40 Hadith on Femininity: How to Be a Good Woman is a curated compilation of the most authentic hadith of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ on the subject of femininity, along with translation and commentary. Our approach is to understand the pure, unadulterated teachings of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, free of any anachronisms or ideological baggage.
This book covers topics like Womanliness, Grace, Chastity, Sisterhood, Motherhood, and much more. Our goal is to be like the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ or get as close to this ideal as Allah wills. And we want to help Muslim women do the same.
📙 Get the print edition 👉 📱 Get the PDF ebook 👉
- The PDF ebook so you can start reading it TODAY
- The Matn (primer) of the book, also in pdf, with only the verses of Quran, hadith, and statements of the Companions and scholars (available in a few weeks – it’s finished but we are doing the formatting and layout so it looks nice)
Want to read it before buying? Read the introduction for free here.
🧠 Authors’ Qualifications
We collaborated with Wordsmiths, a team of expert researchers, translators, and editors with a combined experience over 50 years studying Arabic and Islamic Sciences. Wordsmiths was founded by Dr. Salah Sharief, who has a PhD in International Law, and is currently a full-time student of the Islamic Tradition. Dr. Salah’s team have a similar background of being trained in Arabic and Islamic Sciences. Some of his team are scholars while some are students of the Tradition.
✍️ How We Produced This Book
We spent more than four hours per hadith searching for the most relevant, authentic ahadith. That amounts to 160 hours just in choosing which ahadith to include. Translation takes around four hours per thousand words for a first draft.
Then it goes to the editing department. Then it goes through a final quality review, where Dr. Salah Sharief makes sure the English is impeccable. Once all that was done, Dr. Salah and his team wrote commentary on each hadith. And that went through its own editing process.
Conservatively, finishing this book required an investment of 500 man-hours.
🧕 Why 40 Hadith? Why not 50 or 100?
For hundreds of years, scholars of Islam have written books which compile and expound on 40 ahadith. Why did they do this? We quote from Imam An-Nawawi’s (may Allah have mercy on him) introduction to his eponymous work:
“To proceed – it has been related to us from Ali bin Abī Ṭālib, Abdullāh bin Mas‘ūd, Mu‘ādh bin Jabal, Abūd-Dardā’, Ibn Umar, Ibn ʽAbbās, Anas bin Mālik, Abū Hurayrah and Abū Saeed al-Khudri (may Allah be pleased with them) through numerous chains with varied narrations that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said, “Whoever preserves for my nation forty ḥadīths concerning its religion – Allah will resurrect him on the Day of Resurrection among the jurists and scholars.” In one narration it says, “…Allah will resurrect him as a jurist and scholar,” and in that of Abūd-Dardā’, “…I will be for him, on the Day of Resurrection, an intercessor and a witness.” In the narration of Ibn Mas‘ūd it says, “…he will be told, ‘Enter by any of the doors of Paradise you wish,’” and in that of Ibn `Umar, “…he will be registered among the scholars and resurrected among the martyrs.” But ḥadīth scholars have agreed that it is a weak ḥadīth despite its many narrations.
“The scholars have compiled within this context countless collections. The first one I have known to do so was Abdullāh bin al-Mubārak and then Ibn Aslam at-Tūsi, the nurturing scholar; then al-Ḥasan bin Sufyān an-Nasā’i, Abū Bakr al-Ajurri, Abū Bakr Muḥammad bin Ibrāheem al-Asfahāni, ad-Daraqutni, al-Ḥākim, Abū Nuaym, Abū Abdur-Raḥmān as-Sulami, Abū Sa‘eed al-Malīni, Abū ‘Uthmān as-Sabūni, Abdullāh bin Muḥammad al-Anṣāri, Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqi and innumerable others from among both previous and later ones. And I have made istikhārah to Allah the exalted concerning the collecting of forty ḥadīths following the example of those well-known imams and preservers of Islam. For the scholars have agreed upon the permissibility of acting on a weak ḥadīth in regard to virtuous deeds. But in spite of this, my reliance is not upon that ḥadīth but rather on his ﷺ statement among the authentic hadiths: “Let the one present among you convey to the absent” and his saying: “May Allah make radiant [the face of] a person who heard my statement and grasped it and passed it on as he heard it.”
40 Hadith on Femininity: How to Be a Good Woman continues this blessed and noble tradition.
📙 Get the print edition 👉 📱 Get the PDF ebook 👉
- The PDF ebook so you can start reading it TODAY
- The Matn (primer) of the book, also in pdf, with only the verses of Quran, hadith, and statements of the Companions and scholars (available in a few weeks – it’s finished but we are doing the formatting and layout so it looks nice)
Want to read it before buying? Read the introduction for free here.