Muhammad al-Bukhari

Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari was a scholar of hadith — the reports of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad — born, by traditional dating, in 194 AH / 810 CE in Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. Tradition holds that his father, himself a hadith transmitter, died while al-Bukhari was an infant, leaving him to be raised by his mother. He is said to have begun memorizing hadith as a child.

Sources report that around the age of sixteen he set out on the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca with his mother and brother, then spent decades travelling through the chief centres of learning — the Hijaz, Iraq (Basra, Kufa, Baghdad), Egypt, Syria, and Khurasan — collecting and testing reports and studying with leading scholars of his day.

His enduring work is the collection known as al-Jami al-Sahih (the "sound" compendium), in which he applied strict tests of authenticity. Sunni Muslims came to rank it as the most reliable hadith collection after the Qur'an, though this standing is a judgement of later Sunni tradition, not a claim al-Bukhari made for himself, and is not shared in the same form by Shia traditions, which rely on their own hadith corpora. Importantly, hadith are reports about the Prophet; the Qur'an is, in Islamic belief, the word of God conveyed through him.

Late in life al-Bukhari was caught in a theological dispute at Nishapur over whether the human act of uttering the Qur'an is "created." Reportedly forced to leave, he returned toward Bukhara, then was expelled after refusing a governor's demand for private lessons. He died in 256 AH / 870 CE; tradition places his death on the night of Eid al-Fitr, at the close of Ramadan, at Khartank, a village near Samarkand. The exact day and its conversion to the Common Era are reported variously in the sources.