معايير تنقيح نصوص الحديث النبوي في القرن الثالث الهجري: دراسة نقدية في سياق الصحيح البخاري

Criteria for Revising/purification the Texts of the Prophet’s Hadith in the Third Century: A Critical Study in the Context of Sahih Al-Bukhari

Abstract

To preserve the hadiths of the Prophet, the Companions did not merely memorize them, but a lot of the companions, such as Abdullah bin Amr bin Al-Aas, Ali bin Abi Talib, and Jabir bin Abdullah and Samura ibn Jundab, and Saad bin Ubadah, and their hadith manuscripts are presented and recorded in books. After the Companions, this process was continued by tābi‘ūn and it was developed extensively orally and in writing, and composed works and written collections of the hadith of the Prophet. Knowing that all this effort was not sponsored by the state and the scholars continued to perform these services on their own level. For the first time, official sponsorship became available during the era of Omar bin Abdul Aziz, when he issued an official order to collect hadiths for fear of losing knowledge. Historical facts indicate that the writing and codification of hadith occurred at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century, and this process continued until the end of the second century AH.

           In this first period of editing and transcribing the hadith, two types of compilation and classification emerged:

           The first type is the one in which the authentic chain of transmission is not adhered to, but the hadith that reached the narrator is recorded. The second type is the one in which the obligation of authenticity is adhered to, but there was no obligation to record the Marfu hadith. In this era, since the Mursal hadith was always an argument for the Jurists, and there was no need to separate the Mursal hadith from the Marfu Hadith. Later, when Imam al-Shafi’i denied the authenticity of the Mursal hadith, this idea gained strength among the other Muhaddithin as well, and as a result they felt the need to categorize such books that distinguish between the Marfu hadith and the Mursal Hadith.

In this way, the development stage of hadith began at the beginning of the third century AH, when the Marfu hadiths were separated from other hadiths such as the Mursal and the Maqtu`. But in the view of the Muhaddithin, there was still a defect in mixing all the correct and invalid hadiths in these books, and among the clear, examples of this is the Musnad of Imam Ahmed, so the nation’s need for books that collect only the correct hadiths and adhere to the correctness fully in the production of the Marfu hadiths and Aasar is collected in books for martyrdom only. This is the golden age in which hadith scholars in every country in the Islamic world searched for hadiths. Not only did they collect the scattered hadiths, but they wrote down collections containing only authentic hadiths, and they wrote books on clarifying the reasons for the hadiths and writing the history of the hadith narrators.

 In order to purify and select hadiths, they set criteria for criticizing hadiths. Among the most prominent of these books was the Sahih al-Bukhari of Imam Muhammad bin Ismail al-Bukhari.

In this article a critical study will be presented in the correct context of Al-Bukhari while discussing this evolutionary stage of text purification and collection.