The book *al-Talkhīṣ al-Ḥabīr* by al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar, and likewise the book *al-Muntaqā min Akhbār al-Muṣṭafā* ﷺ by Ibn Taymiyyah al-Jadd, and other books of ḥadīths on legal rulings—for whoever examines them will see many of the sunan that were transmitted by others besides Abū Dāwūd, whether by those whose conditions [for authenticity] are stricter than his or more lenient.

Imām al-Nawawī said: "The *Sunan* of Abū Dāwūd did not encompass all the authentic ḥadīths on legal rulings, nor even most of them. How many a ḥadīth concerning rulings is found in *Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī* and *Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim* that is not in the *Sunan* of Abū Dāwūd."(1)

Nevertheless, when Imām Abū Dāwūd is compared with the authors of the *Sunan*, he is the one among them who transmitted the most of them [i.e., the sunan], as Imām al-Khaṭṭābī says: "As for the pure sunan, none of them intended to collect them all and exhaust them, nor was he able to extract them and abridge their locations from amidst those lengthy ḥadīths and from the evidence of their contexts in the manner that was granted to Abū Dāwūd. For this reason, this book attained, in the estimation of the imāms of ḥadīth and the scholars of athar, a position of wonder; camels' livers were struck [in travel] for its sake, and journeys continued to be made to it."(2)

And in this *Sunan* of his, he gathered—alongside the sunan transmitted from the Prophet ﷺ—what befits the context of what has been transmitted from the noble Companions of their juristic reasoning and their choices. He explicitly stated in his *Risālah* that he favored this in such books, saying: "I find it pleasing that a man should record, alongside these books, some of the opinions of the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ."

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(1) From the editor's footnote to *Risālat Abī Dāwūd ilā Ahl Makkah*, p. 34.
(2) From the introduction to his book *Maʿālim al-Sunan*, 1/7.