About The Book

Beacon Books was proud to commence its publishing programme with the launch of The Encyclopedia of Hadith Forgeries by Mullah Ali al Qari translated by Dr Gibril Fouad Haddad. 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.

Mulla Ali Qari’s own text is in three main sections totaling 350 pages:

1. An introduction in seven sections

2. An alphabetical dictionary of forgeries (with Qari’s original 625 hadith entries in the book’s margins in Arabic)

3. 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:

1. Forgers and the reasons for hadith forgeries

2. Characteristics of forged content and matn implausibility

3. Notorious forgers

4. Typology of forgeries

5. “Famous Hadith” and “Forgery” compilations

6. Bio-bibliography of Mulla `Ali al-Qari

7. 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.

The book totals 740 pages and 1558 footnotes, and discusses approximately 3,000 hadiths in the twin lights of current and past scholarly expertise of this field.

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