A book that ranks, by the consensus of Ahlus Sunnah, second only to the Book of Allah in authenticity is the work of one man's lifetime. This is the biography of that man.
Imam Al-Bukhari was born in Bukhara and showed an extraordinary memory from childhood. His father died when he was young and his pious mother raised him, encouraging the pursuit of knowledge that would define him. By his youth he had memorized thousands of narrations.
Then he traveled — to Makkah, Madinah, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Khurasan and every other center of learning in the Muslim world. He studied under more than a thousand scholars, and he examined every narrator and every chain of transmission with a precision that had not been applied before and set the standard afterwards.
The result was Sahih Al-Bukhari, selected from hundreds of thousands of narrations under criteria stricter than anyone had used, and the discipline of hadith criticism was permanently changed by it.
Why Read a Scholar's Life
Knowledge does not transmit itself. It reaches us through particular people who paid a price to preserve it, and seeing how one of them actually lived changes how a reader treats what he inherited. These biographies deliberately cover not only scholarly contribution but the private side — manners, piety and worship — because those are the qualities that made the scholarship trustworthy.
The Biography of the Imams Series
Darussalam's Biography of the Imams series covers the scholars who preserved and transmitted this religion — one volume each, written to the same standard. Most are by Salahuddin Ali Abdul Mawjood. Also available:
Related Reading
(2) 
