Ghayat al-Maqsid fi Zawaid al-Musnad
- Author died
- 807 AH
- Editions
- Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmīyah
Ghayat al-Maqsid fi Zawaid al-Musnad (The Ultimate Aim Regarding the Additions of the Musnad) is a hadith compilation by Nur al-Din al-Haythami (d. 807 AH / 1405 CE) that extracts the unique narrations of the Musnad Ahmad over the Six Books of Hadith, arranged by subject chapters with their full chains of transmission.
Composition and Purpose
Al-Haythami initially drafted the additions (zawaid) of Ahmad ibn Hanbal's Musnad over the Six Books without comprehensive examination, before setting it aside to compile the additions of Abu Bakr al-Bazzar, Abu Ya'la al-Mawsili, and the two compilations al-Mu'jam al-Awsat and al-Mu'jam al-Saghir by al-Tabarani. Upon gathering those works, he noted deficiencies in his initial compilation of the Musnad, such as the accidental omission of hadiths resulting from the differences between al-Sunan al-Kabir of al-Nasa'i and its abridgment al-Mujtaba. Considering the isolated narrations of the Musnad to be generally sounder than those of the other collections, he resumed work on it to provide a complete and rigorous extraction.
Methodology and Structure
The work gathers all raised (marfu') hadiths transmitted uniquely in their entirety by Ahmad ibn Hanbal or his son Abdullah ibn Ahmad, as well as narrations shared with the Six Books that contain textual additions. Al-Haythami arranged the material topically according to legal and thematic chapters (abwab) and retained the complete chains of transmission (isnads).
When an addition appeared at the beginning or end of a lengthy narration, he either restricted himself to quoting the addition or cited the full text while noting the variant. For narrations added by Abdullah ibn Ahmad, al-Haythami explicitly prefaced them with the formula: قال عبد الله: حدثنا فلان ("Abdullah said: So-and-so narrated to us").
Reception and Integration
Ghayat al-Maqsid spans two volumes and was described by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani as being of "great utility" (kathir al-jadwa). Following the completion of this work and his other individual zawaid treatises on the collections of al-Bazzar, Abu Ya'la, and al-Tabarani, his teacher Zayn al-Din al-Iraqi advised him to merge these separate compilations into a single unified work. Al-Haythami complied, stripping the full chains of transmission and adding critical evaluations of the narrators, resulting in his comprehensive encyclopedia Majma' al-Zawa'id wa-Manba' al-Fawa'id.
The text is preserved in multiple manuscripts, including a 422-folio manuscript in the Municipal Library of Alexandria copied during the author's lifetime in Rajab 793 AH, and a 360-folio copy in the Library of the Holy Mosque in Makkah. It has also been edited across doctoral dissertations at Umm al-Qura University in Makkah.
Answer updated