The Sieve

Ask of every command not only what it says but how surely it is known. The harshest rules of a tradition often stand on its weakest evidence, protected from scrutiny by the reverence that surrounds the whole. A faith that learns to grade its own sources by certainty will find that most of what troubles the world was never proven to begin with.

The Collector of Bukhara

In the early ninth century a boy from the city of Bukhara, on the Silk Road in Central Asia, set out with his mother and brother on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was about sixteen and had already memorized the books of his teachers. When the pilgrimage was over he sent his family home and stayed.

For the next sixteen years Muhammad al-Bukhari traveled. He went to Medina, to Basra and Kufa, to Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, and across Persia from city to city. Everywhere he sought out old men who carried in their memories the sayings and doings of the Prophet, handed down by word of mouth through five or six generations. He is said to have met more than a thousand of them.

The scale of the problem he faced is hard to grasp. Two hundred years had passed since the Prophet's death. In that time the sayings attributed to him had multiplied without limit. Pious men had invented sayings to encourage virtue. Political factions had invented sayings to bless their cause, and storytellers had invented them to hold a crowd. One forger, before his execution, boasted that he had put four thousand false sayings into circulation.

Al-Bukhari devised a test. A report was worthless unless it came with a chain: so-and-so told me that so-and-so told him that he heard the Prophet say. He investigated every link. Was this man honest? Was his memory sound? Had he actually met the person he claimed to quote? If a single link failed, the report was set aside.

By the tradition's own account, he examined some six hundred thousand reports. He kept about seven thousand, and when repetitions are removed the number falls to roughly twenty-six hundred. He rejected, in other words, more than ninety-nine in every hundred.

His book became the most revered in Sunni Islam after the Quran. Its very title, The Sound Collection, announces what it is: the residue of an enormous act of doubt.