40 Hadith From Sunan Abu Dawud

About the authors

Shahrul Hussain: Shahrul Hussain is a British scholar and lecturer in Islamic studies whose work brings classical Islamic law and the foundational religious sciences to an English-reading audience. He first trained in classical Islamic studies and Arabic at Darul Uloom al-Islamiyya in Birmingham, then won a scholarship to al-Azhar University in Cairo, graduating from the Faculty of Islamic Jurisprudence and Law in 2001. He went on to complete a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, with doctoral work on Islamic law in Muslim-minority contexts, and teaches at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education in the UK. His scholarly interests lie in applied jurisprudence, Islamic legal theory, and contemporary fiqh, alongside a sustained engagement with hadith and Qurʾanic studies. His best-known work, A Treasury of Sacred Maxims, presents and comments on the legal maxims (qawaʿid fiqhiyya) that distill the wider aims and reasoning of the Shariʿa, exploring their legal and moral implications for readers new to the discipline. He has also produced a series of accessible forty-hadith collections selected from the principal Sunni hadith works, including Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Jamiʿ al-Tirmidhi, and Sunan Abi Dawud, as well as What the Living Can Do for the Dead, a treatment grounded in the Qurʾan and Sunna. His writing aims to make rigorous traditional learning approachable without diluting its substance.

Zahed Fettah: Zahed Fettah is a contemporary British scholar based in Birmingham, England, where he serves as an imam and khatib and as a Research Fellow at the Ibn Rushd Centre for Islamic research. A hafiz of the Qurʾan, he combines Western academic training with a traditional course of study. He holds a law degree (LLB) from the University of Birmingham, a Shariʿa qualification from the European Institute of Human Sciences, and an MA in Islamic Studies from Newman University, after which he undertook postgraduate study specializing in ifta, the science of issuing fatwas. He holds ijazahs in several Islamic disciplines, principally in Hanbali fiqh and in hadith. For a number of years he has taught fiqh, hadith, and tafsir at mosques and Islamic centers, and has written essays on a range of fiqhi and Islamic questions. Among English readers he is best known, together with Shahrul Hussain, for the 40 Hadith series, a set of accessible volumes each gathering forty narrations from one of the six canonical collections: Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, and the four Sunan of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasaʾi, and Ibn Maja, with clear translation and commentary for general readers.