Muṣṭalaḥ Mutūn resources

I will be keeping this page updated, in shā’ Allāh, with useful resources and links related to learning and reviewing muṣṭalaḥ al-ḥadīth, mostly in English. (Arabic resources are quite easy to find.) Please help me to add to this page by contributing links to or information about any other useful resources in the comments. It is incomplete right now; definitely a work-in-progress.

Al-Manẓūmah al-Bayqūnīyah

Al-Manẓūmah al-Bayqūnīyah is a short, 34-line poem by Imām Ṭaha ʿUmar (or just  ʿUmar) ibn Muḥammad ibn Futūḥ al-Bayqūnī al-Dimashqī al-Shāfiʿī رحمه الله تعالى who lived around 1080 H. Not much is known about him, but Allah تعالى put much barakah in this poem of his which spread and was taught far and wide. It is one of the most popular mutūn or short primers in the science of muṣṭalaḥ. It is commonly memorized because of its brevity and comprehensiveness.

The matn

You can view an English translation along with the Arabic text of the poem here which I have formatted into a Word document here. The translation is by the New Brunswick Islamic Community (unless they copied it from somewhere I don’t know about). The Arabic text alone is available in a convenient, one-page Word document (courtesy of Cordoba Academy) that is perfect for printing and memorizing. (You can also view Cordoba Academy’s library of resources for the Bayqūnīyah. See also Cordoba Academy’s course forum, which contains useful discussions and is a good place to ask questions about the text.)

Memorizing this short text is very much recommended. There are a few audio recitations of the text which may aid in memorization. I have found several different recitals of the matn. I do not know who most the reciters are (the ones that I do have the reciter’s name in the filename), and no longer remember where I found these files, but here they are. (If anyone has any to add, let me know in the comments.) I would suggest choosing the one that you find the most pleasant to listen to and using that to memorize. I personally found the non-melodious version more conducive to memorization (and faster recital, too).

Shurūḥ

There are many shurūḥ on the Manẓūmah. One very useful and recent sharḥ is that of the well-known Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih ibn al-Uthaymin. (I will add links and  more works later.)

Lectures and courses on the poem

There are some lectures and courses available online to study this text. In my opinion, the best way to learn this text thoroughly online is, by far, with the course at Cordoba Academy. Their course which consists of live sessions on al-Bayqūnīyah is excellent, and the forums, which I linked above, is a great resource to ask questions that did not occur to one in class. Cordoba Academy also offers a unique opportunity to earn an ijāzah in the text as well as a general ijāzah in muṣṭalaḥ.

Qibla (formerly SunniPath) offers a course entitled The Bayquniyya Explained (HDT201, formerly HMT111). However, it does not seem that this class has a course page thus far on the relatively new Qibla site, and it does not seem to have been offered recently. Qibla describes the course: “The course details the science of haidth [sic] methodology (mustalah al-hadith) using al-Bayquniyya, a 34-line poem covering over 30 different hadith terminologies, as well as an abridged translation of one of the most famous commentaries of al-Bayquniyya. You will cover key concepts, terminology, and methods of analysis in how hadiths are authenticated, and then apply the theoretical concepts to practical case studies of hadith analysis.”

In terms of recorded lectures, there are a couple online, although with this text if one is a newcomer to muṣṭalaḥ they will most likely need someone to ask questions (if one does not have access to a qualified scholar to ask, I would suggest the Cordoba Academy course forums that I linked above, as there are a few qualified individuals there who respond to questions).

There is a short (about 100 minutes) lecture by Shaykh Sayyid Muhammad ibn Yahya al-Husayni al-Ninowy on the poem. Shaykh Ninowy covers only a few of the most important lines of the poem (such as those dealing with ṣaḥīḥ authentic, ḥasan good, ḍaʿīf weak, and mawḍūʿ  fabricated aḥādīth), but it is a good introduction to the subject. It is divided (for some reason) into ten ten-minute segments which are located on YouTube. However, since I hate streaming media, I downloaded the videos and extracted the audio (since the video was just a sequence of unrelated pictures), which you can download here (just get the AAC files). I typed up my notes when listening to these, and those can be downloaded here.

A more in-depth set of lectures covering the entire text is that of Shaykh Atabek Shurukov Nasafi. The run time is about 3 hours and 16 minutes total. It is divided into two videos (part 1 and part 2) on the Islamic Village podcast. (There is also an audio-only version which combines both parts.) I found these lessons very beneficial, especially since Shaykh Atabek provides the opinions of the fuqahā’ (especially the Aḥnāf) along with those of the muḥaddithīn, which I found very interesting. There is a lot of information packed into these lessons, and for this reason I recommend downloading the lectures instead of watching them streaming, so that you can pause, repeat, and take notes easily. (You can pause the streams too but it’s harder to skip back, etc. Be aware, however, that the downloads are very large.) As Shaykh Atabek himself says, you cannot learn everything in the course well at once; you will have to keep reviewing your notes and the text. However, if one learned well everything covered in these videos, they would have a good grasp of a fair amount of concepts in muṣṭalaḥ.

Nukhbah al-Fikr

the matn

SHURŪḤ

LECTURES AND COURSES ON THE text