The chapters of this book were - originally - hadiths that Ali al-Tantawi used to broadcast live from Radio Damascus for nearly half a century, as he said in his introduction to the new edition of the book: “All that is in this book are remnants of hadiths that were broadcast to me from Damascus more than five years ago. Thirty years (i.e., from the time this introduction was written in 1985), it continued to be broadcasted for years. I worked hard to prepare it, enjoyed it and benefited from it - from the listeners - a lot. It amounted to three hundred hadiths or more. Her reward is if God writes for me - with His generosity - the reward for her.
Then he says in the same introduction: “And whenever I prepared a hadith about a man, the door was opened for me to talk about his peers and the likes of him. Our greats are fifty years old, every week there is talk, and a hundred people like me came to make like mine, when the talks of these great heroes ran out, and I am not one of those who are fond of collecting books and stacking them in safes to be proud of them and be proud of their abundance, and I only have the book that I need; I hope to benefit from it or enjoy it I read it, and I gathered - on this - in my small library, here and in Damascus, more than ninety volumes of biographies of men and women, so if each one of them had biographies of a hundred of them, that would be nine thousand biographies of the greats.