Hadith · a Light

He spent sixteen years deciding what to leave out

Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari was born in Bukhara in 810 and died in 870. He travelled for years through Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and Egypt collecting reports of what the Prophet ﷺ said and did, and interrogating the people who transmitted them: where they lived, whether they had actually met their teacher, whether anyone doubted their memory or honesty. The point of the work was subtraction. His Sahih contains roughly 7,275 reports counting repetitions, sifted out of a far greater mass he had gathered and rejected. The discipline he helped build, weighing a chain of names before weighing the text, is one of the earliest systematic methods for testing testimony.

Al-Bukhari · 810-870 CE