al-Qanaa fi ma yahsun al-ihata min Ashrat al-Saa
- Author died
- 902 AH
- Editions
- Maktabat Adwa' al-Salaf
Al-Qanaʿah fī mā yaḥsun al-iḥāṭah bihi min ashrāṭ al-sāʿah (Arabic: القناعة فيما يحسن الإحاطة به من أشراط الساعة, lit. 'Contentment Regarding What is Proper to Comprehend of the Portents of the Hour') is a treatise on Islamic eschatology by the Shafi'i hadith scholar and historian Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Sakhawi (831–902 AH / 1428–1497 CE) , focusing on the minor and major signs preceding the Day of Judgment .
Title and Attribution
The title appears with slight variations across manuscripts and bibliographic records:
- The title recorded across three primary manuscript copies is al-Qanāʿah fī mā yaḥsun al-iḥāṭah bihi min ashrāṭ al-sāʿah .
- In his autobiographical entry in al-Ḍawʾ al-Lāmiʿ, al-Sakhawi listed the book under the title al-Qanāʿah mimmā taḥsun al-iḥāṭah bihi min ashrāṭ al-sāʿah .
- In Hajji Khalifa's Kashf al-Ẓunūn and Ismail Pasha al-Baghdadi's Hadiyyat al-ʿĀrifīn, it is recorded under the variant al-Qanāʿah fī mā tamass ilayhi al-ḥājah min ashrāṭ al-sāʿah (or fī mā taḥsun ilayhi al-ḥājah) .
All of these sources and manuscript witnesses affirm the attribution of the work to al-Sakhawi .
Purpose and Methodology
Al-Sakhawi composed the work in response to a request from notables of his locality . Because matters of the unseen are established solely through transmitted authority, he relied on textual evidence from the Quran and the Prophetic Sunnah .
In presenting his material, al-Sakhawi typically cites a hadith related to a given sign and then weaves various textual variants into the narrative clause by clause . At times, he quotes hadiths from the middle or end of their texts, conveys them by meaning, or incorporates less common routes of transmission . His analytical comments throughout the treatise draw substantially upon the commentary of his teacher, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, in Fath al-Bari, whom he cites explicitly in several places while quoting him without attribution in others .
Influence and Editions
The treatise served as one of the primary sources synthesized by Ibn Hajar al-Haytami in his monograph on the Mahdi, al-Qawl al-mukhtaṣar fī ʿalāmāt al-Mahdī al-muntaẓar, which abridged al-Sakhawi's al-Qanaʿah alongside Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti's al-ʿUrf al-wardī fī akhbār al-Mahdī .
Al-Qanaʿah has been printed in several modern editions:
- Edited by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Uqayl (Riyadh: Maktabat Adwa' al-Salaf, 1422 AH / 2002 CE) .
- Edited by Majdi al-Sayyid Ibrahim (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Sa'i) .
- Published under the title Ashrāṭ al-Sāʿah, prepared by Isam al-Harastani with hadith documentation by Muhammad al-Zaghli (Dar al-Bayaariq and Dar Ammar) .
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