Commentary on Surah al-Fatiha

Ad-Durr al-Manthur's approach to Surah al-Fatiha exemplifies as-Suyuti's method throughout the work. He presents, verse by verse and often phrase by phrase, all the transmitted reports that bear on the meaning of the text, citing their sources by name without evaluating their chains of transmission in detail — that evaluation having been performed in the fuller parent work, Turjuman al-Quran.

The volume of reports as-Suyuti assembles for the Fatiha is impressive. For the first verse alone, he presents narrations on the blessing of the Basmala, its status as a verse of the surah, the reward associated with its recitation, and its appearances in other surahs. These reports are drawn from the six canonical hadith collections (al-Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Al-Tirmidhi, Al-Nasa'i, and Ibn Majah), from the musnad collections of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and other early scholars, and from the tafsir reports collected by scholars such as Abd ibn Humayd and Ibn Jarir at-Tabari.

For Al-hamdu lillah, as-Suyuti assembles narrations on the virtue of praise, the meaning of al-hamd in prophetic hadith, and reports from the Companions on how they understood the verse's theological implications. A frequently cited narration in this section is the hadith in Sahih Muslim describing how al-Fatiha is divided between Allah and His servant, with 'Al-hamdu lillah Rabb al-'alamin' constituting the servant's praise of Allah to which Allah responds.

The eschatological dimension of al-Fatiha — its recitation in the grave, its intercession for the one who recited it, its connection to the seven gates of paradise — is documented through narrations that as-Suyuti presents as circulating in the tradition, though the hadith critic in later generations would scrutinize many of these reports.

As a compilation of the totality of transmitted material on the Fatiha, Ad-Durr al-Manthur's treatment of this surah has no rival in scope. It preserves reports from early sources — some now lost as independent works — that would otherwise be unavailable to researchers.