Who was Imam al-Bukhari, and how did he compile Sahih al-Bukhari?

Imam Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810-870 CE) was a Persian-born scholar widely regarded as the most rigorous hadith critic in Islamic history. Orphaned young and drawn to hadith study from childhood, he reportedly memorized hundreds of thousands of narrations and travelled across the Muslim world, from Central Asia to Iraq, Egypt, and the Hijaz, to hear hadith directly from their transmitters and interrogate them about their teachers and memory. To compile his Sahih al-Bukhari, tradition holds he examined roughly 600,000 reported hadith and selected only about 7,275 (with repetitions; far fewer without) that met his exceptionally strict conditions for authenticity, including that consecutive narrators in a chain must be proven to have actually met one another. He famously performed ritual prayer before recording each hadith he accepted. The result, organized by legal and doctrinal topic and opening with the hadith on sincerity of intention, is regarded by the overwhelming majority of Sunni scholars as the most authentic book after the Quran, and it remains a foundational text in Islamic seminaries worldwide.

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