The Ṣaḥīh of Imām ibn Ḥibbān

The Author:

The author of this work is Abū Ḥātim Muḥammad ibn Ḥibbān (275-354 AH) from Khorasan, an area renowned in Islamic history for producing ḥadīth scholars. He heard ḥadīth from Abū Yaʿlā al-Mawṣilī, al-Ḥasan ibn Sufyān, Abū Bakr ibn Khuzaymah, the author of the Ṣaḥīh, and countless others from Egypt to Khorasan. He was one of the fuqahāʾ (jurists) and ḥuffāẓ (master memorisers) of the various types of knowledge. Imām al-Ḥākim (405 AH), a leading traditionist of his age known as "the Imām of Khorasan" took knowledge from him. Imām Ibn Ḥibbān himself said in his Kitāb al-Anwāʿ, "Perhaps we wrote from two thousand shaykhs."

The Ṣaḥīh:

It is also called at-Taqāsīm wa 'l-Anwāʿ, the title of the book mentioned by the author in the introduction. The author did not arrange it in chapters, and neither by the asānīd (chains) of the Ṣaḥābah nor alphabetically by the shuyūkh. It is an extensive and reliable firsthand source of ḥadīth. Like Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Khuzaymah, his book contains authentic aḥādīth of both the ṣaḥīḥ and ḥasan level. Because Imām Ibn Ḥibbān was lenient in his criteria regarding narrators, most of the scholars of ḥadīth deemed Imām Ibn Khuzaymah’s work more authentic owing to Ibn Khuzaymah’s special rigour with regards to the narrators. Weak narrations certainly did make their way into the Ṣaḥīḥ as a result of Imām Ibn Ḥibbān's passive criteria with regards to establishing narrator reliability, but the overwhelming majority of his reports are either ṣaḥīḥ or ḥasan.

The Categorization:

Imām Ibn Ḥibbān divides the aḥādīth of his Ṣaḥīḥ into five categories:

• Commands (Awāmir): 110 subcategories

• Prohibitions (Nawāhī): 110 subcategories

• Formative (Akhbār): 80 subcategories

• Permissible (Ibāḥāt): 50 subcategory

• Prophetic ﷺ Actions (Afʿāl): 50 subcategories

This ordering of the sunnah is unique to Imām Ibn Ḥibbān and gives his work an added value. Not only is Imām Ibn Ḥibbān’s Ṣaḥīḥ a compilation of ḥadīth, it is also an extensive encyclopedia of fiqh. In the heading of every ḥadīth, Imām Ibn Ḥibbān captions the fiqh positions he has derived from the ḥadīth. Moreover, at the end of most every ḥadīth, Ibn Ḥibbān includes useful commentary about the narrators or about the text. He also illuminates fine points of meanings that may be otherwise liable to misunderstanding