Translator: Abdul Hamid Siddiqui

Sahih Muslim is a collection of sayings and deeds of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) , also known as the sunnah. The reports of the Prophet"s sayings and deeds are called hadith. Muslim lived a couple of centuries after the Prophet"s death and worked extremely hard to collect his ahadith (pl of hadith).

Each report in his collection was checked for compatibility with the Qur"an, and the veracity of the chain of reporters had to be painstakingly established. Muslim"s collection is recognized by the overwhelming majority of the Muslim world to be one of the most authentic collections of the Sunnah of the Prophet (pbuh).

Muslim, whose full name is Abul Husain Muslim bin al-Hajjaj al-Nisapuri was born in 202 A.H. and died in 261 A.H. He travelled widely to gather his collection of ahadith, including to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt. Out of 300,000 ahadith which he evaluated, only 4,000 approximately were extracted for inclusion into his collection based on stringent acceptance criteria. Muslim was a student of Bukhari, who wrote the Sahih al-Bukhari.

It is important to realize, however, that Muslim"s collection is not complete: there are other scholars who worked as Muslim did and collected other authentic reports.

Sahih Muslim is divided into 42 books on different subjects, each book containing many ahadith. The numbering system used by Muslim is consecutive and uninterrupted for the entire collection.