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بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

IMAM BUKHARI (R.A)

Imam Bukhari (Full Name: Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Ismail bin Ibrahim bin al-Mughira bin Bardizbah al-Bukhari, al-Ju'fiyyi (R.A)) was born as an orphan in a Friday,  Shawwal  13, 194 A.H.   and died in a Saturday, 1st Shawwal (Id al- Fithr), 256 A.H. He belongs to Bukhara, present day Uzbekistan, in Central Asia.

When he was young he lost his eyesight. His mother saw the Prophet Ibrahim (PBUH) in her dream, and he said to her: Allah has returned your son his eyesight due to your profuse weeping.  He was thin, neither tall nor short. He lived up to the age of 62 years less thirteen days at his death.

He worked extremely hard to collect Prophet’s s.a.w.  hadith. He loved learning from his tender age and he was helped in this by his tremendous intelligence. He could re-memorize things by a single hearing or reading.  The beginning of his study of hadith was at the age of 10 in 205H. In his boyhood, he could reproduce more than 15,000 hadiths from his memory, and at the time he was just going to be a youth, he could memorize more than 70,000 Hadith. He did not cite a hadith from the Companions (Sahabah) or Followers (Tabi'iin) unless he knew the date and place of birth of most of them and that of their death, and where they lived.

He travelled to Mecca when he was 16 years old with his mother and elder brother and yearned to learn from its learned scholars. He remained behind and bid farewell to his family. He stayed in Mecca for two years, and then went to Medina. After a total of six years in Hijaz, he left for Basra, Kufa, and Baghdad. He visited many other places in Egypt, Balkh, Marw, Nisabur, Rayy. He also took hadith from innumerable transmitters in Damascus, Caesarea, `Asqalan, and Hims. He heard from 1,080 people in all. He learned the books of Ibn al-Mubarak and Waki` and knew their sayings by heart at age sixteen. When his eighteen, he started to compile the deeds of the Companions (Sahaabah) of Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. and the Followers (Taabi'iin), and their sayings. It was in the time of `Ubayd Allah ibn Musa that he compiled the "Kitab al-tarikh" by the grave of the Prophet s.a.w. during moonlit nights.

Once a number of shaykhs heard that Bukhari was coming to Baghdad. They chose 100 hadiths and shuffled their chains of transmission and their texts, giving each text a different chain than its original one. Each took ten of these hadiths and prepared to test Bukhari with them during their gathering. The people assembled, and one of the scholars confronted Bukhari with one of these hadith. He replied: "I don't know it." Then he asked him about another. He replied "I don't know it." Then another:” I don't know it”. And so forth until he finished his ten. Those in the know looked at each other saying: "The man understands." The rest thought he knew nothing. Then another scholar read his ten, then another his ten, then another until they read 100 hadiths and Bukhari kept saying each time: "I don't know it, I don't know it, I don't know it." When he saw that they had finished, he turned to the first scholar and said: "The correct chain of your first hadith is such-and-such; the correct chain of your second hadith is..." then he turned to the second scholar, then the third, and so on with every single one of the one hundred hadiths. At that time the people understood who he was!

Sahih al-Bukhari is the collection of the reports of the Prophet's s.a.w. sayings and deeds. Each report in his collection was checked for compatibility with the Qur'an, and the veracity of the chain of reporters had to be painstakingly established. He knew by memory 100,000 sahih hadiths, and 200,000 non- sahih hadiths. He used to make wuzu’ and perform two raka’ath of Prayer before adding each hadith into his collection. His criteria for acceptance into the collection were amongst the most stringent of all the scholars of ahadith. There fore, it is unanimously declared by the scholars of the Sunnah as the second most authentic text of Islam after the Holy Qur'an. He spent sixteen years compiling it, and ended up with about 4,000 hadith (7,275 with repetition). He extracted this Kithab from about 6,00,000 (sound) hadiths.

Imaam Bukhari left a great legacy of learning for generations of later students and scholars alike. His contributions to the preservation of the Sunnah of our beloved Prophet s.a.w. are still not paralleled as he set a very high standard for authentication and recording the Hadith of our beloved Prophet s.a.w. Although he has written many more gems of works of Ahadith, Imaam Bukhari is known for the following timeless classics:

1.      Al Jaami' Sahih: best known as the number one hadith collection, Sahih Bukhari.

2.      At Tarikh al Kabiir: An excellent collection of biographies of both reliable and unreliable hadith narrators.

3.      Adabul Mufrad: another popular collection of ahadith mainly of topic of Islamic manners and etiquette.

 

 

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