The Twelve Caliphs — Bukhari 7222 and Muslim 1821: "All of Them From Quraysh"

A Sentence Half-Heard in a Crowd

Picture the scene as the narrator himself gives it. A gathering around the Prophet Muhammad; among the listeners, a young man named Jabir ibn Samura, standing with his father. The Prophet is speaking about what will come after him — about rulers, and about a number: twelve. Then he says something more. But the crowd stirs, voices rise, and Jabir loses the words. He turns to his father: what did he say? His father supplies the missing clause: "All of them from Quraysh."

That half-heard sentence is preserved in the two most authoritative collections of Sunni Islam — Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — and every major branch of the tradition accepts that the Prophet spoke of twelve. What no one has agreed on, in fourteen centuries, is who the twelve are. Sunni commentators drew up list after list, and some of the greatest among them recorded, in their own hand, that they could not make the count work. Shia Islam answered with one list, closed and complete: the Twelve Imams. Between the two columns stands a single short hadith.