Sahih al-Bukhari

The word sahih means sound, and it names a standard before it names a book. By al-Bukhari's century, hundreds of thousands of reports about the Prophet circulated, ranging from the meticulously transmitted to the invented, and the science of hadith criticism had developed to sort them: every report travels with its isnad, the chain of people who passed it on, and critics assessed each link for honesty, accuracy of memory and the real possibility that transmitter met transmitter. Al-Bukhari's innovation, according to the tradition's own account, was to compile a book restricted to reports that survived the strictest form of this test, requiring evidence that consecutive transmitters had actually met rather than merely overlapped in time.

Tradition relates that he sifted some six hundred thousand reports over sixteen years of travel from Bukhara across Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and Egypt, and prayed before including each tradition. The collection contains roughly 7,275 reports with repetitions, since a single tradition may appear under several legal headings, and about 2,602 distinct ones. Later criticism did not treat the book as beyond question, and a small number of its reports and transmitters were debated by scholars such as al-Daraqutni, but the debates confirmed rather than dented the consensus that formed around it: among books of hadith, this one set the bar.

Sahih al-Bukhari is organised as a jami, a comprehensive collection whose books span the whole of religion: revelation, faith, knowledge, ablution and prayer, funerals, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, sales and hire, marriage, oaths, military expeditions, the beginning of creation, the virtues of the companions, commentary on the Quran, and much else, ending in the book of divine unity. The arrangement is itself an argument.

Al-Bukhari's chapter headings, the tarajim, are famous among scholars for carrying his jurisprudence: a heading states a legal position, sometimes boldly where the evidence beneath it is only suggestive, and the traditions that follow are marshalled as proof. Generations of commentators made the headings a study of their own, asking in each case what al-Bukhari meant to establish, and the greatest of the commentaries, Fath al-Bari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in the fifteenth century, runs to many volumes largely by taking that question seriously.

The book's authority in Sunni Islam is difficult to overstate. Paired with Sahih Muslim as the two Sahihs, it heads the six canonical collections, its traditions are cited in law, theology and preaching as decisive, and manuscripts and recitations of it have been honoured across the Islamic world for a millennium, down to public readings held in times of crisis.