On his arrival to the Town of Ray...

On his arrival to the Town of Ray, Muslim went to Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Muslim ibn Warah, who treated him rudely and reproached him for his book, reiterating the same words of Abu Zar’ah about him. Thereat Muslim apologized to him saying: I have brought out this book and said it is Sahih, never claiming that all the traditions that I did not cite in this book being weak!

But I brought it out from the sahih traditions so as to be kept altogether with whoever reporting them from me, doubting not their veracity … and I never claimed other traditions to be weak. He then accepted his excuse and related hadith to him briefly.

587 Muslim has reported traditions of people the hadith of whom al-Bukhari abstained from reporting due to a suspicion he had regarding them, 588 since leaders of transmission differ in most of them because of the divergence in their schools and conditions and use of terms.

There may be found a narrator who was considered trustworthy by Abd al-Rahman ibn Mahdi, but unreliable by Yahya ibn Sa’id al-Qattan and vice versa, who were both two imams constituting axis of criticism in naql, and from whom most of narrators used to take hadith. 589 There was so much talk on criticism against al-Bukhari and Muslim, but I suffice with citing the following.

Views Held about al-Bukhari and Muslim Al-Hafiz Zayn al-Din al-Iraqi, in exposition of his Alfiyyah fi ulum al-hadith, when stating degrees of correct hadith, reported that Muhammad ibn Tahir said in his book of Shurut al-A’immah: al-Bukhari and Muslim stipulate to report the hadith that unanimous agreement is there regarding reliability of its narrators reaching to a well-known companion.

In exposition of his Alfiyyah, al-Iraqi writes: What is uttered by Ibn Tahir is not good as al-Nasa’i has deemed weak some of those from whom the two Shaykhs, or one of them, reported. Al-Badr al-Ayni said: In the Sahih we can find the earlier reporters that were defamed by some of the earlier traditionists.

In al-Ilm al-shamikh, al-Muqbili writes: Among rijal in the two Sahihs some are deemed weak and criticized severely by many leaders of hadith, though they needed not but to act according to their ijtihad. Ibn al-Salah says: al-Bukhari used for argument some people who were already defamed by others, like Ikrimah, the mawla of Ibn Abbas, Isma’il ibn Abi Awis, Asim ibn Ali and Amr ibn Marzuq and others.