Islam's Great Classical Books Part 1

In the name of Allah, and all praise is due to Allah. Peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah, and upon his family and companions, and upon those who follow him.

O Allah, teach us what will benefit us, and benefit us with what You have taught us, and increase us in knowledge, O Lord of the worlds.

O Allah, nothing is easy except what You have made easy, and if You will, You have made sadness easy.

Who has revealed the Qur'an to His servant that he may be a warner to the worlds.

Introduction to Classical Islamic Works

All praise is due to Allah. Every book will have a general context that can be benefited from in all situations. But the more that we understand about the author, their struggles in life, their intellectual formation, their background, the access that they had to information, we're able to be more appreciative of the information that they've presented to us and to understand as well the application of that information for ourselves and for Muslims and Islam in general.

So today, إن شاء الله تعالى, we're going to cover four authors and four books, each from a different area of the Muslim world.

First will be Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Ismail Al-Bukhari. Imam Al-Bukhari and his book Al-Jami' As-Sahih.

The second book that we will cover will be the Ihya Ulum al-Din of al-Imam Abu Hamad Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali.

The third person that we will cover will be Sheikh al-Islam Ahmed ibn Abdul Halim ibn Taymiyyah, the famous Syrian Hanbali polymath, and his book Iqtilaat al-Sirat al-Mustaqeem - The requirement of following the straight path.

And lastly, we're going to cover Imam Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi رحمه الله تعالى, the great scholar of Granada who wrote his book al-Muwafiqat.

Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Ismail Al-Bukhari

Early Life and Origins

So Al-Imam Bukhari finds his origins in Bukhara. As we had mentioned, Bukhara, one of the major cities of the Central Asian steppes whose people were mainly of Persian extraction. So Al-Imam Bukhari, his full name is Abu Abdullah - that's his technonym, his nickname for being named by his oldest son - Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Ibrahim Ibn al-Mughira Ibn Bardizba al-Ju'fi al-Bukhari.

Bardizba was a Persian convert to Islam who accepted Islam at the hands of the al-Ju'fi tribe. Which is why al-Bukhari is known as al-Ju'fi. Because there was a concept in early Islam called الولاء - allegiance. So when a person was orphaned and found in the street, or freed as a slave, or accepted Islam, or had no tribe and family to protect them, they would take an oath of ولاء - an oath of allegiance to the tribe that took them in.

He was born in the year 194 after the Hijrah, which corresponds to about 810 of the Common Era. He was born on the 13th of Shawwal on a Friday.

His father Ismail was a distinguished scholar of Hadith. He studied under giants like Malik bin Anas and Abdullah bin Mubarak. But he passed away when al-Bukhari was still a child.

Now one of the things that's very interesting about the biography of al-Bukhari's father is that it is said that one of the last things that al-Bukhari remembers about his father is that his father promised him that all of the wealth that he was leaving him and his family had only been earned through halal means. And through that he hoped that Allah would bring about greatness in his family.

So never discount the fact that your small acts of righteousness in everything that you do can have a very long lasting effect on future generations. This idea is supported in the Qur'an itself. In Surah Al-Kahf, Allah says that Musa and Khidr عليهما السلام are walking past a wall and that wall wants to fall down so he straightened the wall up.

"And their father was a righteous man." They say that children, the children of children are preserved through the righteousness of their fathers or their forefathers.

The Test of Blindness and Divine Intervention

Imam Abu Bukhari's mother was a woman that was known to be a woman of exceptional piety. After his father's death, she took full responsibility for raising him and his elder brother Ahmed, nurturing their spiritual and intellectual growth.

But he did go through one major test of faith very early in life. In early childhood, he was struck by a loss of his eyesight. He went completely blind. Now this caused immense stress to his mother because she saw the intellect and the brightness in this young boy and was afraid that he would have to be cared for his entire life.

But she did not lose hope. Instead of worrying about the situation, she devoted her nights to intense salah. She made tahajjud, she made du'a, begging Allah to restore her son's eyesight.

One night, after falling asleep during prayer, she saw the Prophet Ibrahim عليه السلام in a dream. The Prophet Ibrahim عليه السلام came to her and said, Allah has restored the sight of your son because of your intense and beautiful du'a.

So when she woke up the next morning, she found that the young boy who had lost his eyesight had fully restored sight. This made her even more intense in making sure that he was cared for and given the best education that he could be given in that time.

Early Education and Remarkable Memory

So she enrolled him in the Qur'an circles that were available to them in Bukhara. He memorized the Qur'an by the age of 10 and he also memorized some of the early works of Hadith like the works of Abdullah ibn Mubarak and Waqi' ibn al-Jarrah and others while still a child.

He himself said, I was bestowed the talent of memorizing Hadith while I was still in the Kuttab, while I was still in the elementary school of Islamic Sciences from 10 years or less. Someone said to Al-Imam, they said, how is it that you've memorized so many Hadith? Now they said that he had memorized over 100,000 chains of narration. He simply answered them by looking at my books a lot, by consistently reading my books.

Now, Imam Abu Bukhari, by the time he was 11 years old, was found by his teachers to be extremely intelligent. In fact, one of his teachers, Dakhri, incorrectly cited a chain of hadith, or a chain of narration, when they were in a hadith circle.

He said to him, Abu Zubair did not narrate from Ibrahim. The teacher rebuked him. No, I'm the teacher, I'm correct, as he was narrating from memory. Imam Abu Bukhari insisted that he go back and check his own manuscript. And when he checked his own manuscript, he found that Abu Bukhari was correct, and he, the teacher, was incorrect.

Journey to the Hijaz and Beyond

Around the age of 15, 16, he took a journey to the Hijaz. He embarked on Hajj with his brother, Ahmed, and his mother was with them as well. After Hajj, when his family decided to return to Bukhara, he decided to stay in the vicinity of Mecca and Medina.

And this decision was probably as important as the decision that his mother made to put him in schools at a very young age. As at that time, he stayed in Mecca and Medina for approximately six years.

So by the time that he was 18 years old, so two years later, he began writing one of his first biographical histories. So in the Arabic language, the word tarikh can mean a compendium of historical events. But it also means a compendium of biographical data.

And so he wrote a book that he called Al-Tarikh Al-Kabir. And it said that the majority of this book he wrote from memory sitting in the Rawdah of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم.

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1195)

"Between my Minbar and my home is a garden from the gardens of Paradise."

And Imam Abu Bukhari wrote this book. Now, I want you to go and try and find the book here in the library while we're on break. But the prints that I have seen in libraries are about 15 to 18 volumes of 8 by 11 pages. He wrote not the entirety but the majority of this book he wrote in 3 nights sitting in the Rawdah of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم writing by the light of the moon.

Extensive Travels and Studies

So, رحمه الله تعالى he dedicated his life to collect the Hadith of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم to narrate it from the scholars that were present at that time, and to travel to them.

He traveled to the cities of Baghdad, Basra, Kufa, he traveled to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and other cities throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Thousands of miles that he traveled were mainly traveled on foot. And he would endeavor the harsh terrain to be able to reach the scholars that he had heard had heard from those who had heard from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم.

The Test in Baghdad

When he was in Baghdad, he had already become known for his memory and known for his ability to recall things at will and to recall them accurately. But the scholars of Baghdad did not believe this. And so they decided that they would set up a day where they would put him on the spot with nothing else with him and test him.

And so they took a hundred different ahadith. And as we know, when you're reading ahadith, you have the chain of narration going back to the Prophet and then the text of the hadith. So they mixed up all of the chains of narration and all of the text of the hadith.

As they sat there, they said, it was narrated to us from so-and-so, it was narrated to us from Anas ibn Malik that the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was once presented with meat at his home. For example, he would say, I don't know this hadith. I don't know it. I don't know it.

The crowd was obviously aghast, thinking this is supposed to be the great young imam of hadith and there's a hundred hadith that are well-known. He doesn't even know them. And when they finished with all hundred, he said, I don't know those hadith with those chains. But the first text that you mentioned is narrated with the chain that's on the fiftieth hadith. And the second is narrated with the chain that's on the sixth hadith.

And he put every chain back to its original text and recited it to them verbatim as they had originally written it down. So the audience was stunned and the scholars of Baghdad recognized his scholarship and fortitude.

His Teachers and Students

He studied with over one thousand scholars across the Muslim world and from those teachers, he had memorized over six hundred thousand ahadith, meaning the chains of narration with their attached text. This is both authentic as well as defective. He said, I memorized one hundred thousand authentic hadith and I memorized two hundred thousand inauthentic hadith.

Imam Al-Bukhari is considered to have met the four greatest hadith scholars of the Ummah and learned directly from them. They are Ali ibn al-Madini who was known as the master of the science of علم الرجال, the science of the narrators. Al-Bukhari said I never felt myself small before anyone except Ali ibn al-Madini.

He studied with Yahya ibn Ma'in who was legendary for his ability to identify fabricated narrations and scrutinize the narrators. Ahmed ibn Hanbal, the Imam of the Sunnah, known for his vast memorization and his steadfastness during the Inquisition. And Al-Imam Ishaq ibn Rahway, and it is said that Ishaq ibn Rahway is the person who planted the idea of writing the Sahih in the mind of Imam Al-Bukhari.

The Divine Dream and Compilation of the Sahih

One of the scholars that Imam Bukhari had met, Ishaq Ibn Rahway was sitting with him in a gathering and he remarked to him after they were discussing a hadith and the levels of those hadith and the criticism of the narrators or the acceptabilities of those narrators, he said to him, if you would only compile a book of the authentic statements of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم.

So this resonated deeply with Imam Bukhari who then saw the need to start separating the authentic narrations from the weak ones. On top of this he رحمه الله تعالى was given spiritual confirmation.

Imam Bukhari saw the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم in a dream and he was standing before him holding a fan and he was standing him to keep flies from landing on him. So the next morning he went to those who are knowledgeable of dream interpretation and they said to him you will defend the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم from the lies that people cast at him. So this solidified his intention to go and compile the sahih.

The Compilation Process

So what did this compilation look like? Well it took him a total of sixteen years. Now this is sixteen years after already ten, fifteen years of simply studying hadith in general. He now specialized in codifying what he had studied.

For every hadith that he would include in his sahih he would make wudu, pray ركعتين, pray two rakaats, and then write it down so that he was analytically sure and spiritually sure of its inclusion. He only wrote down a hadith when he was absolutely certain and had no doubt about its authenticity.

That meant that he was subscribing to a number of conditions that most scholars agreed upon. The standard conditions for authenticity were four:

Al-Adalah - meaning moral probity or a person's internal justice. So a narrator has to be a practicing Muslim known for their integrity, their honesty and free from major sins.

Number two was their precision or Dhabt. So they must possess perfect memory or should be strictly accurate with their written records with no history of frequent errors.

Ittisal - continuity. The chain of narration had to be unbroken back to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم meaning there had to be the possibility of all of the people meeting to narrate from one another.

And then there has to be free - the chain of narration has to be free from hidden defects or irregularities.

Now in addition to all of these things, these four conditions are enough for an authentic hadith, but in addition to this Al-Imam al-Bukhari said I'm going to add another condition and that is not just the possibility of continuity but the surety of actual contact. So they have to be absolutely certain that these two people met.

The Rigorous Filter

We said that Imam Bukhari total memorized hadith - authentic, inauthentic, weak, strong chains of narration were about 600,000 hadith. By implementing these five conditions and meticulously combing through all of the narrations including repetitions, his sahih has about 7,563 hadith. When we look at the book without repetitions then it's about 4,500 hadith. So only the strongest narrations made the cut and so because of this rigorous selection process, it's considered the most authentic book after the Qur'an.

Structure of the Sahih

Now the structure of his book is as follows: there are 97 books of hadith, 97 books or chapters in the book. So you have the book al-jami' al-sahih al-musnad man ayyami rasulillahi salallahu alayhi wa sallam wa akhbarihi - the comprehensive authentic collection of the hadith of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, his reports and his days. That's the long title of Sahih al-Bukhari.

Inside this book you now have 97 other books: the book of purification, the book of revelation, the book of tafsir, and within the book you now have sub-chapter titles, and those are 3,881 chapters spread throughout 97 different books.

Al-Imam al-Bukhari was also different in writing his book from many of the previous scholars as most of them would only write their books in musnad form meaning ordered by the names of the narrators. But Imam Al-Bukhari he wrote it according to subject matter which gives us an insight into the fiqh of Imam Al-Bukhari.

How Narration Works

Now did Al-Bukhari just walk around and gather up Hadith? Many times, people who are enemies of the Sunnah of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم and want to cast aspersions and doubts in your heart about Islam - they won't go and attack the Prophet directly, so what do they do? They attack the Hadith.

So what will they say? They'll say things like, the Prophet عليه السلام lived his life and then in the year 250 or 260 this guy from Central Asia he just shows up and he just starts narrating all these Hadith. Not only is this extremely ignorant of Islamic history and it's slightly racist as well to think that because he's not in the Arab world, he's not going to have access to Islamic knowledge.

Most people think Islam starts, no one wrote anything down, everybody was just talking to each other and then the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم died in the year 13 عليه السلام and then there were 214 years of randomness and then this guy Al-Bukhari showed up.

In reality what happened is that during the life of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم Hadith were not written down at first so that they were not confused with the Qur'an because of the scarcity of writing material. After the Medinan period when writing material was more readily available, both the Qur'an and the Hadith were written down.

Now in the lifetime of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, the terminal number of Hadith that we have from the Prophet عليه السلام are between about 10,000 to 11,000 Hadith. Let's put it at 10,000 Hadith over 23 years divided by 365 days and if the Prophet عليه السلام had 100,000 companions, each one of them would only have to narrate or remember one Hadith a day in order to confidently convey that to the people after them.

Seven of the companions, seven of the Prophet's companions had memorized more than 1,000 Hadith each, meaning that it would reduce the burden on every other individual Muslim by two thirds. So the probability of transmission is not far out there, it's not far fetched.

So the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم passes away in year 13. Abu Huraira lives until the year 59. One of his students is by the name of the young man by the name of Humaam Ibn Munabbih who not only narrates from Abu Huraira directly, but writes down the Hadith in a Sahifa, the manuscript of which still exists. He narrates that to Ma'mar Ibn Rashid, who narrates that to Abdul Razzaq, who narrates that to Ishaq Ibn Mansoor, who narrates that to Al-Imam Al-Bukhari.

Trials and Final Days

There was a theological controversy that happened during that era and this was known as Fitnat Khalq Al-Quran - the trial of the createdness of the Qur'an. A group that had taken information about theology and faith philosophy from different Buddhist and Indian philosophical groups, a man by the name of Jaham Ibn Safwan and a few others started to inject these ideas into the minds of Muslims.

Al-Imam Al-Bukhari was dragged into this controversy. People would come and try to examine him on this issue and he would simply respond:

"The Qur'an is God's words, uncreated, and our actions are created."

When he was in Naisapur, Muhammad Ibn Yahya Al-Duhali, a prominent scholar there, became jealous of the students flocking to Imam Bukhari, so he spread these incorrect views about Imam Bukhari's beliefs, warning the people not to go and attend his circles, to which Bukhari himself said the man only pursued me out of jealousy because of what Allah granted me, nothing else.

He then returned to his hometown of Bukhara and he wanted to settle there, but the governor of Bukhara insisted that he come personally to his palace and to teach his children. At this point, Imam Bukhari responded as most of the scholars of the Salaf responded: knowledge is to be sought, knowledge is to be showed up to, knowledge doesn't come to you.

This angered him and because of this he leveraged the rumors against Imam Bukhari in his own hometown and used it as an excuse to expel him from his own birth place, to which Imam Bukhari then went to the city of Samarkand and in a small village outside of Samarkand passed away there alone.

In fact when I traveled there to Uzbekistan we were able to visit that area which has now been turned into a massive complex for the study of Hadith and its sciences next to the village where Imam Bukhari was buried.

So although his enemies tried to diminish him, Allah raised his ranks and raised his name and now there's not a single person in the Ummah and a single scholarly circle except that Bukhari's name is mentioned there when the Hadith of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم are mentioned.

And with that الحمد لله تعالى we'll conclude the first of our lectures today.