We are going to teach a book that is unlike any other book. It’s not like a book that you can buy from Barnes and Noble or Amazon and then start studying it impromptu. Rather, this is a book that has a legacy and a tradition. One that has a chain, a link, an organic growing connection that increases as every generation goes on. A book that whoever wants to teach it has to have authorization to teach it. That’s because it is about a sacred science that involves a sacred person, and it involves the life and times of the best human being who walked this earth.
In our religion, if you want to get to a level where you are transmitting and narrating what this person said, you need to tell the people where you are getting it from. Who are you to quote from the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم )?
Therefore let us understand the luminaries; the chains of narrators, those who preserved the hadīth and have an authenticated chain of knowledge to the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم ). This is the reality of the religion. It has been preserved through chains of narrations that are verified through scholars of the highest caliber and were the legends of their times.
Shaykh Safi-Rahman Mubarakpuri, a scholar of hadīth and author of “The Sealed Nectar.” had an isnād (chain of narration) to Imam Al-Shawkani (d. 1173H): one of the greatest scholars of hadīth and main nodes of chains of narrations for Ṣaḥīḥ Al-Bukhari. In order to become a node, that scholar has to be way above the rest. Most ijazahs in the world nowadays go through Imam Al-Shawkani. He wrote a book of isnād that includes all of his ijazahs where he has over 15 ijazahs to Bukhari. It is named (إتحاف الأكابر بأسانيد الدفاتر ). His shortest isnād to Bukhari has only 11 narrators!
Shaykh Abdul-Ghaffar Hassan (teacher of Shaykh Yasir) was a senior scholar of Hadīth from Pakistan and taught in the same university as Imam Al-Albani. He had the shortest isnād in the world to Al-Shawkani (4 people) for a total of 16 to Bukhari!