THE CRITICISMS LEVELED AGAINST AL-BUKHARI'S AL-TARIKH

Al-Tarikh al-Kabir is the most voluminous work of al-Bukhari. In this work, he gives information about the transmitters of hadith until his lifetime. There are some criticisms leveled against this work done by leading scholars like Abu Zur'a alRazi, Abu Hatim al-Razi and Khatib al-Baghdadi, to name only four of them. These criticisms focused on the mistakes in determining the names of the transmitters, of their fathers and teachers. Yes, they are right in some of their criticisms; however it is to be noted that these mistakes are resulted from different manuscripts of this work. As it is well known, al-Bukhari began compiling al-Tarikh in the early period of his life. Therefore, it is not surprising to find some differences between earlier copies of it and the later ones.One of the indications of this difference is that out of 771 mistakes, which are allegedly reported in the manuscripts of Al-Bayan by Ibn Abi Hatim, we found that 300 of them in approximate as true / corrected in the edited copy.That is to say that we may consider the most of what al-Bukhari says about other transmitters, who are not rejected by other leading scholars after all, as reliable.

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