Isnad is Part of Islam

About the author

Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah: Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah (1336–1417 AH / 1917–1997 CE) was a Syrian scholar of hadith and Hanafi law, born in Aleppo and widely regarded as one of the foremost muhaddithun of the twentieth century. He received his early training at the Islamic schools of Aleppo, then traveled to Cairo, where he studied at al-Azhar in the fields of Arabic, hadith, Shariʿa, and education. Among his teachers was the renowned late-Ottoman scholar Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari, whose careful approach to the hadith sciences and the Hanafi tradition left a lasting mark on him. He undertook wide scholarly travels through Egypt, the Hijaz, the Levant, and India. Hanafi in law, Abu Ghuddah taught Islamic studies for years in Aleppo and then in the faculties of Shariʿa in Damascus, before spending more than two decades teaching at Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, where he helped shape courses in the hadith disciplines. He authored, edited, and annotated roughly a hundred works, most of them in service of the Prophetic Sunna, the science of isnad, and the manners of teaching and learning. His best-known books include al-Rasul al-Muʿallim wa-Asalibuhu fi al-Taʿlim (The Prophet the Teacher and His Methods of Teaching), Qimat al-Zaman ʿinda al-ʿUlamaʾ (The Value of Time), al-Isnad min al-Din, and a short treatise on the manners of the seeker of knowledge. He is remembered for reviving attention to classical hadith methodology and the moral discipline of scholarship.