna and Companion-Reports. He lives in Brunei Darussalam.