Episode 6 – Muhammad, the Hadith and Iman al Bukhari

Islamic Golden Age (2017)

By Eamon Gearon

Film Review

The Hadith are a collection of Muhammad’s sayings and play a vital role, alongside the Koran, in defining the Muslim religion. Iman al-Bukhari’s main role in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom was to authenticate the source of approximately 600,000 oral directives attributed to the Prophet. In the end, the former verified 7,500 hadith, which he compiled in The Six Books. Each hadith includes at least two sources (people who heard the words directly from Muhammad or someone in his inner circle). By the early 9th century there were already thousands of sayings falsely attributed to Muhammad.

Al-Bukhari was born in in 809 or 810 BC in Bukhara Uzbekistan and began studying hadith at age 10. After his first Haj at age 15, he remained in Mecca to study Hadith. He then spent 16 years traveling throughout the Arabian peninsula interviewing 1,080 Muslim scholars.

The hadith contain significant practical guidance for many aspects of Muslim life, eg how and when to pray, how to have a successful marriage, rules for holy war and “greater jihad” (the internal struggle against desires and impulses), the protocol for freeing slaves and recovering lost property, good manners and controlling one’s temper.

Sunni and Shia Muslims follow different haddith owing to disagreement over the reliability of specific narratives.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/5756987/5757001