Sahih Muslim
Sahih Muslim (Arabic: صحيح مسلم, ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, full title Al-Musnadu Al-Sahihu bi Naklil Adli) is one of the Six major collections of the hadith in Sunni Islam, oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. It is the second most authentic hadith collection after Sahih Al-Bukhari, and is highly acclaimed by Sunni Muslims. It was collected by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, also known as Imam Muslim. Sahih translates as authentic or correct.[1]
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[edit] Collection
Imam Muslim (Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj) was born in 202 AH (817/18 CE) in Naysabur, Iran into a Persian family and died in 261 AH (874/75 CE) also in Nishapur. He traveled widely to gather his collection of ahadith (plural of hadith), including to Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Egypt. Out of 300,000 hadith which he evaluated, approximately 4,000 were extracted for inclusion into his collection based on stringent acceptance criteria. Each report in his collection was checked and the veracity of the chain of reporters was painstakingly established. Sunni Muslims consider it the second most authentic hadith collection, after Sahih Bukhari.Sahih Muslim is divided into 43 books,containing a total of 7190 narrations. However, it is important to realize that Imam Muslim never claimed to collect all authentic traditions as his goal was to collect only traditions that all Muslims should agree on about accuracy.
According to Munthiri, there are a total of 2200 hadiths (without repetition) in Sahih Muslim. According to Muhammad Amin, [2] there are 1400 authentic hadiths that are reported in other books, mainly the Six major Hadith collections.
[edit] Views
Sunni Muslims regard this collection as the second most authentic of the Six major Hadith collections,[3] containing only sahih hadith, an honor it shares only with Sahih Bukhari, both being referred to as the Two Sahihs. Shia Muslims dismiss many parts of it as fabrications or untrustworthy
[edit] Distinctive Features
Amin Ahsan Islahi, the noted Islamic scholar, has summarized some unique features of Sahih Muslim [4]:
- Imam Muslim recorded only such narratives as were reported by two reliable successors from two Companions which subsequently travelled through two independent unbroken isnāds consisting of sound narrators. Imām Bukhārī has not followed such a strict criterion.
- Scientific arrangement of themes and chapters. The author, for example, selects a proper place for the narrative and, next to it, puts all its versions. Imām Bukhārī has not followed this method (he scatters different versions of a narrative and the related material in different chapters). Consequently, in the exercise of understanding ahādīth, Sahīh of Imām Muslim offers the best material to the students.
- The Imam informs us whose wordings among the narrators he has used. For example he says: haddathanā fulān wa fulān wallafz lifulān (A and B has narrated this hadīth to us and the wording used here is by A). Similarly he mentions whether, in a particular hadīth, the narrators have differed over the wordings even over a single letter of zero semantic significance. He also informs the readers if narrators have differed over a specific quality, surname, relation or any other fact about a narrator in the chain.
[edit] Commentaries and translations
- Siyanah Sahih Muslim by Ibn al-Salah, of which only the beginning segment remains
- Al Minhaj Be Sharh Sahih Muslim by Yahiya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi
- Fath al-Mulhim
- Takmilat Fath al-Mulhim
- Sahih Muslim (Siddiqui) translated by Islamic scholar Abd-al-Hamid Siddiqui. The text is used in the USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts
- Summarized Sahih Muslim
- Sharh Sahih Muslim by Allama Ghulam Rasool Saeedi
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.islamic-dictionary.com/index.php?word=sahih
- ^ The number of authentic hadiths (Arabic), Muhammad Amin, retrieved May 22, 2006
- ^ Various Issues About Hadiths
- ^ Mabadi Tadabbur-i-Hadith, Amin Ahsan Islahi, 1989
[edit] Further reading
- The Canonization of Al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon by Jonathan Brown, BRILL, 2007
[edit] External links
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