Bukhārī, Muḥammad ibn Ismāʻīl, 810-870

Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl ibn Ibrāhīm al-Juʿfī al-Bukhārī (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد بن إسماعيل بن إبرهيم الجعفي البخاري; 21 July 810 C.E – 1 September 870; AH 194–256), commonly known as al-Bukhārī, was a 9th-century Muslim muhaddith and one of the foremost authorities on hadith, widely regarded as the most important hadith scholar in the history of Sunni Islam. Born in Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, he began studying hadith at the age of ten and became noted for his exceptional memory. He travelled extensively throughout the Abbasid Caliphate in search of traditions and studied under numerous influential contemporary scholars. He is said to have interviewed about a thousand shaykhs and examined more than 200,000 hadiths, rejecting many after careful scrutiny at a time when numerous spurious traditions were in circulation. Al-Bukhārī memorized thousands of hadith narrations and compiled his principal collection, the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, in 846 C.E. The work selected 7563 narrations including repetitions, from over 600,000 narrations, but fewer than 3,000 when repeated material is excluded; its contents are arranged principally by subject for ease of reference in ninety-seven "books", subdivided into 3,450 chapters. He spent the remainder of his life teaching the traditions he had collected. Near the end of his life he was exiled from Nishapur and subsequently moved to Khartank, near Samarkand. The Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī became the most highly revered hadith collection in Sunni Islam. Together with the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī's student Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875; AH 261), it is known collectively as the Ṣaḥīḥayn (Arabic: صحيحين, romanized: Saḥiḥayn). The two collections are regarded by Sunnis as the principal definitive compilations of reliable hadith and, after the Qurʾān, as authoritative sources for principles of legislation and religious practice. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī is also one of the Kutub al-Sittah, the six most highly regarded Sunni hadith collections. Among al-Bukhārī's other extant works are al-Tarikh al-Kabir and al-Adab al-Mufrad.