Imam al-Bukhārī

Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī was born in 194 AH (810 CE) in Bukhara, in what is today Uzbekistan. His father died when he was young, and his mother (who is reported to have prayed steadily for the restoration of his eyesight after a childhood blindness) raised him.

He began the study of ḥadīth at ten, and was already correcting his teachers' chains by sixteen. By his early twenties he had travelled the breadth of the Islamic world in pursuit of narrations: Mecca, Medina, the Levant, Egypt, Iraq, Khurasan. He is reported to have memorised tens of thousands of ḥadīth with their full chains.

His Ṣaḥīḥ is the work of a lifetime. He sifted, by his own account, through some six hundred thousand ḥadīth and admitted into the collection only those he could establish to his own demanding standard of authenticity. The book is not, despite the impression its title sometimes gives, an exhaustive collection of all sound ḥadīth; it is a curated argument, organised by chapter and by the legal lessons al-Bukhārī wished to draw.

He died in 256 AH (870 CE), in the village of Khartank near Samarkand, where he had withdrawn after a falling-out with the local governor. He left behind a number of works on ḥadīth and biographical material, but it is the Ṣaḥīḥ that has carried his name through twelve centuries of study.