Sahih Bukhari

Sahih Bukhari (in Arabic صحيح البخاري, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī) is a collection of hadiths (narrations) by a non-arab, al-Bukhari, who was born in Persia around 200 years after Muhammad's death ^[1]. He collected narrations which were transmitted only orally for generations. Although he started collecting the orally transmitted stories generations after Muhammad's death, the collection is called "authentic" (sahih). The "authenticness" of a narration is judged by subjectively judging the people in the chain of narrators (if they were good truthful Muslims). In the English translation of the hadiths, often only the last narrator (the one who narrated it to Bukhari) is mentioned, but in the original Arabic, there is always a long list of narrators. This collection of hadiths is considered (by sunni Muslims) to be the most authentic along with the collection Sahih Muslim. It is also part of "the six books" (الكتب الستة, Al-Kutub as-Sittah), the most trusted hadith collections. There are over 7000 narrations in the collection, but there are often different version of the same story, so the actual number of narrations is less than 3000 ^[2].

Content

There is more than one way of numbering the hadiths in this collection. Every hadith has it's own number (from 1 to 7495 ^[3], 7563^[4] or 7658 ^[5]), but the collection was also divided into volumes and books. There are either 93^[6], 97 ^[7] or 98 ^[8] 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.

References