Compilation of Sahih Muslim

# Sahih Muslim: The Second of the Two Sahihs

The Scholar from Nishapur

Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj al-Qushayri al-Naysaburi (may Allah have mercy on him) was born in Nishapur (Naysabur), in the province of Khurasan (modern Iran), in 204 AH / 819 CE. Nishapur was one of the great cities of the eastern Islamic world — a major center of commerce, scholarship, and Sufi spirituality that would produce extraordinary scholars for centuries. The Qushayri tribe from which Muslim traced his lineage was an Arab family that had settled in Khurasan in the early Islamic conquests; the name al-Naysaburi simply identifies his home city.

Muslim began studying hadith at a young age, as was the custom for scholars of his generation who took seriously the hadith sciences. He traveled early, as the discipline demanded: authentic chains of transmission could only be acquired by going personally to the scholars who held them, sitting in their teaching circles, and receiving the traditions directly from their lips. The principle of itala al-asfar — the extension of journeys in pursuit of knowledge — was understood not merely as a scholarly convention but as a religious obligation when the knowledge being sought was the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

His travels took him to Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria, and Egypt — covering the major hadith centers of the Islamic world. He studied under the great scholars of his generation: Ahmad ibn Hanbal in Baghdad, Yahya ibn Yahya al-Naysaburi, al-Qanabi, Sa'id ibn Mansur, Abu Bakr ibn Abi Shaybah, and dozens of others. His most important intellectual relationship was with Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (may Allah have mercy on him), the author of Sahih al-Bukhari, who was eleven years his senior. Muslim's relationship with al-Bukhari shaped both his methodology and the specific decisions he made in constructing his own Sahih.

The Encounter with al-Bukhari: A Pivotal Relationship

The biographical literature preserves a famous story about the relationship between Muslim and al-Bukhari that illuminates the intellectual milieu in which the Sahih Muslim was composed. Muslim is said to have asked al-Bukhari about a narrator — a man whose reliability Muslim had assumed and whom he had included in chains of transmission. Al-Bukhari pointed out a subtle defect: two narrators in the chain, while contemporaries, had not in fact met, making the transmission unreliable.

Muslim's response, according to the tradition preserved in the biographical dictionaries, was to weep — not from wounded pride but from gratitude at having his error corrected. He reportedly kissed al-Bukhari on the forehead and said: "Allow me to kiss the feet of the master of masters, the chief of hadith scholars, the physician of hadith in their defects." This degree of deference, coming from a scholar of Muslim's own formidable abilities, speaks to al-Bukhari's extraordinary standing in the science of hadith criticism ('ilal al-hadith).

The encounter also reveals that the compilation of both Sahihayn was not parallel independent projects but overlapping scholarly activities, with the two scholars in dialogue and mutual awareness. Muslim knew al-Bukhari's work, valued his criticism, and deliberately differentiated his own compilation in ways that reflected his different — though closely related — methodological priorities.

Methodology: Differences from al-Bukhari

Both Sahihayn require the same fundamental criteria: unbroken chains (ittisal), reliable narrators (thiqah), and accurate transmission (dabt). The differences between al-Bukhari and Muslim's approaches are technical but significant.

Al-Bukhari required that contemporaneous narrators in a chain have actually met (shart al-liqa'). Muslim's criterion was somewhat more lenient on this point: he accepted chains where it was plausible that the narrators had met, based on their contemporaneity and geographical proximity, even without direct evidence of an actual meeting. This is why scholars say al-Bukhari's isnad criteria are slightly stricter, and why Sahih al-Bukhari is conventionally ranked slightly above Sahih Muslim in the consensus of hadith scholarship — though both are accepted as definitively authentic.

The organizational difference between the two works is equally significant. Al-Bukhari arranged his Sahih in extensive chapter headings (tarajim al-abwab) that encode his juristic reasoning — his fiqh is embedded in the structure of the book. Muslim, by contrast, deliberately chose not to add chapter headings (or added them only minimally in some manuscripts — scholars debate how much of the existing arrangement is Muslim's own). His focus was on the transmission itself, and he organized his Sahih according to topics but without the elaborate juristic apparatus.

Muslim also adopted a distinctive compositional practice: he grouped together all variant chains for the same hadith in the same place, presenting them consecutively. Al-Bukhari often placed different chains for the same hadith in different chapters to illuminate different juristic points. Muslim's approach makes Sahih Muslim more convenient for studying the variants (turuq) of a single hadith, while al-Bukhari's approach makes his work a richer resource for legal analysis.

The total number of hadiths in Sahih Muslim is approximately 7,500 with repetitions and approximately 3,033 unique traditions without repetition — somewhat more than al-Bukhari's unique count, reflecting the slightly less stringent isnad criteria.

The Muqaddima: First Systematic Work of Hadith Methodology

Sahih Muslim opens with a Muqaddima (Introduction) that is, in the judgment of classical scholars, the first systematic methodological treatise on the hadith sciences. Before Muslim's Muqaddima, the principles of hadith criticism had been practiced and partially articulated in scattered works, but no scholar had assembled them into a coherent methodological statement that served as the formal introduction to a collection.

Muslim's Muqaddima addresses several foundational questions. Why is isnad — the chain of transmission — essential? He begins with a hadith attributed to Ibn Sirin: "This knowledge (of hadith) is the deen — so consider from whom you take your deen." The isnad is not a pedantic scholarly convention but the mechanism by which the integrity of the prophetic tradition is preserved against fabrication and error. Without rigorous chain-authentication, anyone could claim the Prophet ﷺ said anything, with no way to distinguish authentic from fabricated.

Muslim then surveys the categories of narrators and the reasons why some hadiths must be rejected: narrators who are known liars, those whose chains are disconnected, those whose reports conflict without explanation with more reliable narrators. He explicitly states his principle that hadiths with problematic chains — even if not definitively false — must not be included in a collection claiming sahih status. The burden of proof lies with the inclusion, not the exclusion.

The Muqaddima also engages with scholars who collected weak hadiths without clearly distinguishing them from authentic ones, arguing that this practice is harmful to the community because ordinary Muslims cannot distinguish the reliable from the unreliable and may act on fabricated prophetic guidance. Muslim's insistence on the clear categorical distinction between sahih and other categories was a stance with practical ethical implications: it was a defense of the Muslim community against being misled about what the Prophet ﷺ actually said.

Reception and Scholarly Commentary

The canonical consensus on Sahih Muslim's status was established rapidly after its compilation. Within the generation after Muslim's death (261 AH / 875 CE), his Sahih was recognized alongside al-Bukhari's as constituting a category apart from all other hadith collections. The two together came to be called al-Sahihayn (The Two Sahihs), and citations from either were given a weight in legal argument that citations from other collections — however distinguished — simply could not match.

Al-Nawawi (631-676 AH / 1233-1277 CE), the great Syrian Shafi'i scholar, wrote what became the standard commentary on Sahih Muslim: Sharh al-Nawawi 'ala Sahih Muslim, in eighteen volumes. This commentary remains the first reference for any detailed study of the hadiths in Muslim's collection. Al-Nawawi explains the chains, identifies narrators, presents the legal opinions derived from each hadith across the madhabs, resolves apparent contradictions between hadiths, and provides lexical explanations for unusual terminology. His commentary transformed Sahih Muslim from a technical hadith collection into a comprehensive encyclopedia of Islamic practice accessible to any learned reader.

The commentary tradition around Sahih Muslim is extensive: al-Maziri (453-536 AH), al-Qadi 'Iyad (476-544 AH), and al-Nawawi constitute the three major classical commentators, and later scholars including al-Suyuti, Ibn al-Mulaqqin, and others contributed further analyses.

Death and Legacy

Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj died in Nishapur on Sunday, 25 Rajab, 261 AH / 875 CE, at the age of fifty-seven. The account in the biographical dictionaries of his death contains a charming detail: he reportedly died as a result of eating too many dates at a scholarly gathering, having been so absorbed in resolving a difficult question about a hadith that he could not stop himself from reaching for more as his concentration deepened. Whether this account is historically accurate or has become embellished in transmission, it captures something of the portrait the tradition paints of Muslim: utterly consumed by his scholarly work, careless of physical concerns when intellectual questions demanded his attention.

He was buried in Nasraabad, a suburb of Nishapur, and his grave remained a visited site in subsequent centuries.

His legacy is second to none in the hadith sciences after al-Bukhari. Together, the two Sahihayn represent the gold standard of Islamic hadith authentication — the reference point against which all claims about the authenticity of prophetic traditions are measured. A hadith found in both collections (muttafaq 'alayhi — agreed upon by both) carries the highest possible degree of authentication. A hadith in one but not the other is still treated as definitively authentic. The Sahihayn occupy a unique category in Islamic scholarship: not infallible in the way the Quran is infallible (since human compilation is involved), but treated as definitively reliable for practical purposes of Islamic law and practice.

Muslim's Muqaddima established the theoretical framework for hadith methodology that all subsequent scholars have worked within. His careful organization of hadiths by their variant chains continues to be the standard resource for scholars studying the transmission history of any particular hadith. Sahih Muslim endures as one of the foundational texts of Islamic civilization.

Sources:

• Al-Nawawi, Yahya ibn Sharaf. Sharh al-Nawawi 'ala Sahih Muslim. 18 vols. Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-Arabi, 1972.
• Ibn Khallikan, Ahmad. Wafayat al-A'yan. Edited by Ihsan Abbas. Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1977. Vol. 5.
• Al-Dhahabi, Shams al-Din. Siyar A'lam al-Nubala. Beirut: Mu'assasat al-Risalah, 1981-1988. Vol. 12.
• Ibn Salah al-Shahrazuri. Muqaddimat Ibn Salah fi 'Ulum al-Hadith. Edited by Nur al-Din 'Itr. Damascus: Dar al-Fikr, 1986.
• Al-Maziri, Muhammad ibn Ali. al-Mu'allim bi Fawa'id Muslim. Edited by Muhammad al-Shadhili al-Nayfar. Tunis: al-Dar al-Tunisiyyah, 1988.
• Al-Qadi 'Iyad ibn Musa. Ikmal al-Mu'allim fi Sharh Muslim. Edited by Yahya Ismail. Cairo: Dar al-Wafa, 1998.
• Brown, Jonathan. The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon. Leiden: Brill, 2007.