alAdab alMufrad 1 - Intro to Imam Bukharis Life

Bismillahir-Rahmaanir-Raheem

About Imam Bukhari

Born on a Jumu’ah. 194 – 256AH born in modern day Uzbekistan. He was from a scholarly family. He transmitted what he could from the barakah of the third generation and gave us something to hold onto form their lives. Good to analyse his life to see how we can improve missing in our lives.

• He wasn’t even ten years old when he started to learn Quran and Hadith.
  He had the ability to do ilm al rijaal – knew lives of narrators, companions, tabi’een, atba tabi’een etc.
• At 10 years old through his memory was able to correct his teachers in narration.
• He travelled for next 30 years to study Hadith and produced the most authentic book after the Quran. Allah gave him such blessings to produce such a masterpiece.

Paraphrased narration: Imam Bukhari used to go with us to the scholars of Basra and all of us used to write the Hadith down except Imam Bukhari. Eventually we condemned him for not doing so. He told us to bring our notes and he was able to read all the Ahadith off by heart one by one until he narrated 15.000 Hadith off by heart from those notes.

• He memorised 300,000 Hadith. He’d know the chains of narration of these Ahadith as well as being able to categorise the Ahadith.
• He achieved such a high standard, so much so that near to no one disputes the authenticity of Saheeh Bukhari..

Memory was the major asset the scholars had. We are so poor at memorising and being able to retain information. Reasons for this are due to the distractions of our society. We need to make our hearts and minds free from them but the environment and there can’t be any interference.

• He wrote many books: Jaami’ Saheeh, books on aqeedah, fiqh and aladab almufrad.
• The generally accepted reason as to why he called it alAdab alMufrad is in order to distinguish it from Kitaab alAdab which is the 78th book of the Jaami’ Saheeh.
• No one has given this book a commentary until recently an Indian scholar gave a brief commentary.
• The root word Adaba is to invite a guest or collect people together in one place thus Adab means to bring all things good, of a high standard together.
• The Mufrad version is larger in size. Contains more Ahadith. The authenticity varies from the same level as Jaami’ Saheeh, to less even some weak narrations. It also contains sayings from the Sahabah and the Tabi’een.
• The majority of scholars deem it permissible to use weak hadith in issues of virtuous and good actions of the community, however there are three conditions the Hadith must fulfil:

1. The Hadith isn’t very weak and is definitely not fabricated. So if there’s a liar in the chain he must not have been the only one who narrated that particular Hadith.
2. The Hadith must come under a general principle which is established in other narrations.
3. One must never narrate it as if it was definitely said by the Prophet. This is to protect yourself from attributing something to him which he did not say.