Can I Sell Books Containing Weak Hadiths and Pictures?

Answered by Ustadh Salman Younas

Question: Assalam aleykum

Shall I stop printing and selling books in which the author has used some drawings of muslim scientists conducting some experiments in the past and also used a really weak Hadith?

Answer: assalamu alaykum

There is no problem publishing such a book.

Firstly, some of the content you take issue with has been deemed permitted according to certain scholars, such as the pictures that you describe. According to the Maliki school, for example, such pictures would not be deemed prohibited.

Secondly, no book is perfect save the Quran. This means that a book may sometimes incorporate something erroneous, a weak tradition here and there, and the like. In such situations, if the good clearly outweighs the harms arising from these errors, there would be no issue in publishing such a work.

[Ustadh] Salman Younas

Checked and approved by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Ustadh Salman Younas  graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Political Science and Religious Studies. After studying the Islamic sciences online and with local scholars in New York, Ustadh Salman moved to Amman where he spent five years studying Islamic law, legal methodology, belief, hadith methodology, logic, Arabic, and tafsir. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford and continues his traditional studies with scholars in the United Kingdom.