Being Dutiful to Parents: Birr al-Walidayn

Translated by Mohammed Siddiq and Muhammad Ammar Salim. Edited with Commentary by Shaykh Yusuf Shabbir

Birr al-Walidayn is a short treatise on the subject of being dutiful to parents which was published recently for the first time. This treatise is significant because Imam Bukhari appears to be the first person to pen a treatise specifically on this subject. It comprises 75 hadiths which are transmitted under various chapter headings focusing on two broad themes: being dutiful to parents and maintaining family ties. This English translation is accompanied by succinct and insightful commentary from Mufti Yusuf Shabbir, in addition to appendices featuring the narrations transmitted by Imam Bukhari on the same topic in his Sahih and Al-Adab al-Mufrad, chains of transmission and biographies of the narrators.

It includes many Chapters, some of them are:

•  The person who is blessed in his sustenance due to maintaining his ties of kinship 
•  Allah the Exalted maintains ties through His grace with the person who maintains his ties of kinship 
•  The Muslim who disobeys his parents will not enter Paradise initially 
•  The person who maintains ties of kinship is not someone who [merely] reciprocates 
•  Whoever maintains his ties of kinship, Allah the Exalted maintains ties with him 
•  Mercy does not descend upon a people who have among them a person who severs the ties of kinship 
•  The sin of the person who severs the ties of kinship