Translator’s Introduction — Hadith 3

Since this is one of the older extant ḥadīth texts, there are bound to be some discrepancies among the available manuscripts of this work. The source we have chosen for this translation is the edition that has been meticulously put together, after comparing a number of available manuscripts and also referring to secondary sources, by the esteemed scholar and researcher Mirzā Ghulām Riḍā ʿIrfāniyān, and published in the year 1361 AH Solar. Many of the traditions compiled in this work are also found in other sources such as Kulaynī’s al-Kāfī, or al-Ṣadūq’s al-Amālī among others. At times, these latter works seem to have more complete and accurate versions of the traditions. It is perhaps for this reason that in more recent times Kitāb al-Zuhd has not gotten the same attention as some of the other ḥadīth texts, despite being of an earlier provenance. To date, there is only one Farsi translation of the work and no other complete English translation. [1] Since the Arabic text of this work has a number of instances where the editor has included a second form of a word or phrase in square brackets, which at times is quite different from the first one, we opted to translate only the word which seems more accurate given the context, and in cases where it is not clear which of the two is more correct, we