Bukhari wrote at a time when the Shi'ites and Sunnis joined in rejecting the Abbasid leadership and abandoned the Gospel and the Torah (see The Great Leap-Fraud - Social Economics of Religious Terrorismfor details). It must be read in that light. As had the Christians before them, the Muslims now rejected everything that the Jews and Christians had done previously. For everything they did, an alternative ritual and behavior had to be found in order to make sure that the Muslims could build their own distinct identity—their Jewish past was buried.

From the Sunni point of view, Bukhari's traditions would be the most authentic of the thousands of sayings fathered upon Muhammad. For the modern reader, they are an impenetrable and repetitive maze of useless gibberish containing only the occasional hint of the intention and meaning of the sayings. Yet, when one views the writings as being under the impression of the ninth century, the Bukhari script turns into an invaluable fountain of information.

The Islamic scholar Malik ibn Anas had provided the foundation for the writings of Bukhari, who completed his collection of Mohammad’s traditions between the year 864 and 870. He seems to have taken the extensive Shi’ite collections and pretended to confirm their authenticity. This must have been a difficult task, if not impossible. Bukhari attempted to ask great grandsons of direct witnesses about what may have happened two hundred years earlier. To be sure, we are not talking about historical events that changed the world, but nitty-gritty details very close to the daily struggle of ordinary people. Thus, the value of those traditions in their historicity is limited. Because no federal or provincial code of law had been established in either Damascus or Baghdad and no edicts had been issued by the caliphs, it seems that local authorities were referred to for case-by-case decisions within a moral framework, which must have been any combination of the Torah, the Zabur, the Gospel, and the Koran.

As for the gibberish, the text regulates everything from how to pray to how to spit.

One of the interesting aspects in the study of Bukhari is his technique of suggestion. He leaves out details, emphasizes arguments differently, and buries critical passages in repetitious sayings and lengthy excurses to nowhere. He frequently withholds information about time and places, not disclosing whether the recounted occurred in a dream or reality, keeping important details close to the chest, misplacing quote marks, putting sayings in deliberate chronological disorder, and breaking sayings into pieces that make little sense in their fragments. It makes for such an extraordinarily hard read that it could not amount to a commoner’s bedtime lecture.

Bukhari’s school of thought was that the Shi’ite recordings were inventions of the time and that Bukhari’s uniquely Ghassanid Sunni collection was the only correct one. The parts that stood the test of “authenticity” more than two hundred years after Muhammad’s death were, conveniently, those that fit Bukhari’s ideals. They were authenticated because he wanted them authenticated. The text is exhaustive and overwhelming—overwhelmingly ridiculous, that is.

Unfortunately, for the student of Sunni Islam, no path can evade Bukhari.

A.J. Deus, author of The Great Leap-Fraud - Social Economics of Religious Terrorism ( )