ABSTRACT
The remaining four works are called sunan (the word has the meaning ‘path’ or ‘way’) because they concentrate on the example of Muhammad’s actions and decrees insofar as these provide the ultimate foundation of all Islamic law. The work recognized as the best of these collections is the sunan of Abu Dawud, which contains many of the hadith in the two Sahihs but also includes traditions not found there. He likewise was a scrupulous collector and, although some of his traditions are regarded as weak and suspect, he was aware of the problem and was careful to distinguish between sound and weak hadith in his text. Abu Dawud did his best to deal faithfully with the material at his disposal. Unlike al-Bukhari and Muslim, he includes material that is not very reliable, or even considered actually unsound, but he does not fail to draw attention to it. Two collections very similar to Abu
Dawud’s are the sunan works of al-Tirmidhi and al-Nasa
) i. The former is
called a Jami‘ (collection) because it covers not only legal traditions but also, like Bukhari and Muslim, historical and other hadith as well. Nevertheless Tirmidhi confined himself to traditions on which the principles of Islamic law had already been based and did not venture to record such as might lead to new interpretations. His collection is therefore primarily a reference work as well. The sunan of al-Nasa
) i is very com-
prehensive. Unlike Tirmidhi he did not limit himself to recording individual hadith as a resource work for issues concerning the jurists of his day but sought to catalogue all the variant editions of each hadith known to him, just as Muslim had done before him. His work accordingly has a place of its own in the heritage of the tradition literature.
