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Sayings (Hadiths) of Prophet Muhammad
Method of counting different reports
European critics of Hadith are generally under the impression that when the authors of the Musannafat set to work, there was a vast mass of spurious hadith, that the collectors did not credit more than one or two per cent, of the prevailing mass as being genuine, and that these were taken to be genuine on the slender authority of the reliability of transmitters without any regard to the subject-matter of the hadith.
The impression that the vast mass of reports taught at the different centres in the third century was fabricated is based on a misconception. It is true that it is related of Bukhari that he took cognizance of 600,000 reports and knew some 200,000 of these by heart. It is also true that his book contains no more than 9,000 hadith. But it is not true that he found the other 591,000 reports to be false or fabricated.(9) It must be clearly understood that those who were engaged in the dissemination and study of hadith looked upon every report as a different hadith when even a single transmitter of the hadith was changed.
Let us, for instance, take a hadith for which the original authority is Abu Huraira. Now Abü Huraira had 800 disciples in Hadith and the same hadith may have been reported by ten of his disciples with or without any variation. Each of these reports would, according to the collectors of hadith form a separate hadith.
Again, suppose each of the transmitters of Abu Huraira’s hadith had two reporters, and the same Hadith will count say 20 different reports, and the number would thus go on increasing as the number of reporters increased. Now at the time when Bukhari applied himself to hadith in the first decade of the third century of Hijra, there were schools of Hadith at different centres, and hundreds of students learned hadith at these schools and reported them to others.
In a chain of ordinarily four or five transmitters, consider the number of reports that would arise from the same hadith on account of the variation of transmitters, and it is easy to understand that 600,000 did not mean so many reports relating to various subjects, but so many reports coming through different transmitters, many of them referring to the same incident or conveying the same subject-matter with or without variation of words.
That this was the method of Bukhari’s counting of reports is clear from his book, the Sahih Bukhari, which with the change of even one transmitter in a chain of, say, four or five, considers the report to be distinct.(10) What is called repetition in Bukhari is due to this circumstance.
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