Bukhārī’s counting of reports is clear from his book, the Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhārī, which, with the change of even one transmitter in a chain of, say, four or five, considers the report to be distinct.31 What is called repetition in Bukhārī is due to this circumstance.
European criticism has often mixed up Ḥadīth with the reports met with in the biographies of the Holy Prophet and in the commentaries on the Holy Qur’ān. No Muslim scholar has ever attached the same value to the biographical reports as to ḥadīth narrated in the above-mentioned collections. On the other hand, all Muslim critics recognize that the biographers never made much effort to sift truth from error. Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal sums up the Muslim point of view as regards the trustworthiness of the biographical reports when he declares that the biographies “are not based on any principle,”32 and Ḥāfiz Zain al-Dīn ‘Irāqī says that “they contain what is true and what is false.” In fact, much of the adverse European criticism of Ḥadīth would have been more suitably levelled at the biographical reports; and the same is true of the reports met with in the commentaries, which are still more unreliable. Many careless commentators confounded Ḥadīth with Jewish and Christian stories, and made free use of the latter as if they were so many reports. Speaking of the commentaries, Ibn Khaldūn says: “Their books and their reports contain what is bad and what is good and what may be accepted and what should be rejected, and the reason is that the Arabs were an ignorant race without literature and without knowledge, and desert life and ignorance were their chief characteristics, and whenever they desired, as mortals do desire, to obtain knowledge of the cause of existence and the origin of creation and the mysteries of the universe, they turned for information to the followers of the Book, the Jews and such of the Christians as practised their faith. But these people of the Book were like themselves, and their knowledge of these things went no further than the knowledge of the ignorant masses … So when these people embraced Islām, they retained their stories which had no connection with the commandments of the Islamic law, such as the stories of the origin
31 “On the other hand, the same Ḥadīth is often repeated more than once under different chapters (abwāb), so that if repetitions are disregarded the number of distinct ḥadīth is reduced to 2,762” (Tr. Is., p. 28).
32 Mau., p. 58.