مشارق الأنوار النبوية من صحاح الأخبار المصطفوية

Mashariq al-Anwar al-Nabawiyyah

A celebrated classical collection of Prophetic traditions by the distinguished Ḥanafī ḥadīth scholar, linguist and lexicographer Raḍī al-Dīn Abū al-Faḍāʾil al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣaghānī (577–650 AH). Mashāriq al-Anwār was designed as a compact collection of rigorously selected aḥādīth that could serve students as an accessible repository of the most important Prophetic texts. Numerous surviving manuscripts attest to its wide circulation and long-standing place within the scholarly tradition.

Al-Ṣaghānī explains in his introduction that he brought together material from Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, supplementing it with narrations he regarded as authentic from Kitāb al-Shihāb and Kitāb al-Najm, with the aim of gathering authentic traditions into a book of manageable size. He employs symbols to identify the sources of individual narrations, thereby allowing a large body of material to be presented with considerable economy. His own description of the work emphasises both its compactness and his concern for the authenticity of its contents.

Unlike collections arranged according to the conventional chapters of Fiqh, Mashāriq al-Anwār employs a distinctive arrangement intended to facilitate the memorisation and retrieval of ḥadīth texts. Its concise format helped make it particularly suitable for teaching, and the work became the subject of numerous commentaries in subsequent centuries. Among these is the substantial commentary of the Ottoman Ḥanafī scholar Shaykhzādah Muḥammad ibn Muṣṭafā al-Qūjawī (d. 951 AH), completed in 937 AH, demonstrating the importance the text acquired within later Ḥanafī scholarly circles.

The work is also of particular interest because al-Ṣaghānī was not only a muḥaddith but one of the outstanding Arabic lexicographers of his age. His precision in language and textual transmission is reflected in the concise presentation of the Prophetic reports. Mashāriq al-Anwār consequently became a useful intermediate text for students who had progressed beyond very small ḥadīth collections but were not yet studying the major canonical works in their entirety.

This handsome Dār al-Lubāb edition is critically edited by the noted manuscript specialist Tawfīq Maḥmūd Taklah and was established from four manuscript copies