Prayers Reported From the Prophet?

A Takhrīj-Based Reading of Sayyid ʻUthmān Al-Batāwī’s Maslak Al-Akhyār and The Problem of Devotional Attribution in Nusantara Islam

Abstract

Prayer collections (kutub al-adʻiya wa-al-adhkār) occupy an ambiguous space between devotional literature and the formal discipline of hadith: they circulate as books of remembrance, yet their authority rests on the implicit claim that the formulae they transmit descend from the Prophet. This article tests that claim against a single historically significant case, Maslak al-Akhyār fī al-Adʻiya wa-al-Adhkār by the Hadrami-Batavian mufti Sayyid ʻUthmān ibn ʻAbd Allāh ibn Yahyā (1822–1914). Using a complete takhrij of the book's forty-six prayers, which resolve into sixty-two distinct reports, and applying the method of al-ʻIrāqī in al-Mughnī and Ibn Hajar in al-Dirāya, the study finds that roughly seventy per cent are sound (sahīh), eighteen per cent weak (daʻīf), one report fabricated (mawdūʻ), and a further nine per cent without identifiable basis in the corpus. Rather than reading this distribution as a verdict on the author's competence, the article argues that the gap between the book's title and its contents exposes a genuine epistemological fault line in vernacular Islam: the difference between what is maʾthūr (transmitted) and what is merely manshūr (in circulation). Situating the compilation within the economy of fadāʾil al-aʻmāl and the field of living hadith, it concludes that devotional attribution is best understood not as a binary of true and false ascription but as a graded claim whose evidentiary standards are negotiated by the community that prays.