Sahih Muslim
The second of the “Two Sahihs” — compiled by Imam Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, and held by Sunni scholarship to be second only to Sahih al-Bukhari in authenticity.
About Imam Muslim
Imam Muslim travelled extensively through the major centres of Hadith scholarship — including the Hijaz, Iraq, Syria and Egypt — studying under many of the leading scholars of his generation, among them Imam al-Bukhari himself. He is remembered by biographers for his precision, his broad command of the narrations in circulation in his time, and for the careful, systematic method he applied to organising his collection.
About the Collection
Sahih Muslim is traditionally described as drawing on a very large body of narrations — commonly cited as around 300,000 — from which Imam Muslim selected a collection commonly cited as containing a little over 3,000 Hadith once repeated narrations of the same report are counted once (figures vary somewhat between different classical countings, so these are given as the commonly cited range).
What most distinguishes Sahih Muslim’s structure from Sahih al-Bukhari’s is its method of organisation: where al-Bukhari often placed a single Hadith in several different chapters to illustrate different rulings it touches on, Imam Muslim instead gathered every chain of narration (turuq) for the same report together in one place, arranged with exceptional precision. This makes Sahih Muslim especially valued by later Hadith scholars for cross-comparing chains of the same narration.
Structure of the Collection
Sahih Muslim is organised into roughly 54 major topical books, covering much of the same ground as Sahih al-Bukhari — Faith, Purification, Prayer, Zakat, Fasting, Hajj, transactions, family matters, and more — but grouped and cross-referenced by Imam Muslim’s own distinctive chain-gathering method. Within HikmahBridge’s Hadith Library, individual Hadith are referenced by their number within the collection.