Sahih Al-Bukhari: English Translation and Explanatory Notes

This is volume 1 of an English translation of Sahih al-Bukhari, with explanatory notes.

Sahih al-Bukhari is a work regarded in most of the Muslim world as the most correct of books after the Book of Allah , second only to the Quran. It is a compilation of Hadith reports - narrations by the Companions of the Holy Prophet Muhammad relating his sayings and actions - which were later collected and arranged in book form according to subject matter by scholars such as Bukhari.

Bukhari was the earliest and the most stringent of such compilers, hence the high regard in which his work is held for the accuracy and reliability of its contents. Nonetheless, these reports are still subject to human error in their origin, transmission and recording.

An Urdu translation of the entire Sahih al-Bukhari, with detailed comments in footnotes, entitled Fadl al-Bari, was produced by Maulana Muhammad Ali (d. 1951), the famous translator of the Holy Quran into English and into Urdu. Its publication was completed in 1937. The great wealth of knowledge and analysis in his massive Urdu commentary has inspired and prompted this English translation.

Volume 1 of this English translation consists of the first 2046 reports out of the total of 7563 reports contained in Sahih al-Bukhari, reaching the point where Bukhari finishes dealing with the five fundamentals of Islam. The footnotes here follow closely the footnotes in Maulana Muhammad Ali’s Urdu work, with some small revisions and additions. The translation of the texts of the reports has been aided by their Urdu translation, but has been carefully checked against the Arabic original.