10 Million Hadith of Bukhari

Most modern sources claim that Bukhari memorized and evaluated some 600,000 hadith, of which he selected only the ones he designated authentic in his Sahih compilation. Yet, according to a Hadith attributed to Bukhari himself, this number was much larger.

In the book “An Introduction to Sahih Bukhari, Authors Biography, Recensions, and Manuscripts,” by Mustafa Al-Azami it cites a quote from Tarikh Bukhara (History of Bukhara), where ibn Ahmad ibn Ahmad Ghunjar said:

“I heard Abu ‘Amr Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Muqri’: I heard Mahib ibn Sulaym: I heard Ja’far ibn Muhammad ibn al-Qattan, the Imam of Karminyah: I heard Muhammad ibn Isma’il [Bukhari] say, “I wrote from over a thousand teachers, and from each teacher over ten thousand hadiths. I remember the chain for every hadith that I know.”

If Bukhari studied under a thousand teachers, and from each over ten thousand hadith would mean that Bukhari wrote and memorized over 10 million Hadith.

If we are to take Bukhari’s quote seriously, we can calculate how long such an accomplishment would take in the most optimistic scenario. If we generously assume that Bukhari could write one Hadith and memorize its isnad in a minute.

This would imply that if Bukhari did nothing other than write and memorize Hadith, meaning that he did not eat, sleep, or do anything else, such a feat would take over 19 years to achieve. The absurdity of such a claim is obvious; note the reason that later generations reduced this number to 600,000 to make it seem more believable.

Some argue that many of these Hadith would have been repeats. Yet this does not lessen the absurdity of the claim, because for Bukhari to recognize a Hadith as one he already knew, he would still have to hear the entire chain (isnād) and content (matn) in case any variation existed. Only after listening in full could he determine whether it was a duplicate. In other words, he would still have to go through all ten million Hadith.

Using a more realistic estimate, let’s assume each Hadith took an average of three minutes for one of his teachers to recite. Going through 10,000 Hadith would therefore take 30,000 minutes, or 500 hours per teacher. If Bukhari learned from 1,000 teachers, that would amount to 500,000 hours in total.

To put this in perspective: 500,000 hours equals roughly 57 years of nonstop listening, assuming Bukhari did nothing else and studied 24 hours a day, every single day of the year. If we reduce that to a still-unrealistic 10 hours per day, it would take him around 137 years to complete this task.

On the same page, it also states that,

“During my stay in Nishapur, I would receive letters from my relatives in Bukhara conveying their greetings. I would intend to respond to their greetings, but their names would escape me, so I never replied – however, rarely did I forget knowledge.

So the same person who claimed to write and memorize the isnad of over 10 million Hadith was incapable of remembering the names of his own family members 😦

1/ In "An Introduction to Sahih al-Bukhari" it states that Bukhari said:

"I wrote from over a thousand teachers, and from each teacher over ten thousand hadiths. I remember the chain for every Hadith I know."

This comes out to +10 million Hadith that he apparently wrote down pic.twitter.com/uLr9RYrPWf

— ℚ𝕦𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕋𝕒𝕝𝕜 (@talkquran) September 3, 2023