i have always wanted to do arbayin - it is one of my favourite texts along with
riyadu's salihin.
things happen at their appointed time. actually, the original translation goes back to 2014 - and then i thought of adding a primer to hadith sciences. i chose a small
risalah and said to myself, this could be done in a few days. i was disabused of my naivete soon thereafter, and i realised that it was not possible to summarise it without rendering it unusable. on the contrary, the risalah required footnotes and explanations. thus arbayin was also delayed.
There are plenty of translations available of the arbaeen already.
i could say that i didn't find a single translation satisfactory - but that could also be said about my translation.
i tried my best - just as others who have tried before - and many others who may try after.
apart from personal reasons - there are also practical considerations. friends and relatives would ask for a simple hadith text, and obviously
arbayin is the easiest and the best - but i couldn't find a translation that i could GIVE them without a caveat. other reasons are:
- i couldn't find a translation by a staunch sunni. if there are any please share.
- extant translations were by non-specialists. ideally, translation of hadith should be done by someone with a sound knowledge of hadith sciences. but given the challenges of our time, at the least, a translator of hadith works should be a serious student of the science and should be familiar with commentaries. (disclaimer: i am only a student of hadith).
- language limitations - either the translator seemed to lack access to arabic and thus translated from ANOTHER translation such as urdu; or the translator's english appeared to be at the acquired-as-a-second-language level. or by a combination of authors - one who knows arabic and english - does the first pass and the the other with native proficiency, tweaks the final translation.
- superficial understanding of the hadith. i browsed a few translations that i could google - these are translations of words without an attempt to capture the meaning of the hadith, which would require one to diligently study the hadith by way of commentaries.
of course, all of these charges can be levelled at me/my translation too. in which case, this would be yet another attempt at translating the arbayin. at least, sunni madaris can use this if they do not have any sunni translations.
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Allah ta'ala knows best.
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but my question to you is what prompted you to ask these questions? in fact, it is for the readers to tell us whether it is any better, or features you might not have found in other translations or if it is no better than any other - perhaps even worse..