Holy Qur’ān, and as such a secondary source of the teaching of Islām.
European critics are generally under the impression that when the authors of the Muṣannafāt set to work, there was such a vast mass of spurious ḥadīth that the collectors did not credit more than one or two per cent of the prevailing mass as being genuine, and that these were taken to be genuine on the slender authority of the reliability of transmitters without any regard to the subject-matter. 30 The impression that the vast mass of reports taught at different centres in the third century was fabricated is based on a misconception. It is true that Bukhārī took cognizance of 600,000 reports and knew some 200,000 of these by heart. It is also a fact that his book contains no more than 9,000 ḥadīth. But it is not true that he found the other 591,000 reports to be false or fabricated. It must be clearly understood that those who were engaged in the dissemination and study of Ḥadīth looked upon every report as a different ḥadīth when even a single transmitter was changed. Let us, for instance, take a ḥadīth for which the original authority is Abū Hurairah. Now Abū Hurairah had about 800 disciples and the same ḥadīth may have been reported by, say, ten of his disciples with or without any variation. Each of these reports would, according to the collectors, form a separate ḥadīth. Again, suppose each of the transmitters of Abū Hurairah’s ḥadīth had two reporters, the same ḥadīth would then be counted as twenty different reports. The number would thus go on increasing as the number of reporters increased. At the time when Bukhārī applied himself to Ḥadīth in the first decade of the third century of Hijrah, there were schools of Ḥadīth at different centres, and hundreds of students learned and transmitted reports to others. In a chain of ordinarily four or five transmitters, consider the number of reports that would arise from the same Ḥadīth on account of the variation of transmitters, and it is easy to understand that 600,000 did not mean so many reports relating to various subjects, but so many reports coming through different transmitters, many of them referring to the same incident or conveying the same subject-matter with or without variation of words. That this was the method of
30 Writing of Bukhārī, Guillaume says: “Tradition reports that this remarkable man took cognizance of 600,000 aḥadīth, and himself memorized more than 200,000. Of these he has preserved to us 7,397, or according to other authorities, 7,295. If one adds to these the fragmentary traditions embodied in the tarjamah, the total is 9,082 … When one reflects from these figures furnished by a Muslim historian that hardly more than one per cent of the Ḥadīth said to be openly circulating with the authority of the Holy Prophet behind them were accounted genuine by the pious Bukhārī, one’s confidence in the authenticity of the residue is sorely tried. Where such an enormous preponderance of material is judged false, nothing but the successful application of modern canons of evidence can restore faith in the credibility of the remainder” (Tr. Is., Pp. 28, 29). And Muir writes: “It is proved by the testimony of the Collectors themselves, that thousands and tens of thousands of traditions were current in their times which possessed not even the shadow of authority … Bokhary … came to the conclusion, after many years’ sifting, that out of 600,000 traditions ascertained by him to be then current, only 4,000 were authentic” (Life of Mahomet, intr., p. xxxvii).