At-Taqrib

At-Taqrîb wa at-Taysîr li-ma'rifat sunan al-Bashîr an-nadhîr: Treatise on the sciences of Hadith, by Imam An-Nawawî, Translated from Arabic by Marçais, Revised and enlarged by Corentin Pabiot , House of Ennour

The Taqrîb of Imâm an-Nawawî, it is true, has been fully translated and annotated up to the thirty-ninth branch of the sciences of hadith, by W. Marçais.

But, apart from the fact that this translation dates from 1900, and was published in the Asian Journal in several parts, between September of the year 1900 and August of the year 1901, it is hardly accessible to non-specialists.

If we add to the dispersion of the work of W. Marçais in several volumes of the Asian Journal, the fact:

-that his annotations obey views which are very personal to him, symptomatic of the Orientalist spirit which then reigned supreme over “Muslim studies”;

- that the last branches of the Taqrîb have been incompletely translated, and in particular the lists of characters that Imâm an-Nawawî cites therein, whose transcription into Latin characters can be beneficial to our contemporary translator colleagues until today1;

-that the methodological vocabulary used is now outdated,

-that the index is missing;

all this makes this work, otherwise remarkable, of little use to readers, whether they are eager, like the common people, to extend their general culture, or have the desire, like students, to deepen their special knowledge.

We therefore propose in this book:

- to bring together the translation of W. Marçais in a single volume, to form a homogeneous whole;

- to rid the explanatory notes which accompany the text of the preconceived ideas which one regularly finds there, and to give only a faithful representation of what is said in the commentaries of the Scholars;

- to fully translate the Taqrîb, including by transcribing into Latin characters all the lists of characters mentioned therein;

- to refresh the methodological vocabulary used by Marçais, by stripping it of its various rusts and giving it a new shine;

-and to accompany it with an alphabetical table of the subjects dealt with and the names cited, accompanied by the necessary references.

But before that, we present the preface of W. Marçais, taking it up and making partial changes, either by reducing the material and reducing it to the essential points, or by introducing certain remarks of our own, in order to complete what deserves it.

Perhaps the public will give a benevolent welcome to our attempt to spread the knowledge of the sciences of hadith, as it deserves, because this branch of the Muslim sciences is very interesting for beginners too.