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 ahadith. Muslim lived a couple of centuries after the Prophet's death and worked extremely hard to collect his ahadith. 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 (full name 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.
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.
The translation of Sahih Muslim found here is not complete! Roughly half of the collection is missing; please take this into account if you cannot find a specific hadith.
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.
MSA-USC has placed anchors (hyperlinks) for all the ahadith in the translations presented here. Prospective developers of Islamic sites may find it useful to refer to these anchors. For example, one could use the anchors to create an 'active' subject index into Sahih Muslim.
The format of the anchor names for the translated ahadith in Sahih Muslim is very simple (one of two forms):
DDD.DDDD[A]
DDD.DDDD[.D]
where D stands for a digit, [A] means an optional
letter, and [.D] means an optional period followed by a digit.
The first three digits are the book number, and the remaining digits and
letters identify the report number. The format of the file names (one per
book) is:
DDD.smt.html
The three digits are the book number, and smt stands for Sahih
Muslim Translation. Given the anchor, you can tell which file it is found
in (e.g. 005.2134 is found in 005.smt.html).
For example, the following snippet of HTML should take you to book 33, number 6443:
<a href="033.smt.html#033.6443">SAMPLE</a>
We have taken some pains to remove typos, and scanning/format errors from these files, but it is more than likely that quite a few still remain. PLEASE SEND US ANY CORRECTIONS OR SUGGESTIONS!
MSA-USC is indebted to Mr. A. Abdullah for donating this collection of ahadith in electronic format. The collection may absolutely NOT be copied or used for commercial gain.
Direct your comments to msa@usc.edu.
Enjoy!