810-870
Hadith Collector

Traveling Scholar. Muhammad ibn Ismail al- Bukhari is one of the best-known compilers of hadiths, or traditions, of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. He began to memorize hadiths at the age of ten. He had an excellent memory and traveled widely—from Central Asia to Egypt—in search of people from whom he could learn traditions. This extensive research made him able to correct the oral and written hadith collections of his contemporaries by winnowing out less-reliable and unreliable traditions by checking the veracity of the isnad, or links, of the transmitters back to the Prophet himself.

Collecting Hadiths. Al-Bukhari went on to compile one of the most authoritative collections, applying the same standards and categorizing hadiths according to their reliability. For his best-known work, Sahih al-Bukhari, he selected 7,397 hadiths that he judged to have complete...