Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj

Abu al-Husayn Muslim b. al-Hajjaj b. Muslim al-Qushayri of Nishapur, the imam, memoriser, and "proof of Islam" whose compilations defined the canon; he is said to have been born in 204 AH, and his first hadith-hearing was in 218 AH, after which he transmitted widely from Yahya b. Yahya, al-Tamimi, al-Qa'nabi, Ahmad b. Yunus al-Yarbu'i, Isma'il b. Abi Uways, Sa'id b. Mansur, Ahmad b. Hanbal, and many others. ² Ibn al-Nadim lists his books including the Sahih, al-Asma' wa-l-kuna, al-Awhad, al-Mufrad, al-Tarikh, and al-Tabaqat. ³

Muhammad b. al-Masirjisi heard Muslim say he compiled the Sahih from three hundred thousand hadiths he had heard, and Ahmad b. Salama says he wrote with Muslim over the Sahih for fifteen years, the work running to about four thousand hadiths. Hammad b. Salama saw Abu Zur'a and Abu Hatim prefer Muslim over the shaykhs of their own era in knowledge of the sound, Abu Quraysh named him among the world's four memorisers, and when Hamdan was asked who was the better memoriser, Bukhari or Muslim, he answered that Muhammad is a scholar and Muslim is a scholar — Muhammad errs on the men of Syria because he took their books and worked from them, while Muslim is rarely found in error because he wrote continuous chains and omitted truncated and mursal reports. Abu Ali al-Naysaburi declared "there is no book under the sky sounder than Muslim's book"; al-Dhahabi remarks that Abu Ali had not reached what Bukhari's Sahih had reached. ⁴

He attended the circle of Muhammad b. Yahya, who announced that anyone who called his utterance of the Qur'an created should leave the assembly — Muslim rose and left. He vied with al-Bukhari, which estranged al-Dhuhli from him. His works beyond the Sahih include al-Musnad al-kabir ala al-rijal, al-Jami' ala al-abwab, al-Asma' wa-l-kuna, al-Tamyiz, al-Wuhdan, al-Afrad, al-Aqran, his questions to Ahmad b. Hanbal, al-Intifa' bi-uhibb al-siba', Mashayikh al-Thawri, Mashayikh Shu'ba, Awlad al-sahaba, Wham al-muhaddithin, al-Tabaqat, and Ifrad al-shamiyyin. He died in Rajab 261 AH and is buried at Nasrabad. ⁵