Abu Hurayra's Output

The Man Who Spoke for a Generation

Abd al-Rahman ibn Sakhr al-Dawsi — history remembers him by the affectionate nickname the Prophet gave him: Abu Hurayra, "the father of the kitten," for the small cat he carried. He came to Islam late, embracing it around the year of Khaybar (7 AH), and he walked beside the Prophet Muhammad for only about three years before the Prophet died in 11 AH. Yet from those three years flows the single largest river of prophetic reports in Islam: roughly 5,374 hadiths bear his name. No companion who spent ten, twenty, or thirty years with the Prophet — not Abu Bakr, not Umar, not Ali — transmitted anything close.

This is one of the oldest conversations in the science of hadith. It was raised in Abu Hurayra's own lifetime, to his own face, and he answered it. It was raised by a caliph. In places it was raised by the Mother of the Believers herself. And it has been answered, across twelve centuries, by the scholars who built the defense of his memory and his integrity. This article lays both columns side by side.