The Shaykh continues his account of his illness, along with his story regarding the treatise "Dhamm al-Mala'ih" by Ibn Abi al-Dunya, and then his story regarding the lost page.

The Shaykh : We return to where I left off. Therefore, when the eye specialist advised me to stop working on repairing watches and reading for six months, I resolved to comply with him. However, the nature of my work does not allow me to close the shop, as there are people with watches and appointments to collect them. So, I had to keep the shop open, either to deliver the finished watches or to complete the watches I had promised to repair, and then I would not accept any new watches. So, I opened the shop and sat waiting for customers from among these existing customers, and that was all. A week passed, then two weeks, and they say in Syria that "the ant started moving in me," which is a Syrian expression meaning that boredom began to creep into me. What am I sitting between... no reading, no writing, no work... And as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, so the mind started working and wandering, and I remembered that in the Zahiriyyah Library there is a treatise by al-Hafiz Ibn Abi al-Dunya titled "Dhamm al-Mala'ih". I had wished that I would be able to copy it, then edit it, comment on it, and publish it. When I saw the people's attention to entertainment and their indifference to its prohibition, I remembered this treatise and said to myself, since you are now in a period of rest, have the calligrapher so-and-so, who used to sit in the Zahiriyyah Library, copy the manuscript for you, and you will have had time to rest and start little by little... And indeed, I then decided on this and went to the Zahiriyyah Library and retrieved the manuscript, which is in a collection in the Zahiriyyah Library in a section called "Collections." Books, like printed works, are arranged by science: hadith, tafsir, fiqh, history, biography, and so on. Likewise, manuscripts are divided into these sections, but there is a section that deviates from this classification called "Collections," which consists of volumes gathered from different treatises with varying topics, paper, size, and handwriting. It is a collection, so you might find a treatise like a small booklet, and next to it a larger treatise, one with yellow paper, one with green paper, one with red paper, and so on. It is like a scrapbook, called a "collection." There are more than one hundred and fifty such collections in the Zahiriyyah Library alone. This is titled "Collections." So, I took the treatise out of a collection and gave it to the calligrapher and said, "Copy this treatise for me from here to here. It is not large; it is like a booklet, about twenty pages." I left the treatise with him to copy. After a few days of starting the work, he came to me and told me that the treatise seemed to have a missing part. He had reached the middle, and there was a gap in the middle. I went to the Zahiriyyah Library and examined the treatise, and indeed, there was a gap. I said, "If we continue copying, we will see what Allah the Exalted wills." The copying of the treatise was finished. Two or three months passed, I do not remember exactly. I began to return to my habit, and I was unable to complete the full six months that the doctor had told me. I started thinking about this lost page and where it might be... Perhaps I am talking to myself, considering that the treatises were originally separate, and some people in the past collected them to preserve them, gathering them in a volume or volumes. Perhaps the binder was a craftsman and not a scholar, and he did not have an interest in this precious treasure. Perhaps during the binding process, a page fell out and he did not care about it and did not put it back, or he placed it in another collection. So, what is to be done? One must study the one hundred and fifty volumes, flip through the treatises, and see if the lost page can be found in another collection. And so, a search opened up that I had not even considered. The story is long; we went through more than one hundred and fifty volumes and more, and the lost page was not found. Perhaps it is in the hadith section, perhaps, perhaps. The important thing is that I went through the manuscripts present there in the Zahiriyyah, which number more than ten thousand manuscripts, and Allah the Exalted made the path easy for me, because the system followed in all libraries is that you submit a form, which they call a slip, where you fill in the blanks, put your name and the date of the request, and send it to the responsible manager or supervisor, who goes around and gives it to the employee who brings the books, so it takes time. So, Allah the Exalted smoothed my path, and I started entering the library, setting up the ladder, taking the book, and studying it while on the ladder, because what is the study? Flipping through pages. And in this way, I went through all the books. But at this time, a second issue opened up for me: I started writing down the names of the books that passed by me. During this search, I finished with these ten thousand books and did not find the lost item I was seeking.
They have what they call the "dust," meaning storage boxes where various types of papers from lost manuscripts are thrown, and they keep them as heritage, preserving them. I said to the employee, "Please tell me where these papers are," so I started flipping through these papers. And here is the witness: I found there complete treatises... that are not mentioned in the library's index. The greatest thing I found in this, in our Zahiriyyah Library, are two copies of the book "Musnad al-Shihab al-Qudha'i." Both copies are incomplete. One is in ordinary handwriting, and the other is in beautiful Maghribi handwriting, and it has been served by hadith scholars, with margins written by one of the weak memorizers, discussing topics and such things. The Maghribi copy is in the Zahiriyyah Library, missing the first booklet. And because the first booklet is missing, it is not known what the book is. Meanwhile, the second copy, which is in Mashriqi handwriting, is known because it is complete at the beginning, though incomplete in the middle. If I find the booklet that completes the Maghribi copy that is with them and is not known... they would tell you: "A part is missing at the beginning of the hadith," meaning chains and hadiths. But what is the book? They do not know. And if I find the booklet that completes the book in its entirety and completeness, I went to the manager responsible for manuscripts and said to him, "Here. This is the book you have, and this is the name of the book... A part in hadith, and this is its completeness: "Musnad al-Shihab" in very beautiful Maghribi handwriting. So, for the sake of history and clarifying the reality, I wrote: 'Extracted from the dust by Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani.' Then it was the turn of our friend Hamdi, this Salafi, 'Abd al-Majid. May Allah guide him. He took copies of it and said, as you heard: "This our friend Shu'ayb, out of envy and jealousy, erased this name." This effort, if employees were hired and given regular salaries, they would not do this work at all. But a person for whom Allah the Exalted made this work easy, and who was created with activity and an urgent desire, discovered things that existed in the Zahiriyyah Library but were not in the indexes. And no praise or thanks, we do not want a reward or gratitude from you, and praise be to Allah. This person comes and gets jealous, so he erases this name. What do you think comes from this except this deep-seated envy, unfortunately?
Abu Layla: He who erases the truth, Allah will erase him...

The questioner : The Salafi youth... it is not from the Sunnah after the prayer, every time someone says the closing salam, to say "May Allah accept, may Allah accept" and so on. So, what is better when he reaches the... is to give him the salam, meaning, what is the point when a group of people finish their prayer? We do not want to say "May Allah accept," we give the salam to everyone and greet them, that is all...?

The Shaykh : Yes