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, and sometimes only the first narrator from the time of Muhammad is mentioned.^[2] 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 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 ^[3].

Contents

Allah's hadiths

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

This hadith is also scientifically wrong, because there is no time of "the last third of the night". The Sun constantly shines on the Earth which rotates around its own axis and "the last third of the night" is subjectively experienced constantly somewhere on Earth. However the hadith is perfectly in line with the model of flat earth with the Sun orbiting around it.

Fairy tales

Animals talk and Muhammad believes it:

Ridiculous stories

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

Gibberish

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

They are lost. His work was transmitted to us by his student al-Firabri. So technically, Bukhari and Firabri should be added to the (already long) chains of narrations of every hadith.

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.^[5]

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 ^[6], 7563^[7] or 7658 ^[8]), but the collection was also divided into volumes and books. There are either 93^[9], 97 ^[10] or 98 ^[11] 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 ^[12]. 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