al-Fath al-Kabir fi Damm al-Ziyada ila al-Jami al-Saghir
- Author died
- 911 AH
- Editions
- Dar Al-Fikr
al-Fath al-Kabir fi Damm al-Ziyada ila al-Jami al-Saghir (The Great Opening in Merging the Addition with the Small Collection) is an alphabetical hadith compendium that integrates al-Jalal al-Suyuti's (d. 911 AH / 1505 CE) hadith collection al-Jami al-Saghir with its supplementary work, compiled into a unified reference by Yusuf al-Nabhani (1265–1350 AH / 1849–1932 CE).
Background and Purpose
Al-Suyuti completed the original al-Jami al-Saghir in 907 AH (1501 CE), condensing brief prophetic reports from his larger work Jam' al-Jawami' (al-Jami al-Kabir). During the final four years of his life, he authored a supplement titled Ziyadat al-Jami' (or al-Ziyada ala al-Jami al-Saghir), which compiled an additional 4,440 hadiths arranged alphabetically. However, al-Suyuti did not merge the supplement into the primary text before his death.
Al-Nabhani combined both texts into a single work to facilitate their consultation and acquisition, noting in his preface that the supplement belongs directly with the parent work and shares its rules, scope, and authorship.
Structure and Method
The compilation contains 14,471 hadiths arranged in strict alphabetical order according to the first word of each narration and its subsequent letters. Al-Nabhani's editorial methodology involved several specific features:
- Hadiths originating from the supplement (al-Ziyada) are marked with the letter zay (ز) at their beginning to distinguish them from the base text.
- Each entry cites the text of the hadith, its source attribution (takhrij), and the Companion who narrated it.
- Exact duplicates appearing in both the base text and the supplement were omitted from the addition, while narrations with variations in wording were retained.
- A dedicated subsection for narrations beginning with the definite article (al-) was placed at the conclusion of each alphabetical letter.
- Al-Nabhani omitted the symbolic abbreviations indicating the authentic, fair, or weak status of narrations that were present in al-Suyuti's original work for reports outside the two Sahih collections, a decision noted critically by later scholars.
The work has been published in three volumes.
Reception and Derivatives
Al-Fath al-Kabir served as the source text for modern hadith evaluations of al-Suyuti's corpus. The scholar Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani evaluated and verified the narrations of al-Fath al-Kabir, dividing the material according to his assessments of authenticity into two published works: Sahih al-Jami al-Saghir wa-Ziyadatuh (for sound and good reports) and Da'if al-Jami al-Saghir wa-Ziyadatuh (for weak narrations).
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