Criticized Narrators in the Sahihain: The Rijal Critics and Ibn Hajar's Defense in Hady al-Sari

The Man They Could Not Trick

Baghdad, third century of the hijra. The city''s hadith masters, hearing that the young Muhammad ibn Isma''il al-Bukhari had arrived, prepared a public examination. Ten scholars each took ten hadiths, deliberately swapped their texts and chains, and recited the hundred scrambled reports before him in open assembly. To each one Bukhari answered only: "I do not know it." The uninitiated in the crowd concluded that he had failed. Then he turned to the first questioner and repeated every altered report exactly as it had been recited — and restored each text to its correct chain, all hundred of them. Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi records the account in Tarikh Baghdad, and Ibn Hajar retells it approvingly in the introduction to his commentary. History''s verdict matched the assembly''s: Bukhari''s al-Jami'' al-Sahih, with Muslim''s Sahih beside it, would occupy the highest shelf in Sunni Islam.

Nearly six centuries later, in Mamluk Cairo, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani wrote that introduction — Hady al-Sari, the gateway to Fath al-Bari — and assigned its ninth chapter a remarkable task: an alphabetical register of narrators who appear inside Sahih al-Bukhari and yet had been disparaged by the tradition''s own narrator-critics. The register runs to roughly three hundred names. A parallel file exists for Sahih Muslim, where objections were voiced in Muslim''s own lifetime. So the question is on the table: how do the two most authentic books after the Quran contain narrators whom the science of al-jarh wa-l-ta''dil — impugning and accrediting — itself called weak?