And the dictionaries and collections (of hadith) require verifying the authenticity of their hadiths and distinguishing their weak and defective ones from the sound, so that one may follow the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, with knowledge, and worship Allah with insight. This is what we intended, Allah willing, in producing this "Sunan."

The other motive for this work of ours is to produce the texts and contents of these "Sunan" free from the blemishes of misreading and distortion, safe from the harms of omission and fabrication, as occurred in previous editions, to which we will point.

We also aimed, beyond that, to produce a hadith encyclopedia that provides the authentic and good texts from the purified Prophetic Sunnah. This cannot be achieved unless we undertake a comprehensive survey of the primary sources composed on the Sunnah, first by obtaining their verified manuscript originals that scholars have attested to their authenticity, so that their texts may be produced in the manner we have described, and then by ruling on them according to what the principles of hadith science require, guided in that by the statements of the imams of this field and the experts of this discipline, following in their footsteps regarding what they held and agreed upon.

Our emphasis on the necessity of relying on verified manuscript originals and ruling on the hadiths of the Sunan was only because many of the books of the Sunnah either have not been critically edited in a scholarly manner that reassures the researcher and satisfies the reader, or their hadiths have not been ruled upon with what befits them of authenticity or weakness, so what may be cited from them in legal rulings has not been distinguished for the reader.