The Great History (Arabic: التاريخ الكبير, romanized: al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr) is a book by ninth-century Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari in the field of biographical evaluation.[1]
| Author | Muhammad al-Bukhari |
|---|---|
| Original title | al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr |
| Language | Arabic |
| Genre | Biographical evaluation |
| Published | Da'rah al-Ma‘arif al- ‘Uthmaniyyah |
Overview
editBukhari's Great History does not focus on the full names or biographies of those who narrated hadith but instead on their place within the extensive network of hadith transmission,[2] as such comments are made on the reliability of as few as 6% of the hadith reports and seldom the reliability of transmitters themselves. A typical biographical entry is as follows:[3]
Ad'ham al-Sadusi, Abui Bishr. Hajjaj al-Aʿwar quoted Shuʿbah, "He was client to Shaqiq ibn Thawr." He heard ʿAbd Allah ibn Buraydah. There related (hadith) from him Shucbah and Hushaym. His hadith is among the Basrans.
According to Firabri, Bukhari composed this text as a young man in Mecca, long before composing his Sahih. Several manuscripts of the text are known from the 9th century, and the tradition is known through the transmission of Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad ibn Sahl ibn ʿAbl Allāh, a reciter and grammarian of the Quran from Basra, who is only known for his transmission of his text.[3] Extant manuscripts of this text contain biographies of 12,300 individuals, none of whom are women. While Al-Ḥākim claims that according to Abū ʿAlī al-Husayn al-Māsarjisī, the text contained roughly 40,000 biographical entries of both men and women,[2] Melchert has argued that the evidence is consisted with Bukhari having assembled the Great History roughly in the form it exists today, although having undergone some editing and rearrangement.[3]
Some entries in Bukhari's Great History are dedicated to polemicizing against other scholars he is critical of. For example, his entry on the jurist Abu Hanifa claims that he was part of the Murji'ah, a sect al-Bukhari deemed to be heretical. In addition, he asserts that the scholarly community had renounced Abu Hanifa and his "speculative" jurisprudence.[4]
Reception
editBukhari's Great History was quickly received, and it gained fame much earlier than did the work that Bukhari is more famous for today, Sahih al-Bukhari. The first mention of someone narrating from the Great History is a century earlier than that of his Sahih, and it becomes used as a model for another biographical work nearly seventy years before another figure uses the Sahih as a template for their own hadith collection.[5]
Ibn Abi Hatim wrote the first response to any part of Bukhari's works, specifically by responding to his Great History, though his book was aimed at detecting errors in it. However, he would soon enter a dispute regarding having plagiarized from the Great History. A student replied, however, that Ibn Abi Hatim had considered the work so impressive that he along with his students were using it as the basis of a new work.[6]
Related works
editBukhari also authored two other books of history, titled The Medium History (al-Tarikh al-Awsat) and The Small History (al-Tarikh al-Saghir ). The latter is lost.[4]
References
editCitations
edit
- ^ Al-Kattani, Muhammad ibn Ja‘far; Al-Risalah al-Mustatrafah, pg. 128–9, (Beirut: Dar al-Basha'ir al-Islamiyyah); seventh edition, 2007.
- ^ a b Brown 2007, p. 68, cf. n. 64.
- ^ a b c Melchert, Christopher (2001). "Bukhārī and Early Hadith Criticism". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 121 (1): 8–12. doi:10.2307/606725. ISSN 0003-0279.
- ^ a b Khan, Ahmad (2023). Heresy and the Formation of Medieval Islamic Orthodoxy: The Making of Sunnism, from the Eighth to the Eleventh Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 63–64.
- ^ Brown 2007, p. 96.
- ^ Brown 2007, p. 97.
References
edit- Brown, Jonathan (2007). The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim. Brill.
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