Sahih al-Bukhari

Context

From the time Muhammad first received his call to preach in 610, until the lifetime of al-Bukhari two centuries later, people were telling stories about Muhammad. These stories were passed down from generation to generation, first orally and then in writing. These stories recount Muhammad’s life in detail: his birth and childhood, his first encounter with the angel Gabriel in 610 at the age of forty, his escape (hijra) from Mecca to Medina in 622, his successful return to Mecca in 630, and finally his death in Medina in 632. For Muslims, the most important event in Islamic history is Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina. Muslims use this event to mark the beginning of the Islamic era.

No detail of Muhammad’s life was too personal to be recounted in the Hadith. Stories about him are used for a variety of purposes—to entertain and enlighten as well as to support particular beliefs and practices, whether personal or political. Hundreds of thousands of stories about Muhammad were in circulation during al-Bukhari’s lifetime, and a number of people had undertaken to collect them. Fabrication of Hadith was a widely recognized problem. People were known to have invented stories about Muhammad for both pious purposes and personal or political ends.

Al-Bukhari is said to have decided to compile the Sahih after one of his contemporaries expressed the wish that someone would produce a concise but comprehensive work containing only authenticated reports. He was the first to attempt to develop a system of authentication that could determine the relative reliability with which such stories might be traced back to Muhammad. He spent his entire adult life traveling in search of Hadith and is said to have examined more than six hundred thousand Hadith, of which fewer than seven thousand were included in his collection. Even after his death, however, al-Bukhari remained just one of many scholars who collected, studied, and taught Hadith throughout the Muslim world. It took two more centuries for his Sahih to become part of the emerging canon of Sunni Hadith literature.

In the late eleventh century, one of the most important events in the canonization process took place: The grand vizier of the Seljuk Empire, Nizam al-Mulk, ordered the public reading of al-Bukhari’s Sahih at his newly founded religious college, known as the Nizamiyya, in the Iranian city of Nisapur in 1072. This reading was attended by the children of the city’s elite. The strong support of the ruling elite and the usefulness of al-Bukhari’s topically arranged collection of Hadith helped to earn the Sahih its position as the most authoritative work in the Sunni Hadith canon. We do not know exactly when al-Bukhari completed the Sahih. Like other works from his era, the dating of the Sahih is established according to the year in which its compiler died—in al-Bukhari’s case, in 870.