About Sahih Muslim

Sahih Muslim (Arabic: صحيح مسلم, ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, full title Al-Musnadu Al-Sahihu bi Naklil Adli) is one of the Kutub al-Sittah (six major ahadith) of the hadith in Sunni Islam. It is the second most authentic hadith collection after Sahih al-Bukhari, and is highly acclaimed by Sunni Muslims. It was collected by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, also known as Imam Muslim. Sahih translates as authentic or correct. The collector of the Sahih Muslim, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, was born into a Persian family in 204 AH (817/18 CE) in Nishapur (in modern-day Iran) and died in 261 AH (874/75 CE) in the city of his birth. He traveled widely to gather his collection of ahadith (plural of hadith), including to areas now in Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Egypt. Out of 300,000 hadith which he evaluated, approximately 4,000 were extracted for inclusion into his collection based on stringent acceptance criteria. Each report in his collection was checked and the veracity of the chain of reporters was painstakingly established. Sunni Muslims consider it the second most authentic hadith collection, after Sahih al-Bukhari. Sahih Muslim is divided into 43 books, containing a total of 7190 narrations. However, it is important to realize that Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj never claimed to collect all authentic traditions as his goal was to collect only traditions that all Muslims should agree on about accuracy. According to Munthiri, there are a total of 2,200 hadiths (without repetition) in Sahih Muslim. According to Muhammad Amin,[2] there are 1,400 authentic hadiths that are reported in other books, mainly the six major hadith collections. Muslims regard this collection as the second most authentic of the six major hadith collections,[3] containing only sahih hadith, an honor it shares only with Sahih al-Bukhari, both being referred to as the Two Sahihs. Shia Muslims (and some sunnis) dismiss some of its contents as fabrications or untrustworthy due to the questionable reliability of some narrators