One of the greatest Muslim compilers and scholars of Hadith (the recorded corpus of the sayings and acts of the Prophet Muhammad), al-Bukhari (810-870) began learning the utterances and actions of the Prophet by heart while still a child. His travels in search of more information about them began with a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was 16. He then went to Egypt, and for 16 years he sought out informants from Cairo to Merv in Central Asia. Al-Bukhari was an extremely scrupulous compiler, showing great critical discrimination and editorial skill in his selection of traditions as authentic ones. From the approximately 600,000 traditions he gathered, he selected only about 7,275 that he deemed completely reliable and thus meriting inclusion in his Al-Jami al-Sahih (“The Authentic Collection”). He arranged his collection in sections according to subject so that the reader can compare the soundest accounts of the Prophet’s example, in word or deed, on points of law and religious doctrine as diverse as the validity of good deeds performed before conversion to Islam and marriage law.
As a preliminary to his Sahih, al-Bukhari wrote Al-Ta’rikh al-kabir (“The Large History”), which contains biographies of the persons forming the living chain of oral transmission and recollection of traditions back to the Prophet. Toward the end of his life, he was involved in a theological dispute in Nishapur and left that city for Bukhara, but, following his refusal to give special classes for Bukhara’s governor and his children, he was forced into exile in Khartank, a village near Samarkand.
Scent to the cut of a beard. Comprehensive and practical, the Sunnah could amuse as well. When asked whether to trust in God or tie one’s camel, so a popular hadith goes, the Prophet replied, “Trust in God, then tie your camel.” The significance of Hadith and Sunnah is represented by the ending date of the period of conversion and
Crystallization. No one can say exactly when the majority of Islamdom’s population became Muslim. Older scholarship looks to the end of the first quarter of the 9th century, newer scholarship to the beginning of the third quarter. In 870 a man died whose life’s work symbolized the consolidation of Islam in everyday life: al-Bukhari, who produced one of the six collections of Hadith recognized as authoritative by Jama‘i-Sunni Muslims. His fellow collector of Hadith, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, died about four years later. About the same time, classical thinkers in other areas of Islamicate civilization died, among them the great author of adab, al-Jahiz (died 868/869), the great early ecstatic Sufis Abu al-Fayd Dhu al-Nun al-Misri (died 861) and Abu Yazid Bistami (died 874), the philosopher Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq al-Sabah al-Kindi (died c. 870), and the historian of the conquests al-Baladhuri (died c. 892). Men of different religious and ethnic heritages, they signified by the last quarter of the 9th century the full and varied range of intellectual activities of a civilization that had come of age.
World History
