An Nawawi's Forty Hadith

About the author

al-Nawawi: Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi (631-676 AH / 1233-1277 CE) was born in the village of Nawa, south of Damascus, from which he takes his name. As a young man he moved to Damascus, then a great center of learning, where he immersed himself in the religious sciences with extraordinary discipline, reportedly attending many study circles each day. Shafiʿi in law, he became one of the school's foremost authorities, and is honored with the title Muhyi al-Din, "reviver of the religion." He was renowned for his piety, simplicity, and detachment from worldly comfort, declining wealth and position to remain devoted to learning and teaching. Though his life was short, his scholarship was vast and remarkably enduring. Among his landmark works are Riyad al-Salihin, a thematically arranged collection of nearly two thousand hadith on ethics, worship, and noble character that remains among the most widely read books in the Muslim world; al-Arbaʿun (the Forty Hadith), a concise gathering of foundational traditions studied by beginners and scholars alike; Kitab al-Adhkar, on supplication and remembrance of God; the influential Shafiʿi legal manual Minhaj al-Talibin; and al-Minhaj, his detailed commentary on Sahih Muslim. His writings continue to anchor traditional Islamic study to this day.

About the translators

Denys Johnson-Davies: Denys Johnson-Davies (1922 to 2017) was a British translator widely regarded as the foremost interpreter of modern Arabic literature into English. He was born in Vancouver, Canada, to an English father, and spent his childhood between Cairo, Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya before settling in Egypt as a young man in the 1940s. Over a career spanning roughly seventy years he produced more than thirty volumes of translated Arabic novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, drawing writers from across the Arab world into English. He was the first to translate the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and the Palestinian thinker Edward Said described him as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time." His memoir, "Memories in Translation: A Life between the Lines of Arabic Literature," recounts these decades. Beyond belles-lettres, Johnson-Davies held a lasting interest in the Islamic tradition. Working with Ezzeddin Ibrahim, he prepared the widely used English renderings of "An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith" and "Forty Hadith Qudsi," presenting these classic collections with facing Arabic text for students and general readers alike. He also translated a portion of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's "Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din" dealing with the manners relating to eating. He lived his final years in Egypt, where he died in May 2017 at the age of ninety-four, leaving a body of work that shaped how the Anglophone world reads Arabic letters.

Ezzeddin Ibrahim: Dr. Ezzeddin Ibrahim (Cairo, 1928 - 2013) was a distinguished Egyptian Islamic scholar, academic, and diplomat whose career spanned five decades across the Arab world and beyond. He studied Arabic Literature at the University of Cairo, subsequently completed a BA in Education and Psychology at Ain Shams University, and in 1963 earned a PhD in Literature from London University. He also received honorary degrees from institutions including the University of Malaysia and the University of Wales. During the early part of his career he held educational and administrative positions in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Qatar, where he devised a study programme for the Ministry of Education, before becoming Professor of Arabic Literature at Riyadh University in Saudi Arabia from 1967. He later settled in the UAE, where he served as Cultural Advisor to the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Ruler of Abu Dhabi and founder and President of the UAE, and held a number of important posts at key Abu Dhabi institutions. Throughout his life he was a passionate advocate for inter-Muslim solidarity and Islamic-Christian dialogue, speaking at international conferences and contributing to journals, newspapers, and books. He is co-translator of An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith and Forty Hadith Qudsi.