1914–1999 · Albania / Syria / Jordan · Hadith scholar and Salafi reformer; verifier and grader of hadith
Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani was born on 16 August 1914 (1333 AH) in Shkodër, Albania, as Muhamed Nasirudin Nexhati. His father, Nuh Nexhati, was a Hanafi jurist trained in Istanbul. Around 1923, when Albania turned towards secularism under Zog, the family moved to Damascus. He learned Arabic at the al-Isʿāf charitable school and studied Hanafi texts with his father and local teachers; he worked as a carpenter and then a watchmaker, as his father had.
At about twenty he turned to hadith, influenced by Rashid Rida’s al-Manār. He had no formal chain of teachers in the subject and was largely self-taught, spending long hours in the Ẓāhiriyya Library in Damascus reading manuscripts. His first works of verification and authentication date from this period, and his book on women’s dress, Ḥijāb al-marʾa al-muslima, argued that the face need not be covered.
In 1961 he was invited to teach hadith at the new Islamic University of Madinah, reportedly at Ibn Bāz’s invitation. He left in 1963. The sources differ on why: Lacroix links it to the controversy over his hijab book, and Wikipedia partly to his remarks on Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. He returned to Damascus, was imprisoned twice in Syria, and moved to Jordan in about 1979. He settled in Amman and died there in early October 1999, aged 85 (the sources give 1, 2 or 3 October). In 1999 he received the King Faisal International Prize in Islamic Studies for his service to hadith.
His main works are the two Silsilas (of sound and of weak and forged hadith), Irwāʾ al-ghalīl, the “sound” and “weak” editions of the four Sunan and of al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaghīr, and Ṣifat ṣalāt al-nabī. His method put hadith criticism at the centre of law: he reopened the grading of isnads, rejected adherence (taqlīd) to the four schools, and held that ijazas confer no authority. Scholars often describe him as Salafi in creed but not in jurisprudence. His rulings on prayer, graves and mosques, women’s dress and music, and his advice against political activism and for leaving occupied Palestine, were widely disputed, including by the Syrian scholars Abū Ghudda and al-Būṭī. Emad Hamdeh and Stéphane Lacroix have written the main academic studies of him.
Most of his Arabic works are free on Shamela. The archive links to those copies, to English translations on archive.org, and to recordings of his Silsilat al-Hudā wa-l-Nūr sessions. Dates of some of the books are not verified.