The Shaykh (may Allah have mercy on him) urged the necessity of distinguishing between authentic and weak Prophetic hadiths.

The Shaykh : Then I return to what I had begun speaking about, namely the greeting and the handshake, and I say: The summary of this talk is to remind you, for the reminder benefits the believers, to be eager. I do not say that you must hold fast to the Book and the Sunnah, for that is, if Allah wills, a matter agreed upon by all Muslims; the obligation to hold fast to the Book and the Sunnah is agreed upon by all Muslims in general terms. But what concerns me now is the detail. So I advise you now to be eager to hold fast to the Sunnah, the authentic Sunnah. That is, let it be your constant habit and your perpetual practice, always and forever, that when a hadith reaches your ears, you do not open your hearts to it immediately, but only after you have verified its authenticity. Regarding the previous hadith: This is my advice to you: when you hear a hadith, do not adopt it, or speak of it, or act upon it, except after verifying its authenticity. Naturally, a question arises here: How can we know the authentic hadith from the weak one? The answer is easy, for knowledge is not obligatory upon every Muslim individually. Knowledge is divided into two categories: knowledge that is an individual obligation for every Muslim, and knowledge whose obligation is a collective obligation, meaning that if some people fulfill it, the obligation falls off the rest. The first category relates to what is individually obligatory for a Muslim to perform. For example, every person who has reached the age of accountability is obligated to pray and obligated to fast. But this general rule is not stated, nor does it apply, to say that he is obligated to perform Hajj or obligated to pay zakah. We do not say that every person who has reached the age of accountability is obligated to perform Hajj or obligated to pay zakah. Why? Because, as you know, zakah is only obligatory upon the wealthy, and not every person of accountability is wealthy. Likewise, Hajj is only obligatory upon one who has the ability to perform it. Ability includes wealth, includes health, includes the safety of the road, and perhaps other matters that vary according to the individuals. So there are individual obligations for some people that differ from one person to another. Whoever is obligated to pray is obligated to know how to pray, and whoever is obligated to fast is obligated to learn how to fast. But whoever is not obligated to pay zakah has no individual obligation to know the rulings of zakah. And so you can infer the rest. These are collective obligations, or this is collective knowledge, which is not obligatory upon every individual among the Muslims who are of age, and the general Muslim public. I mean, the general Muslim public are not scholars, and many, many questions arise for them. How do they know the ruling of Allah in them? The answer, before I clarify it, is clear naturally if you reflect on it before my answer. It is the same answer to the question I raised earlier when I said, how can the general public know the authentic hadith from the weak one? The answer to both matters is a verse in the Noble Qur'an: If you do not know a jurisprudential issue, and often many issues arise for one of you during work in the daytime, and he says, "I wish we could ask a scholar so that we know the ruling of Allah in this issue," what does he do? He asks. As the ruling relates to jurisprudential issues , so it relates to distinguishing, or knowing, the authentic hadith from the weak one, by asking the people of knowledge. So it is not obligatory that every one of you be a jurist, but it is obligatory for him to ask the people of jurisprudence. Likewise, it is not obligatory for every one of you to be a scholar of hadith, but it is obligatory for him to ask the people of knowledge of hadith if he wants to distinguish the authentic from the weak. This is what I wanted to address briefly. Hold fast to the Sunnah, distinguishing its authentic from its weak. Whoever holds fast to the Sunnah is saved.