al‑Hizb al‑Aʿzam

Its full title is al-Ḥizb al-Aʿẓam wa l-Wird al-Afkham, the Supreme Litany and the Noblest Daily Recital. In his own preface the author says he had seen devout people reciting litanies whose chains of transmission showed them to be fabricated, and so he gathered the supplications found in the reliable books of hadith, in the manner of Imam al-Nawawī's al-Adhkār and Ibn al-Jazarī's al-Ḥiṣn al-Ḥaṣīn. He placed the Qurʾānic supplications first and closed the book with blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ. In his commentary on al-Ḥiṣn he counts around five hundred supplications in it.

He asked that it be read in full every day, or failing that every week, every month, every year, or at least once in a lifetime. The division into seven daily portions that this reader follows was made by later scholars to serve the weekly reading, and is the arrangement of the Indian and South African editions. Ottoman scholars wrote commentaries on it in the twelfth century after the Hijra, it was recited from the pulpit at ʿArafāt in Ottoman times, and it was printed in Istanbul, Cairo, Makkah and Delhi through the nineteenth century. Across the Indian subcontinent it remains a fixture of daily practice in homes and madrasas.

Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Sulṭān Muḥammad al-Harawī, was born in Herat and settled in Makkah, where he studied under Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, ʿAlī al-Muttaqī al-Hindī, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī and others. He was a Ḥanafī jurist, a scholar of hadith and a theologian, and he is said to have written out a muṣḥaf every year, with notes on the readings and the tafsīr in its margins, and lived on its sale.

He wrote more than a hundred works. The largest is Mirqāt al-Mafātīḥ, his commentary on Mishkāt al-Maṣābīḥ; others include a commentary on al-Shifāʾ of Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, a commentary on al-Ḥiṣn al-Ḥaṣīn, and al-Asrār al-Marfūʿa on fabricated hadiths. He died in Makkah in Shawwāl 1014 AH (1606 CE) and was buried at al-Maʿlāt; when the news reached Cairo, the funeral prayer in absentia at al-Azhar drew more than four thousand people. al-Hizb al-Aʿzam is the most widely read of all his works.

The Qurʾānic supplications are taken from a verified text of the Qurʾān and cut to the portion the book quotes. The supplications from the Sunnah are transcribed from a no-copyright print and collated against a second, referenced edition. Every line carries its source, the transliteration is our own, and the author’s preface is translated in full.