Making Sense of the Portents of the Hour

Dr. Muhammad Ahmad Ismail al-Muqaddim is an Egyptian Salafi scholar, preacher, and one of the founding figures of the Alexandrian Salafi da'wah, beginning in the early 1970s. Born in Alexandria in 1371 AH / 1952 CE into a religious household, he memorized the Qur'an in his youth and pursued a dual education in medicine and Islamic studies — completing his bachelor's degree in medicine from Alexandria University in 1975 alongside intensive informal Islamic studies, and later earning master's and PhD degrees in Islamic creed (al-'aqida) from the Islamic University of Madinah and the Imam Muhammad ibn Sa'ud Islamic University in Riyadh.

Al-Muqaddim has authored more than thirty books, primarily through Dar al-'Aqida and Dar al-Iman in Alexandria, addressing creed, jurisprudence, and the principles of Salafi scholarship. His best-known works include Adillat Tahrim Halq al-Lihya ('Proofs of the Prohibition of Shaving the Beard'), Adillat Hijab al-Mar'ah al-Muslima ('Proofs of the Hijab of the Muslim Woman'), Hijab al-Mar'ah al-Muslima Bayna Khurq al-'Aqida wa Khurq al-Adilla, and Fiqh Ashrat al-Sa'a ('Fiqh of the Signs of the Hour'). His pulpit lectures and recorded courses on creed and fiqh have circulated extensively in the Egyptian and broader Arabic Salafi study circles.

Al-Muqaddim continues to teach and lecture in Alexandria. His writing is characterized by extensive citation of classical Salafi authorities, careful detailed argumentation, and a methodological adherence to the approach of the salaf as he understands it — features that have made his work particularly influential among Salafi students and circles in Egypt and beyond.

Nasiruddin al-Khattab is a Canadian Muslim translator whose body of work — produced primarily through Darussalam Publishers in Riyadh — constitutes the largest single contribution to the contemporary English-language translation of classical Sunni hadith literature. A convert to Islam who studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto and pursued further training in the Arab world, he has spent several decades rendering the canonical hadith collections, classical biographical works, and major creed and fiqh texts into accessible English.

His translations include the complete English-language editions of Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abi Dawud, Jami' al-Tirmidhi, Sunan al-Nasa'i, and Sunan Ibn Majah — together known as the Six Books of Sunni hadith — published by Darussalam in multi-volume bilingual Arabic-English sets that have become the standard reference editions in English-speaking mosques, schools, and personal libraries worldwide. He has also produced English translations of Riyad al-Salihin, al-Targhib wa al-Tarhib, the Mukhtasar of Tafsir Ibn Kathir, and a long list of works of biography, creed, and contemporary Islamic scholarship.

Al-Khattab's translation style is characterized by careful literalism — preserving the technical hadith vocabulary and the structure of classical chains of transmission — combined with sufficiently natural English prose for general readers and students. His work, more than that of any single translator before him, has made the canonical Sunni hadith corpus directly accessible to English-speaking Muslims, and his Bukhari and Muslim editions in particular are present in nearly every serious English-language Islamic library.