Kitab al-Hajj: The Pilgrimage

The Kitab al-Hajj in Sahih Muslim is one of the most detailed and practically indispensable sections of the collection. It draws primarily on the eyewitness accounts of Companions who performed the Farewell Pilgrimage with the Prophet in 10 AH, and the result is an extraordinarily complete record of how the Prophet performed every rite of Hajj from beginning to end.

The section opens with hadiths establishing the obligation of Hajj for those who are able and the virtue of performing it. The Prophet said: 'Whoever performs Hajj for the sake of Allah and does not engage in sexual relations, commit sins, or argue will return as sinless as the day his mother gave birth to him.' This hadith, along with others on the acceptance of Hajj and its spiritual rewards, provided the motivational foundation for the juridical detail that follows.

The central narrative source for Muslim's Hajj section is the long hadith of Jabir ibn Abdallah, one of the most detailed single hadiths in the entire literature, in which Jabir describes the Prophet's entire Farewell Pilgrimage day by day, rite by rite. Jabir describes the Prophet entering ihram at Dhul Hulayfah, the talbiyah he recited, his arrival in Mecca and circumambulation of the Kaaba, the running between Safa and Marwa, the journey to Mina on the eighth of Dhul Hijjah, the standing at Arafah, the descent to Muzdalifah, the stoning of the Jamarat, the sacrifice, the shaving of the head, the final tawaf, and the sermon of the Farewell Pilgrimage in which the Prophet delivered his last major address to the assembled Muslim community.

This hadith of Jabir became the backbone of the juristic treatment of Hajj in every madhab. Because Jabir was with the Prophet throughout and describes the sequence of actions in precise detail, the hadith resolved many otherwise disputed questions about the order of Hajj rites. Muslim's decision to include it in full, with variant chains, made his collection the primary hadith reference for Hajj law.

The section also covers the different types of ihram — tamattu (combining Umrah and Hajj with a break in between), ifrad (Hajj alone), and qiran (Hajj and Umrah combined without a break) — and records the Prophet's own ihram and the discussions among Companions about which form is most virtuous. The scholarly disagreement about which form the Prophet actually performed, preserved honestly in these narrations, became one of the most studied questions in Hajj jurisprudence.

Muslim also records the hadiths on Umrah, the lesser pilgrimage, including its rites and their differences from Hajj, and the hadiths on the virtue of Mecca and Medina themselves — the prohibition of hunting in the sacred precincts, the boundaries of the Haram, and the special status of the two holy cities.

For the millions of Muslims who perform Hajj each year, the hadiths in this section form the practical foundation of what they do and why. Every Hajj guide written by Islamic scholars ultimately traces its rulings back to these narrations, making Kitab al-Hajj one of the most continuously relevant sections of any classical hadith collection.