Vol. No. 26, Issue No. 11November 2019

IN MEMORY OF JALAL-UD-DIN AKBAR IBN-I ABDULLAH, SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

Editor: Nasir Ahmad B.A. LL.B.

MOTTO ISLAM: I SHALL LOVE ALL MANKIND

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ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF SAHIH AL-BUKHARI VOL. I PUBLISHEDFROM THE PREFACE TO FADL AL-BARI 3Maulana Muhammad AliPREFACE ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION 4Dr. Zahid AzizBRIEF LIFE-HISTORY OF DR. ZAHID AZIZ 6INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION 11Maulana Aftab-ud-Din AhmadBRIEF LIFE-HISTORY OF MAULANA AFTAB-UD-DIN AHMAD 13THE QUR’AN AND HADITH 13

PageCONTENTS

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AN INVALUABLE ADDITION TO OUR WEBSITE

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONOF

SAHIH AL-BUKHARIBASED ON FADL AL-BARI

URDU TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARYBY MAULANA MUHAMMAD ALI

RENDERED BY

MAULANA AFTAB-UD-DIN AHMAD

AND

DR. ZAHID AZIZ

VOL I

IT CONSISTS OF FIRST 33 BOOKS

AND COVERS ALMOST THE FIVE FUNDAMENTALS OF ISLAM

[In order to apprise our readers the complete story of how the translation was started by Maulana Muhammad Ali, then it was taken up by Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad. After his death in 1956 the work somehow continued and finally Dr. Zahid Aziz took up the work. Alhamdulillah he has been able to finalise vol. 1 which is already on the website: www.ahmadiyya.org. How this English translation is different from other existing translations can be understood from the Preface reproduced below.We are also reproducing below extracts from the English translation of the preface to Fadl-ul-Bari, original Urdu work, by Maulana Muhammad Ali to give complete back-ground of this English Translation.

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A word about Dr. Zahid Aziz. As far as our knowledge goes, there are few authors who are at one and the same time writers, composers, editors and expert in making a print-ready copy for the printers. When we say editors: it means revising, preparing contents and index also. This is a rare quality with which Dr. Zahid Aziz has been immensely blessed. We are giving below his brief biography as well. Ed]

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FROM THE PREFACE TO FAḌL AL-BĀRĪ

By Maulana Muhammad Ali

Among the works of the service of Islām which I had in mind, after completing the translations of the Holy Qur’ān and its commentary in English and Urdu, was the translation of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī with explanatory notes. A most substantial amount of material relating to the religion of Islām, the life of the Holy Prophet Muḥammad, and the history of early Islām, is to be found in books of Ḥadīth, and Bukhārī holds the highest rank of all among these collections. Due to my various other engagements this work kept being postponed. However, in the meantime, I had the opportunity to write a booklet on the compilation of Ḥadīth, with the object of removing mis-conceptions about this literature as well as clarifying the true position of Ḥadīth. It therefore refutes the extreme views held by some Islamic groups which either give Ḥadīth a place even above the Qur’ān or reject it altogether. This book was published under the title Maqām-i Ḥadīth and can serve as an introduction for a translation of Bukhārī, or indeed any other Ḥadīth collection. Topics discussed in it include the position of Ḥadīth in Islām, reliability of its reports, and the status of Bukhārī among the collections of Ḥadīth.

In this translation I have included also those reports from Bukhārī which have a break or missing link in the line of narrators (reports known as maqṭū‛ or mu‛allaq) as well as the sayings and comments of the Companions of the Holy Prophet and authorities of the next generation. These are omitted by some translators, but their inclusion gives access to the reader to all reports that Bukhārī has presented in his collection.

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However, as regards the isnād, the lists of names of the narrators in the chain which appear preceding each report, I have omitted these, except for the name of the first narrator, most often a Companions of the Holy Prophet, as the full lists are of no benefit to the ordinary reader.

As to the footnotes, the explanations I have provided in them are based on the prin-ciples which I have set down in my booklet Maqām-i Ḥadīth. If I found a report to contradict the Holy Qur’ān, I have tried to interpret it in a sense which makes it accord with the Qur’ān. Where it proved impossible to find such an interpretation, I have rejected the report in whole or in part, as necessary. If a report could be interpreted in more than one way, I have given preference to the sense which makes it accord with human experience or accepted history. In case of reports which clash with each other, I have accepted that view which is supported by the majority of reports or by the stronger evidence. In writing these notes I have borne in mind allegations of the critics of Islām as well as the doubts and objections raised in our present times due to modern thought.

I have to confess my handicap that I lack a sufficiently broad knowledge of the field of Ḥadīth. Most of all, I regret that, for the translation of Bukhārī, I could not benefit from the vast and detailed knowledge of the learned Maulana Nur-ud-Din, as I had done in case of translating the Holy Qur’ān. This regret was expressed by the Maulana himself in the last days of his life when he said to me: “The Qur’ān has been done, but Bukhārī remains.” I must also mention here that this shortcoming of mine has to some extent been removed by the participation of Maulana Ahmad in this work, who shared with me the task of writing the footnotes. I also received much help from Maulana Abdus Sattar.

Muhammad AliDalhousie (India)8 June 1926

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PREFACE ABOUT THIS TRANSLATIONBy Dr Zahid Aziz

The work Faḍl al-Bārī is an Urdu translation with extensive explanatory notes by Maulana Muhammad Ali (d. 1951). Its first volume, consisting of nearly the first half of Bukhari, was published in 1932. The same contents had been appearing in the form of instalments of about 100 pages long, starting in 1926. The remainder was published all together as the second volume in 1937. A newly-typeset edition of the entire Urdu work was published in 2012, again in two volumes, by the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha‛at Islam Lahore, based in Dublin, Ohio, U.S.A.

Maulana Muhammad Ali started an English translation of this enormous work near the end of his life. He had only reached as far as Book 2, Ch. 21, when he passed the manuscript to Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad, then editor of The Light, to continue the translation. He took it up with great devotion, but after completing the first three Parts and some of the fourth Part, he died in 1956. Parts 1 to 3 were published in 1956, 1962, and 1973 respectively. In the mid-1970s Mr Iqbal Ahmad, elder son of Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad, who had served in the Woking Muslim Mission in the 1950s, revised the partial translation of Part 4 done by his father. This was serialised in The Light of Lahore, the weekly organ of the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Lahore, from its issue dated June 8, 1983 to its issue dated February 8, 1985.

In 2015 Mr Nasir Ahmad, also son of Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad, and a veteran of the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Lahore in its propagation and literary work, proposed that the translation should be continued. The first step was to complete the remaining translation of Part 4. This was done by me in collaboration with Mr Nasir Ahmad. The portion of Part 4 that was previously translated was also revised for consistency with the new translation. Following that, Parts 5, 6 and 7 were completed by the collabo-rative work of myself, Mr Nasir Ahmad, and others. He and his helpers prepared the draft, which I then thoroughly checked, revised and finalised. In fact, we have included the first two short books of Part 8, so that our translation covers Sahih Bukhari up to the point where it finishes dealing with the five fundamentals of Islam. Then we took up the revision of the existing published translations of Parts 1 to 3. The introductory material within Part 1 of that edition was also revised and expanded for our new

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edition. Some extracts from Maulana Muhammad Ali’s preface to the original Urdu work have also been added in this new edition.

As Parts 4 to 7 and then Parts 1 to 3 were completed, these were published online be-tween January 2016 and June 2019, but revisions still continued to be made in these Parts. Now that the entire work is considered as finalized in October 2019, it has been compiled into one volume, to be printed soon.

Principles of work, sources and acknowledgementsIt is essential to mention here briefly the nature of our work in this translation and the sources used. The 2012 newly-typeset edition of Faḍl al-Bārī greatly facilitated our translation because of its clear layout, modern formatting and easy readability. It also uses the system of numbering the reports in Bukhari that is in commonly accepted use now, and we have adopted the same in this Translation.

In translating the text of Bukhari, we have not merely relied on Maulana Muhammad Ali’s Urdu work, but also kept in view other published translations of Bukhari in Urdu as well as the well-known English translation by Dr Muhammad Muhsin Khan. Of course, for Parts 1 to 3, and some of Part 4, we already had the great advantage of our own English translation by Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad. I must pay tribute here to his excellent, accurate and idiomatic translation. The revisions we made to his translation are mainly for reasons of consistency, and not due to any shortcoming in his work.

We have also carefully checked our translation, word for word, with the original Arabic text of Bukhari.

An Urdu translation and commentary of Bukhari which we found most useful in clarifying many points of interpretation is that of Maulana Muhammad Dawud Raz. Occasionally, we consulted other Urdu translations and commentaries of Bukhari for clarifying particular points. We must also express our gratitude to the maintainers of the www.sunnah.com website which provides the English translation of Bukhari by Dr Muhsin Khan, as well as English translations of several other Hadith collections, in a conveniently accessible form. Its search feature to find Hadith reports by the text they contain, in the original Arabic or in English translation, has been a vital tool for us.

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Sahih Bukhari contains 7563 hadith reports, but of these some 2450 may be consid-ered as distinct, while the others may be called their repetitions in one form or an-other. Repetitions of the same report very often occur in different Books and Chapters because Bukhari applies them to different situations, and he also makes inferences based on the variations between the repetitions of the same hadith.

The repetitions, indispensable though they are, make Sahih Bukhari a very volumi-nous tome. Facing this difficulty, Maulana Muhammad Ali, as he himself explains in the Preface to his Urdu translation, did not reproduce the repetitions in the main translation, but instead he added a footnote at such points in which he quoted either the entire or just the differing parts of the repetition, commented on the differences, and referred the reader to the hadith whose repetition this was. In the English trans-lation of the Parts done by Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad, naturally the same scheme is followed. However, in most cases this makes it quite burden-some for the reader to visualise the repetition as a complete hadith.

Therefore, we decided that in most cases a repetition should be given in the main translation like any other report, and its points of difference with the original hadith be highlighted in footnotes as Maulana Muhammad Ali had done. Still there were some cases in which it was easier for readability to give only a part of a repetition in the main text and omit the rest. At such places, ellipses (...) is used to indicate omis-sion and a footnote is provided which refers the reader to another report in which the omitted translation can be found. It may be added that in our times, with the rise of digital documents and online publishing, we do not face the same restrictions of space that Maulana Muhammad Ali did in the days when paper itself was not always easy to obtain.

As regards the explanatory footnotes of Maulana Muhammad Ali, we have made a few small additions in them, here and there, and in a few instances we have summarised a lengthy discussion. In the Parts translated by Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad, he had already added useful brief comments of his own in some places while translating the footnotes, and we have mostly retained these. The original footnotes of Maulana Muhammad Ali contain references to other collections of Hadith, citing only the name of the collection, such as Sahih Muslim, without providing the location within the book. In the 2012 edition of the Urdu work, the compilers have in many cases added the chapter name and hadith number, or volume and page, of the reference concerned.

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In this translation I have filled in many more such references, so that these are now complete except in a few cases. Before closing this Preface, I must acknowledge that the drive and impetus for continuing the English translation of Sahih Bukhari came from Mr Nasir Ahmad. He continuously urged the completion of this work and provid-ed all necessary help and support, without which this new translation would not have been possible.

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BRIEF LIFE-HISTORY OF DR. ZAHID AZIZ M.SC., PH.D.

He is the son of Mr. Aziz Ahmad M.Sc. and Mrs. Akhter Jabeen Aziz, M.A., M.Ed., and great-grandson of the late Hazrat Maulana Aziz Bakhsh and also maternal grandson of the late Hazrat Maulana Abdul Haq Vidyarthi. He was born in Lahore in November 1951 and had his early education at Muslim Model Junior School and Central Model School, Lahore. His parents with their children moved to England in 1963. In 1964 he joined the prestigious Taunton’s Grammar School, in Southampton, England where he remained till the age of 18. Following this, he graduated in Mathematics from Imperial College London in 1973, and joined the University of Manchester the same year. At the University of Manchester he completed his M.Sc. and then Ph.D. in research in-volving the programming of mathematical techniques by digital computers. In 1975 he married Miss Fauqia Ali, grand-daughter of the late Hazrat Dr. Mirza Yaqub Beg. He and his wife moved from Manchester to Nottingham in 1978, where he worked at the University of Nottingham in a computer advisory role in the use of numerical techniques. In May 2013 he took retirement from this post.

By his own study of the English and Urdu publications of the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Lahore, which he did ever since his youth, he acquired considerable knowledge of Islam and the Ahmadiyya Movement. He also has a good command of both English and Urdu. He has done a lot of revision and translation work and has been able to con-tribute worthy material on Islam and the Ahmadiyya Movement. In his revision and

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proof-correcting works can be mentioned “Muhammad in World Scriptures” Volume I, a unique work on comparative study of religions by the late Hazrat Maulana Abdul Haq Vidyarthi, and the English translation of the Qur’an with commentary by Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ali. He has not only revised the latter work but has enlarged the index, and he introduced a footnote numbering method which, later on, was found convenient for the audio recording of this book.

For several years he worked with the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha’at-i Islam, Ohio (USA) and carried out revision and formatting of many of the publications produced by them from 1990 till 2005. He also created their website www.muslim.org. He was editor of ‘The Light and Islamic Review’ (USA) from its beginning in 1991 to 2003, and later editor of ‘The Light’, UK edition, from 2006 to 2010.

In 2007 he wrote the book Islam, Peace and Tolerance, which he revised and expand-ed for its second edition in 2017. His other writings include the 2014 book The True Succession, which is a history of the founding of the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam Lahore in 1914, and the 2017 booklet Centenary of Maulana Muhammad Ali’s English Translation of the Quran.

He also maintains the websites www.ahmadiyya.org and www.wokingmuslim.org. The first of these also has the sub-website, www.berlin.ahmadiyya.org, on the history of the Berlin Mosque and Mission and current activities there. The Woking Muslim web-site provides an extensive history of the Woking Muslim Mission, which existed from 1913 to 1968, and contains articles, documents, booklets, photographs and newsreel film clips relating to the Mission.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION

Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad

In presenting this translation of the great work of Ḥadīth, the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, to the English-speaking world, I am doing no more service than fulfilling practically a dying wish of the late Maulana Muhammad Ali, to whom I owe so much in my humble knowledge of Islām. Not only the instructions for the work as a whole, but also the bulk of knowledge contained in these pages is the gift of the Maulana. The translation of the text here presented is mostly my own responsibility, but the commentary is mainly from the Urdu work of the Maulana, Faḍl al-Bārī. The necessity of a work like the present one arises from the fact that being more or less conversant now with the contents of the Qur’ān, as a result of a number of translations having seen the light of day, inquisitive minds are eager to know the authentic history of the person who gave this wonderful Book to the world. This consideration aside, there is also the fact that Islām is pre-eminently a religion of practice, not a religion of principles and ideas alone, and practice requires demonstration. None could be a better demons-trator than the man who received this religion from on High, and whose heart was illumined by a direct impact of the Source of all knowledge. Rightly, therefore, Muslim saints, savants, theologians and jurists united in regarding the Sunnah, .e., the practice of the Prophet Muḥammad, as the secondary source of the teachings and the law of Islām, after the Qur’ān. Unlike other religions, Islām is a religion of one authoritative man, responsible for the whole code of the law and its application to all the various aspects of life. Every word, deed and hint of the Holy Prophet was taken, and instructed to be taken, as interpreting, explaining or demonstrating these laws. No corner of his life was in that way private. Any other human would have been offended in a few days at being observed so closely. Even his wives viewed him in their most private moments as not merely a marital partner but a moral exemplar, and they saw all his deeds and actions in the light of Quranic principles. The need for the Sunnah having been estab-lished, the questions that now arises are: where can it be found, and why was it not, as with the Qur’ān, recorded contemporaneously? The fact is that the Sunnah was a way of life, meant to be copied in action, not on paper. The Sunnah of the Holy Prophet was naturally to be found in the lives of those thousands of disciples who would avidly

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copy his example, even in the smallest matters. This is why no systematic effort was made to codify these actions of the Holy Prophet during his life and even for some time after his death. The case of the Qur’ān was different. It was a body of arguments, enunciations, precepts and laws of life. Its best place was on paper or the memories of men, and it was preserved accordingly. The Sunnah, on the other hand, was preserved in the lives and habits of the believers. Some of the Holy Prophet’s exhortations were recorded in writing at the time but this was rather infrequent. It may be noted that historicity is the very starting point of the truth of a religion. To investigate its truth, the life and personality of the man to whom it was revealed must necessarily form the basis of the enquiry. The historical tests and documentary evidences about the existence of the Holy Prophet Muḥammad and his everyday life are numerous and in abundance, more so than any other human being. For this unique documentary evidence, we are indebted to the Collectors of Ḥadīth. They have achieved a historical accuracy which is unparalleled among all records of the life story of the Founder of a religion, and beyond which human resources cannot go. These saintly chroniclers have given the names of the links in the chain of narrators of each report. They have retained certain inaccuracies because of their unapproachable sincerity. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhāri, the most careful of these illustrious collections, has been called “the most correct of books after the Book of Allāh.” This is a statement without the least exaggeration in it. In view of the various doubts that have been aroused in the minds of many people by numerous adverse criticisms of Ḥadīth, the present publication has become all the more neces-sary. Instead of speculative criticism that has been going on, it will be more useful to read the Ḥadīth itself and then see how much truth there is in the criticism. Let the world know what this much-discussed literature contains before it can be in a position to rightly evaluate the observations, adverse or favourable, about Ḥadīth.

AFTAB-UD-DIN AHMADAhmadiyya Buildings,Lahore-7, Pakistan January 12, 1956.

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BRIEF LIFE-HISTORY OF MAULANA AFTAB-UD-DIN AHMAD

Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad died on 13 January 1956.Born in West Bengal in 1901, Maulana Aftab-ud-Din Ahmad obtained a degree, with distinction in English from Calcutta in 1923. He followed this up by studying Islam and Arabic at the famous reli-gious seminary of Deoband near Delhi for almost two years. Shortly after this, being attracted towards the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, he became a missionary, author and scholar of the Movement for the rest of his life. During the 1930s he served first as deputy Imam and then as Imam of the world-famous Woking Mosque and Muslim Mission in England. Later in Lahore he became editor of The Islamic Review, the month-ly journal of the Woking Muslim mission. In 1950 he was appointed as editor of The Light, weekly organ of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement published from Lahore, and served in this capacity till his death, while also engaged in translating Sahih Bukhari into English during this time.

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THE QUR’ĀN AND THE ḤADĪTHAs is well known, there are two sources from which all the principles and precepts of Islām are derived: the Holy Qur’ān and the Ḥadīth. The Qur’ān is a collection of revela-tions vouchsafed by God to the Prophet Muḥammad (may peace and the blessings of God be upon him) and it is the Book of God. The Ḥadīth, using the word in its broader sense, is a collection of the Sayings of the Holy Prophet and of reports about his ac-tions and behaviour. Strictly speaking, it is the former, i.e. the Sayings, which is Ḥadīth, while the term for the latter is Sunnah. Of the two sources, the Qur’ān is obviously more important. The Ḥadīth is subordinate to the Qur’ān, and no reported saying or action of the Holy Prophet in the Ḥadīth is to be accepted as authentic and author-itative which is not in conformity with the letter and spirit of the Qur’ān. However, the importance of the Ḥadīth as the secondary source of Islām is emphasized by the Qur’ān itself. It is written: “Certainly Allāh conferred a favour on the believers when

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He raised among them a Messenger from among them-selves, reciting to them His messages and purifying them, and teaching them the Book and the Wisdom, although before that they were surely in manifest error.” (3:164)From this verse of the Holy Qur’ān it is clear that the Holy Prophet Muḥammad had come to this world as G od’s Messenger with a threefold mission: (1) to convey to mankind the messages that were revealed to him by God, to adopt measures to preserve them intact, and to spread them to all the corners of the world; (2) to explain the various doctrines and injunc-tions of the Qur’ān and to apply them to the concrete and particular situations of life; and (3) to set a perfect example for others to follow by practising in their true sense the teachings of the Qur’ān in his own daily life and in his dealings with other people. All prophets, whenever they were raised by God, had come with the same threefold mission. But the Holy Prophet Muḥammad is the last and greatest of the prophets. The Qur’ān revealed to him is the Book of complete and all-embracing Divine guid-ance for all man-kind; and he himself is the perfect exemplar for people in all walks of life and for all times to come. Hence, the importance of both the Qur’ān and the Ḥadīth. The Qur’ān says: “Obey Allāh and obey the Messenger” (24:54), where to obey Allāh obviously means to follow the Holy Qur’ān (the Book of Allāh), and to obey the Messenger means to follow the precepts and examples of the Holy Prophet (i.e., Ḥadīth and Sunnah). The Holy Prophet has been described in the Qur’ān as “an excel-lent exemplar” (33:21) and “a mercy to all the nations” (21:107), and it is proclaimed: “O Prophet, surely We have sent you as a witness and a bearer of good news and a warner, and as an inviter to Allāh by His permission, and as a light-giving sun” (33:45-46).The Qur’ān enjoins upon those who love God and long to win His grace and attain nearness to Him, to follow in the footsteps of the Holy Prophet: “Say: If you love Allāh, follow me. Allāh will love you, and grant you protection from your sins, and Allāh is Forgiving, Merciful.” (3:31)Thus, the importance of the Ḥadīth as a collection of the say-ings of the Holy Prophet and reports of eye-witnesses about his life and actions cannot be denied by anyone. The Holy Qur’ān, as is well recognized, lays down broad principles of life. It was the Holy Prophet who provided the explanations and details and showed how they were to be translated into practice.

The Qur’ān, as is well known, was written down in the lifetime of the Holy Prophet. As soon as any revelation came to him, he would have it written down, and several of his followers would also learn it by heart. Immediately after his passing away, the revela-tions thus recorded and preserved were collected in the form of a book in the order of sequence that the Holy Prophet had himself determined under Divine guidance.

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Why were the Sayings and the Sunnah of the Prophet not reduced to writing in the same manner in his lifetime? The answer to this is that the Holy Prophet was anxious that his own sayings should not get mixed up with the verses of the Qur’ān. It was for this reason that the sayings and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet were not, generally speaking, committed to writing in his lifetime. Nevertheless, it is an undoubted fact that hundreds of his followers who saw him and heard his conversations, discourses and speeches memorized them and conveyed them to others who were not present. Thus the reports of the sayings and actions of the Holy Prophet passed from mouth to mouth, and from one generation to another, and were preserved in the memo-ries of his devoted disciples before they were finally written down. The Arabs were famous for their vast and retentive memories, and whatever had been recorded on their minds was as good as recorded with pen and ink on paper. But with the passage of time, as the early followers of the Holy Prophet began to pass away, the danger was felt that the knowledge of the Ḥadīth and Sunnah would die with them. So the need was felt to write them down and collect them in the form of books. The collectors of Ḥadīth observed certain definite principles and rules in accepting a report about the life and sayings of the Holy Prophet for inclusion in their collections. The first and the most important of these principles was that the Ḥadīth must be in conformity with the letter and spirit of the Qur’ān. Secondly, that it must be in keeping with the high-est moral principles. Thirdly, that it must not be in flagrant opposition to reason and common sense. Fourthly, that it must have come down to the collector through an unbroken chain of narrators from an eye-witness or from the first one who had heard it from the Holy Prophet himself. If the chain of narrators was not complete or if it was broken at any point, then the report was not considered of the highest authenticity. Moreover, the collectors of Ḥadīth made inquiries about and studied the characters of the narrators through whom the report had come to them. If anyone of the narrators was known to have told a lie or was prone to exaggeration or was not otherwise a man of perfect moral integrity, then the report which had come through him was not regarded as reliable. If it was found that a particular report was serving and advancing the worldly ambitions of the narrator or of the faction to which he belonged, then also it was not considered above suspicion. The collectors of Ḥadīth also made sure that the narrators had good memories and had enough intelligence to under-stand what they were reporting. If the report passed all these tests, then alone was it declared to be absolutely authentic. Otherwise the collectors either totally rejected it or if they included it in their works they took good care to point out in what way and how far it fell short of the required test. No report of any historical event or statement of any

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historical personage has ever been so thoroughly scrutinized and tested as the reports about the life and sayings of the Holy Prophet were tested by the collectors of Ḥadīth. We can safely speak of the collections of Ḥadīth as the most authentic and reliable works of history. Six collections of Ḥadīth are regarded as reliable by the vast majority of the Sunni Muslims. They are the collections of Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, Ibn Mājah, Nasā’i and Tirmidhī. Of these the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārīis considered the most care-ful and trustworthy. Firstly, Bukhārī has the unquestioned distinction of being first, all the others modelling their writings on his. Secondly, he is the most critical of all. He did not accept any report unless all its transmitters were reliable and until there was proof that the later transmitter had actually met the first; the mere fact that the two were contemporaries, which is the test adopted by the compiler of Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, did not satisfy him. Thirdly, in his acumen he surpasses all. Fourth-ly, he heads the more important of his chapters with text from the Quran, and thus shows that Hadith is only an explanation of the Quran, and as such a secondary source of the teachings of Islām. Note about Imām Bukhārī Abū ‛Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn Ismā‛īlal-Bukhārī was born in the city of Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) in 810 C.E. (194 A.H.). His father was a leading scholar of Ḥadīth. Completing his early education at the age of ten years, he started memorising sayings of the Holy Prophet. Even before he was sixteen, senior scholars of Ḥadīth were astonished by his ability to remember tens of thousands of reports along with the names of their narrators. At sixteen he accompanied his mother and a brother to the Pilgrimage at Makkah. While the mother and brother returned home, he remained in Makkah for two years to acquire more knowledge of Ḥadīth from the great scholars he met there. He then went to Madīnah to study under the teachers of that city. He wrote two books while in Arabia and then travelled to Iraq where several times he visited Baghdad, the centre of Islamic learning and civilisation at the time. It was at the suggestion of one of his teachers that Bukhārī became convinced that he should compile a book of the most authentic Ḥadīth reports. Over a period of sixteen years he produced his compilation by selecting out of some 600,000 reports those which met his standards. (This large number were not all different reports but included reports repeated with variations in wording or in lines of narrators.) After selecting a report for inclusion, he would say two rak‛ahs of prayer before writing it down in his manuscript .In Bukhara, the ruler became angry with him after Bukhārī refused his request to teach his sons Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhārī privately at the royal palace. The ruler exiled him and Bukhārī went to Nishapur. Here too he had a disagreement with the ruler and he moved to settle in Khartung, near Samarkand. His opponents had made life impossible for him and he prayed to God to call him back as “this earth has

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become narrow for me”. There he died on the night before Eid-ul-Fitr at the age of just over 60 years in the year 870 C.E. (256 A.H.

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blessings of Allah be on him). LOVE also generates peace and happiness in the society. Follow the commandments of ALLAH and His Messenger, the Holy Prophet MUHAMMAD and earn an ever-lasting life here in this world and in the Hereafter. May Allah bless you all.

Ahmad Nawaz, Hayward, California I have just finished reading the February 2013 issue of the HOPE Bulletin dedicated to the memory of the late Br. Akbar Abdullah. I must say that your team has worked very hard to collect facts about the life and contributions made by our late Br. Akbar. The formatting of the Bulletin and photographs have made it very impressive and visual. Br. Akbar deserved such a beautiful dedication. I wish to congratulate you for making the Bulletin more than just a news bulletin. The brief life history of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (sas) by our new sister in the fold of Islam, Christiane Backer, is very impressive and shows how his Perfect Example has inspired her thoughts and behaviour. I am sure her book “From MTV to Mecca” must be worth reading. Thanks for introducing the autobiography of a highly popular figure in the Western media, who, by her own study, has adopted Islam, and is facing challenges with firm faith and conviction.

CONTACT INFORMATION

The HOPE Bulletin E-mail address: thehopebulletin@hotmail.com

ISLAM stands for: I SHALL LOVE ALL MANKIND

Design & Formatting : Erwan Hamdani, Jakarta, Indonesia

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