How do we reconcile your statement that many hadiths were lost to the scholars with Allah’s preservation of this Sunnah?

Ibrahim Shuqara: Our Shaykh, in your speech you said that many hadiths were lost to the scholars, or to many of the people of knowledge. Perhaps some of our brothers understand from this statement that some, or many, of the hadiths were lost in themselves, and that it was not possible for those to whom they were lost to gather them or pick them up. Therefore, may Allah reward you, I hope that such an understanding does not occur in the minds of some of the brothers. If you could clarify this phrase in a way that removes the misunderstanding in this specific issue?

The Shaykh : I believe my words were clear and free of ambiguity, but there is no harm in repeating the statement with some clarification, as you requested.
Ibrahim Shuqara: May Allah reward you.

The questioner : I have a point that I have repeated in more than one gathering: Allah, Mighty and Majestic, who said in the Noble Book: We say that this verse means that Allah, Mighty and Majestic, also pledged to preserve the Sunnah. I mentioned to you earlier that Allah, Mighty and Majestic, addressed His Prophet with His saying: And I said that this explanation mentioned in the Qur'an is the Sunnah. If Allah, Mighty and Majestic, pledged to the Ummah to preserve the Qur'an, and He obligated His Prophet with the explanation, then that necessitates the preservation of the explanation as well. So I say that just as the Qur'an is preserved, we do not imagine that this Qur'an is preserved in the heart of every individual Muslim; rather, it is first preserved in the Noble Mushaf, and secondly preserved in the hearts of many of the Muslim reciters. From this perspective, I say that the Sunnah is preserved in the hearts of the Ummah, not in the heart of every individual of the Ummah. The Sunnah is preserved in the Ummah, but the Sunnah is scattered in the hearts of the Ummah, as we mentioned earlier, that it contains the authentic and the weak. I hinted at two aspects: that this Sunnah, which I affirm is preserved in the hearts of the Ummah as a whole, and not in one or a few individuals, we hope that the Muslims, or the select among the Muslims and the scholars of the Muslims, will gather this Sunnah so that it becomes a reference for every student of knowledge. And with this gathering is associated the filtering that we referred to, which is distinguishing the authentic from the weak. All we want from the previous statement is that some of the Sunnah was lost to the entire Ummah, and that undoubtedly it was lost to some of the individuals of this Ummah, even among their scholars. This is very clear to many of the meticulous scholars. The most famous and most settled in this knowledge is Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah (may Allah have mercy on him) in his treatise "The Causes of Disagreement Among the Imams," what is its name... "Lifting the Blame from the Distinguished Imams." There, Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah mentions, among the causes of disagreement, two aspects related to my topic. The first aspect is that a hadith reaches an Imam and he issues a ruling based on it, while the other Imam does not receive it, so he exercises his independent legal reasoning and contradicts the authentic hadith. Not out of malice or hatred of the authentic hadith, but because it did not reach him. This is the first aspect. The other aspect is that the hadith may have come to him and reached him, but it reached him through a path that does not constitute proof for him, so he does not trust the transmitter of that hadith and does not act upon it, while he exercises his independent legal reasoning. Meanwhile, this same hadith may have reached another scholar through an authentic path, so he issued a ruling based on it and was correct, while the first one erred. This is what we are circling around in our previous speech, and I hope that the intended meaning has become clear in this subsequent speech of mine, if Allah wills.