4to. Volume I: [10, contents], 597 pp., / Volume II: [12, contents], 543 pp., / Volume III: [10, contents], 510 pp., / Volume IV: [12, contents], 513 pp., / Volume V: [10, contents], 490 pp., / Volume VI: [7, contents], 531 pp., / Volume VII: [11, contents], 544 pp., / Volume VIII: [12, contents], 546 pp., flap slightly damaged / Volume IX: [10, contents], 511 pp., hinges weak & lower part of spine slightly damaged / Volume X: [10, contents], 553 pp., lithographed Arabic text within borders, titles & some borders printed in red, contemporary black full calf with flaps, cover slightly scratched in few volumes, otherwise set in very good condition, printed al-Matba’a al-Bahiya, Cairo, 1258 A. H. / 1868.

Synopsis

VERY RARE WORK. Al-Qastallani (851-923), was a Sunni Islamic scholar who specialized in hadith and theology. He owed his literary fame mainly to this exhaustive commentary on the Sahih al-Bukhari entitled Irshad al-Sari fi Sharh al-Bukhari which is considered a reference in the jurisprudence of Hadith; it is an explanation of the most authentic books after the Noble Qur’an, namely Sahih al-Bukhari. In it, the author relied on the interpretation of the chain of narrators and the narrative text, explaining the vocabulary and showing what is also deduced from the Hadith, based on the statements and opinions of the scholars and jurists.
His greatest advantage is that al-Qastallani contained the text of al-Bukhari, letter by letter and word by word, as mentioned by Abu al-Ashbal Ahmad Muhammad Shakir in the introduction to his book, the Greek version of Sahih al-Bukhari.
Qastallani was a contemporary of Suyuti, and between the two there were several scholarly challenges. Later in life, he settled on the Shafi’i school, though he was initially a follower of the Maliki school in jurisprudence. Regarding to Islamic theology, Qastallani was a proponent of the Ash’ari school for which he is considered one of the main figureheads.