Imam Al-Bukhari: Guardian of the Prophet's Word
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In the city of Bukhara — now in Uzbekistan — a child named Muhammad bin Ismail was born in 194 Hijriah. His father, a cleric, died when he was small; His childhood was tested by blindness, and according to a famous story his sight returned after his mother's unceasing prayers. The child would later be known to the world by one name: Imam Al-Bukhari. His talent was astonishing from an early age: he began memorizing hadiths before the age of ten, and by sixteen had memorized the books of the great scholars. His powers of memorization were legendary — in a famous test in Baghdad, the clerics deliberately mixed up the sanad and matan of a hundred hadiths to test him; it returns them all to their correct order one by one without any defects. He wandered for decades — Khurasan, Hijaz, Syria, Egypt, Iraq — meeting more than a thousand teachers and collecting hundreds of thousands of histories. From that sea he filters with the strictest conditions ever applied: the narrator must be fair, strong in his memorization, and truly proven to have met his teacher. Sixteen years he compiled Al-Jami' Ash-Sahih - and according to history, he did not write a single hadith in it except after bathing and praying two rak'ahs asking for guidance. The result: Sahih Al-Bukhari, a book that people agree is the most authentic book after the Koran. His scientific rigor was wrapped in personal piety. He was very careful about wealth, generous to students of knowledge, and stayed away from the ruling council. Precisely because he refused to give special teachings at the palace - he said knowledge was visited, not visited - he was expelled from his hometown at the end of his life. He died on the night of Eid al-Fitr in 256 Hijriah in Khartank, near Samarkand. Muslims are indebted to him in a way that is difficult to describe: millions of Muslim every day practice the sunnah that came to them through his filter. From Al-Bukhari we learn that honesty and thoroughness are worship; that one work worked on with piety for sixteen years may be more valuable than a thousand works hastily; and that a mother's prayer is able to open the path of history.