Imām Yaḥyā Abū Zakariyya Muḥyī al-Dīn b. Sharaf al-Nawawī, may God grant him mercy, was one of the most celebrated scholars in Islamic history. Imām al-Dhahabī, a great master of ḥadīth, referred to Imām al-Nawawī with the following honorary titles: the great legal authority of the Prophetic community (Muftī al-Umma), the authority in Prophetic tradition (Shaykh al-Islām al-Ḥāfiẓ), the head jurist of the Shāfiʿī school (al-Faqīh al-Shāfiʿī); and he described him as an ascetic (zāhid), and one of the towering authorities (aḥad al-aʿlām). He reported that his shaykh, Ibn Faraḥ, said: “Shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn [al-Nawawī] reached three high stations, each of which would suffice to make its possessor someone people would travel to see: knowledge, abstinence, and enjoining good and forbidding evil.”
Imam al-Nawawi’s collection of 40 Hadiths is one of the most important collections of hadiths we have today.
This translation is accompanied by an introduction and commentary that seeks to provide the seeker of God with a deeper understanding of this devotion and of remembrance (dhikr) in general.
