السنن الكبير للبيهقي-الإمام مسلم

al-Sunan al-Kabir lil-Bayhaqi

One of the monumental works of classical Ḥadīth and one of the most extensive collections devoted to the Prophetic and early Islamic evidence underlying the rulings of Fiqh, authored by the great Shāfiʿī ḥadīth master Imām Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Bayhaqī (384–458 AH). Commonly known as al-Sunan al-Kubrā, the work is entitled al-Sunan al-Kabīr in this major new critical edition. Al-Dhahabī singled it out among al-Bayhaqī's exceptionally valuable writings, describing his Sunan as a work without equal and urging scholars to give particular attention to it.

Arranged systematically according to the chapters of Fiqh, the work gathers the evidence relevant to purification, prayer, zakāh, fasting, Ḥajj, transactions, marriage, judiciary, criminal law and the other fields of Islamic jurisprudence. Al-Bayhaqī does not restrict himself to marfūʿ Prophetic aḥādīth, but brings together an enormous body of aḥādīth, reports from the Companions, statements of the Tābiʿūn and other early legal material, making the Sunan an invaluable repository for tracing the textual foundations of classical Fiqh.

Its importance lies equally in al-Bayhaqī's critical treatment of the evidence. He supplies the reports with their isnāds, compares variant routes and wordings, identifies disagreements among transmitters, discusses hidden defects and frequently indicates whether particular reports are sound or unsound. He may comment upon individual narrators, explain unfamiliar vocabulary, reconcile apparently conflicting texts and demonstrate the different ways in which a narration may be understood as legal evidence. The book is therefore much more than a vast collection of narrations: it is an important work of ʿIlal al-Ḥadīth, Fiqh al-Ḥadīth and comparative legal argumentation.

Al-Bayhaqī was himself one of the foremost authorities of the Shāfiʿī tradition, and the work is particularly important for understanding the ḥadīth foundations of Shāfiʿī Fiqh. At the same time, its usefulness extends far beyond a single madhhab. He records disagreements, adduces the evidence relevant to competing legal positions and preserves numerous transmissions from early authorities. It consequently became a major source for generations of jurists and muḥaddithūn. Al-Dhahabī later produced his well-known abridgement, al-Muhadhdhab fī Ikhtiṣār al-Sunan al-Kabīr, itself testimony to the stature of al-Bayhaqī's original.

This Dār al-Imām Muslim edition is especially noteworthy as a major modern critical edition of the work, prepared by Shaykh Dr. ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī in conjunction with Markaz Hajar lil-Buḥūth wa’l-Dirāsāt al-ʿArabiyyah wa’l-Islāmiyyah. It is a substantially larger scholarly production than the familiar older ten-volume editions and has been issued jointly through Dār al-Imām Muslim, Madinah, and Suṭūr lil-Baḥth al-ʿIlmī, Riyadh.

The edition comprises 24 large hardback volumes and 11,544 pages, printed on cream paper in a 17 × 24 cm format. It is the first edition, 1444 AH / 2023 CE. Given the scale of the editorial project and the importance of the underlying work, this is one of the most significant recent editions of al-Sunan al-Kabīr and an excellent choice for serious students and researchers of Ḥadīth, Fiqh al-Ḥadīth, comparative jurisprudence and the evidences of the Shāfiʿī school.