All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds, and may He send blessings and peace upon our Prophet Muḥammad , upon his family and upon all his Companions.
Every building stands on what cannot be seen. Its rooms may be rebuilt and its walls repainted from one generation to the next, but its foundations, once laid, carry everything above them. Allah Himself gives us this image when He likens a good word to “a good tree, whose root is firm and whose branches reach into the sky” [Q 14:24]. The word the scholars chose for the foundations of belief, uṣūl, is the plural of aṣl, the very word used in that verse for the root.
To speak of Uṣūl as-Sunnah, then, is to speak of the roots of the Sunnah: what the Messenger of Allah and his Companions believed about Allah and His names and attributes, about His decree, about faith, the Qurʾān, the Companions and the Hereafter. Everything else in the religion grows from these roots.
For the first generation these roots needed no defence; they were simply what the Muslims believed. It was the appearance of new sects that made it necessary to state them plainly: (1) the Khawārij, who declared Muslims disbelievers on account of their sins; (2) the Qadariyyah, who denied the decree; (3) the Murjiʾah, who separated action from faith; and (4) the Jahmiyyah, who denied the attributes of Allah and claimed that the Qurʾān was created.
The scholars of ḥadīth did not answer them with a new creed. They put into short and clear words what had always been believed, and they narrated those words with their chains of narration, just as they narrated ḥadīth, so that the common people would not be led astray and the student would know the path. Their students learnt these statements by heart and passed them on.
Al-Ḥumaydī (d. 219 AH/834 CE) was among the earliest to set down such a statement, and a long line of imāms followed him: Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241 AH/855 CE) in his Uṣūl as-Sunnah; al-Muzanī (d. 264 AH/878 CE) in Sharḥ as-Sunnah; Abū Zurʿah (d. 264 AH/878 CE) and Abū Ḥātim (d. 277 AH/890 CE), the two scholars of Rayy, in the creed they reported from the scholars of every land; Ibn Abī ʿĀṣim (d. 287 AH/900 CE) and ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad (d. 290 AH/903 CE), each in a book called as-Sunnah; al-Barbahārī (d. 329 AH/941 CE) in Sharḥ as-Sunnah; Ibn Baṭṭah (d. 387 AH/997 CE) in al-Ibānah; Ibn Abī Zamanayn (d. 399 AH/1008 CE) in Uṣūl as-Sunnah; al-Lālakāʾī (d. 418 AH/1027 CE) in Sharḥ Uṣūl Iʿtiqād Ahl as-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah; and aṣ-Ṣābūnī (d. 449 AH/1057 CE) in ʿAqīdat as-Salaf Aṣḥāb al-Ḥadīth. They lived in different lands and different centuries, and their words differ; yet it is not difficult to see that their creed is one.
The weight of al-Ḥumaydī’s words comes from the man himself. He was the Shaykh of the Ḥaram in Makkah; he sat with Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah for nineteen years and became his leading transmitter; he accompanied ash-Shāfiʿī to Egypt; and he was a teacher of al-Bukhārī, who chose to open his Ṣaḥīḥ with a ḥadīth narrated from him.
In a few short paragraphs he gathers the belief of Ahl as-Sunnah in the decree, in faith, in the Companions, in the Qurʾān, in the believers’ seeing of their Lord, in His attributes, and in the grave matter of declaring a Muslim a disbeliever. The treatise has reached us within his Musnad, narrated from him by his student Bishr ibn Mūsā.
May Allah keep your heart firm upon the Sunnah, make it beloved to you, and make you among those “who listen to the word and follow the best of it” [Q 39:18]. I ask Allah, the Most Generous, to accept this work us, to forgive us our shortcomings in it, to make it sincerely for His Face and heavy on our scales on the Day we meet Him, and to have mercy on Imām al-Ḥumaydī and on all the imāms of the Sunnah who preserved this religion for us. And our final call is that all praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds.
