The Ṣaḥīḥ is only one of many works ascribed to Imām al-Bukhārī. By the age of eighteen, he had composed a treatise on the opinions of the Companions and the Successors and prepared a draft of his renowned al-Tārīkh al-kabīr.1 His purported oeuvre comprises over thirty books and tracts on theology, law, history, prosopography, polemics, and filial piety. To date, only about ten of his books are published.2 Many books are either misattributed to him, or they are different iterations (ibrāza) of the same book or sections extracted from his larger works.3 For instance, he is said to have composed a large collection on Qurʾānic exegesis, but this appears to be the chapter of Tafsīr from his Ṣaḥīḥ.4 During his lifetime, al-Tārīkh al-kabīr caught the attention and engagement of the scholarly community,5 but it was the Ṣaḥīḥ that would eventually not only overshadow his own scholarly output but dominate the hadith tradition as a whole.
At some point during his extensive academic travels, al-Bukhārī was in Nishapur sitting in the company of the great hadith scholar Isḥāq b. Rāhawayh (d. 238 AH) when someone in the audience suggested that one gather the circulating authentic hadith in a single collection, something unheard of at the time.6 As the seed was planted in al-Bukhārī’s mind, it began to germinate, and spurred him on a sixteen-year project of compiling his magnum opus.7 Al-Bukhārī initially compiled a massive collection entitled al-Mabsūṭ,8 wherein he gathered all his hadith and organized them into chapters. According to Ibn Ṭāhir al-Maqdisī (d. 507 AH), he then drew on this reservoir of narrations to compile the Ṣaḥīḥ, by handpicking those that met his standards of authenticity.9 The body of hadith that al-Bukhārī used for his Ṣaḥīḥ were a mixture of “live” oral traditions and previously compiled books.10 Some of the written corpora that he cites in his Ṣaḥīḥ include Maʿmar’s (d. 153 AH) Jāmiʿ, Mālik’s (d. 179 AH) Muwaṭṭāʾ, Ibn Abī Shayba’s (d. 235 AH) Muṣannaf, and al-Farrāʾ’s (207 AH) Maʿānī al-Qurʾān, among other books.11 Since the dominant culture at the time required that one cite a chain of transmission regardless of the form of one’s source, al-Bukhārī would narrate from written sources using phrases that are associated with live transmission (e.g., ḥaddathanī).12
Al-Bukhārī’s greatest accomplishment through the Ṣaḥīḥ was that he filtered the overwhelming body of hadith that was circulating by the early third century AH and gathered the most reliable ones in a single work. To be sure, he was not blindly collecting hadith based solely on reliability. Rather, the Ṣaḥīḥ is an expression of al-Bukhārī’s vision of Islamic law, theology, and ethics through rigorously authenticated reports from the Prophet (ṣ) and the early generations of Muslims. By his own admission, he left out many authentic hadith for the fear of unnecessarily prolonging the work.13 To compensate for the stringency of his standards for including hadith, al-Bukhārī introduced the concept of tarājim, that is, chapter headings that precede each section, comprising introductory material related to the chapter, such as verses, exegetical comments, and scholarly dicta.14 In addition to its exceptional interest in philological material, the Ṣaḥīḥ is thus a multifaceted work that ably treads the line between law and hadith and owes its complex structure to “the tension between the goals” of these two disciplines.15 The division of themes in the Ṣaḥīḥ demonstrates the predominantly legal nature of the Ṣaḥīḥ,16 but it also highlights the importance of topics that receive less importance in hadith literature, like Qurʾānic exegesis. 55% of the hadith in the Ṣaḥīḥ relate to law (aḥkām); 11% to comportment (ādāb); 11% to history and maghāzī; 7% to hagiography (manāqib); 7% to Qurʾānic exegesis; 4% to heart-softeners (riqāq); 4% to theology; and 1% to eschatology (fitan).17 The Ṣaḥīḥ consists of four types of narrations:
The latter two types are found in the chapter headings. His standards of authenticity were applied only to the primary hadith, i.e., prophetic hadith with continuous chains.18 The other categories were subject to a lower standard of verification.19 According to Ibn Ḥajar, the Ṣaḥīḥ comprises the following number of narrations. Including repetitions, there are 7397 primary hadith; 1341 suspended reports; and 344 corroborating reports and allusions to alternative routes.20 Thus, the total number of prophetic hadith including repetitions is 9079. Then, there are 1608 non-prophetic reports. Putting all the categories together, there are 10690 narrations in the Ṣaḥīḥ.21 For the sake of convenience, this study uses the prevalent number 7563 to account for the primary and corroborating hadith in the main text, as enumerated by the Egyptian editor Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī (d. 1968), though it is not free of criticism.22 Ultimately, The exact number of narrations and chapters (discussed later) in the Ṣaḥīḥ depends on the method of counting one uses and the recension one consults.
According to the prevalent numbering system, the printed editions of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī based on al-Farabrī’s recension contain 97 Kitāb titles. However, 19 of these titles do not appear in any reliable manuscript or recension, and two titles are only found in the mustakhraj works. From the remaining, the inclusion of 29 titles is agreed upon within the Farabrī tradition, and 55 titles are disputed.23 Although most printed editions of the Ṣaḥīḥ today contain 97 Kitāb titles, there is considerable disagreement among the secondary literature and earliest prints, chiefly due to conflicting views on labelling certain bābs as Kitābs. In recent secondary literature, for instance, Muḥammad al-Tūqādī’s 1896 index enumerates 68 Kitāb titles and Riḍwān Muḥammad’s 1949 index enumerates 91 titles.24 In the eighth century AH, al-Kirmānī estimated that there are about 100 Kitāb titles, an estimation that was reiterated by the Ottoman encyclopedist Ḥajjī Khalīfa (d. 1067 AH) in Kashf al-ẓunūn.25
We will explore the manuscripts of the Ṣaḥīḥ in a separate post. As for printed editions, the Ṣaḥīḥ was printed at least three times by the nineteenth century. The first lithographic edition of the Ṣaḥīḥ was printed in Delhi between 1851–1854 with editorial and commentarial work by Aḥmad ʿAlī al-Sahāranpūrī (d. 1880). The second is the Leiden edition published by Brill. The first three volumes were printed between 1862–1868 with editorial work by Ludolf Krehl (d. 1901), and the fourth volume was completed in 1908 by Theodor Willem Juynboll (d. 1948).27 The third is the Sulṭāniyya edition, which was published in nine volumes in 1895 from the Cairene publishing house al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya and reviewed by a committee of scholars from al-Azhar.29