Sahih Bukhari: Difference between revisions

Sahih Bukhari (in Arabic صحيح البخاري, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī) is a collection of hadiths (narrations) by a central Asian, al-Bukhari, who was born in Bukhara in what is modern-day Uzbekistan around 200 years after the accepted death the prophet Muhammad ^[1]. He collected narrations which were transmitted only orally for generations and collated them into a book of sayings, stories, and traditions about the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The collection is called "authentic" (sahih) and is considered second only to the Quran in terms of authenticity and authority amongst most Sunni Muslims. The "authenticness" of a narration are judged by for authenticity according to whether the people in the chain of narrators were good, truthful Muslims in the traditional Sunni reckoning. The most common narrators in Sahih Bukhari from Muhammad's generation are Abu Huraira and Aisha. See also [1] and [2].For each Hadith there is always a long list of narrators, listed as "so and so told so and so" etc. It is also part of "the six books" (الكتب الستة, Al-Kutub as-Sittah), the most trusted hadith collections in Sunni Islam. There are over 7000 narrations in the collection, but there are often different versions of the same story, so the actual number of narrations is less than 3000 ^[2].

Contents

Allah's hadiths

The words of Allah are not only in the Quran but in the hadiths also:

Fairy tales

Animals talk and Muhammad believes it:

Tall Tales

Monkeys stone a monkey as a punishment for adultery and `Amr bin Maimun joins them:

Strange Anecdotes

In The Book of Hunting, Slaughtering (كتاب الذبائح والصيد), al-Bukhari wrote at the beginning of chapter 12 (the texts in the beginnings of chapters are usually not translated in English translations):

Nun is the Arabic letter ن.

Bukhari's original manuscripts

Bukhari's work is only extant through his student al-Firabri.

Translations

The whole collection was translated to English by Muhsin Khan. His translations uses the 97 books version. The collection was translated into many other languages.^[4]

The English text often isn't a literal translation of the Arabic original. For example the book "كتاب السلم" (kitaab us-sallam, book of payment) is named "A book of Sales in which a Price is paid for Goods to be Delivered Later". Other times they are so literal, that they are actually not translation, but only a transliteration, for example "Khusoomaat" (Quarrels).

Just like in the Qur'an translations, when the Arabic original text is too violent or absurd, the English translation uses euphemisms, transliteration, mis-translation or just doesn't translate it at all.

For example, in the 58th Book (with only a transliterated name) "Jizyah and Mawaada'ah" (the tax and the peace treaty), the first chapter is named:

• In English: "Al-Jizya taken from the Dhimmi"
• In Arabic: "باب الْجِزْيَةِ وَالْمُوَادَعَةِ مَعَ أَهْلِ الْحَرْبِ"
  • باب (baab) - chapter
  • الْجِزْيَةِ (al-jizya) - (of) the tax
  • وَالْمُوَادَعَةِ (wal-mawaada'ah) - and the peace treaty
  • مَعَ (ma'a) - with
  • أَهْلِ (ahl) - people
  • الْحَرْبِ (al-harbi) - (of) the war

We would expect that the English word "dhimmi" is a transliteration of the Arabic word dhimmi (ذمي), but the name of the chapter actually says "people of war" (أَهْلِ الْحَرْبِ, ahl il-harbi) and doesn't use the word dhimmi (ذمي). This might be even called "mis-transliteration". Also the chapter mentions the Mawaada'ah (الموادعة), the peace treaty (of not killing them), while the translation says only "jizya".

Ambiguous numbering

There is more than one way of numbering the hadiths in this collection. Every hadith has it's own number (from 1 to 7495 ^[5], 7563^[6] or 7658 ^[7]), but the collection was also divided into volumes and books. There are either 93^[8], 97 ^[9] or 98 ^[10] books and there are 9 volumes (in the 93 books version). So for example, if someone tells you about a hadith in the book 98, you might find out your collection has only 93 books and the hadith is actually in the book 93 in your collection. Also what is in one version considered as two separate hadiths might be in other collection considered to be one big hadith. So we can't tell how many hadiths are there.

In the 93 books (USC-MSA) version, the hadith numbering is not from the first hadith of the whole collection, but from the first hadith of the first book of the volume. The hadith identificator is volume:book:hadith. For example, 9:84:53, is the first hadith of the book 84, and it has the number 53, because volume 9 started with the book 83 and the book 83 has 52 hadiths. The same hadith could be described as 88:1, because it is the 1st hadith of the book 88 in the 97 books version (or 89:1 in the 97 books version). It could be also described with one number 6918, as it is the 6918th hadith from the beginning of the whole Sahih Bukhari collection (in the 93 books version). And it could be also described with the number 7004 (more than 6918), because in the 93 books version, some hadiths from the 98 books version, were "joined" and considered to be one hadith.

This is a list of all names used in different versions ^[11]. The first three columns "98", "97" and "93" contain a number of the book with the name "Book name" in the 98, 97 or 93 version. The last three columns Q98, Q97 and Q93 contain the number (Quantity) of hadiths in the book "Book name" in the 98, 97 and 93 books version. "x" means that a book with this name is not a part of that version (the hadiths which would be in that book are in some other book instead).

Conclusion

Sahih Bukhari is a collection of narrations from people who lived with Muhammad. The word "sahih" means "authentic", but since Bukhari started collecting them hundereds of years after Muhammad and all of the narrations have a long chain of narrations (like "someone said, that someone else said, that someone else said, that she said, that he said that Muhammad did something"), it is questionable, whether those narrations are actually authentic. Nevertheless this collection is considered to be the most authentic by sunni Muslims.

The English translation by Muhsin Khan is not very reliable.

The collection is divided into 9 volumes and volumes are divided into books. There are more than 90 books. One book can contain from a few to hundereds of hadiths (narrations). Since the numbering of both books and hadiths is problematic (there are more numbering methods), we can't say how many books and how many hadiths there are. Also we can't say which book contains the biggest number of hadiths. But we can say that (in all numbering methods) the 3 biggest books are:

• Military expeditions led by the prophet
• Prophetic commentary on the Qur'an
• Fighting for the cause of Allah (jihaad)

So two out of three biggest books of narrations about Muhammad's life are about killing people. The book "Military expeditions led by the prophet" contains over 500 hadiths. While the book of "Peacemaking" contains less then 30 hadiths. From this we can conclude that killing people was a very big part of Muhammad's life (of his "sunna").

See Also

• Sahih
• Hadith

• Sahih Bukhari online with English translation

References