Book of Faith
Showing hadiths in this book
The second of the two most authentic books of hadith, compiled by Imam Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj al-Naysaburi (204–261 AH). Renowned for its precise chains and clean organisation. Browse 54 books — searchable, citable, lovingly translated.
Sahih Muslim (Arabic: صحيح مسلم) — full title Al-Musnad al-Sahih al-Mukhtasar bi-Naql al-'Adl 'an al-'Adl ila Rasul Allah ﷺ — is the second of the "two Sahihs", considered alongside Sahih al-Bukhari as the most authentic books of hadith ever compiled. Where al-Bukhari arranged his material by fiqh and broke long narrations across chapters, Imam Muslim kept each hadith intact and gathered all its chains and wordings together in one place — making his Sahih the preferred reference for specialists studying the routes of a single narration.
Sahih Muslim contains approximately 7,470 hadiths (with repetitions for differing chains) organized into 54 books. Imam Muslim selected these from over 300,000 narrations he had memorized — a number he himself reports in his introduction. He spent fifteen years on the compilation, presenting it during his lifetime to his teacher Imam Abu Zur'ah al-Razi and incorporating his corrections.
Imam Muslim was born in 204 AH / 821 CE in Naysabur (in present-day Iran), a great centre of Islamic scholarship at the time. His full name was Abu al-Husayn Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj ibn Muslim al-Qushayri al-Naysaburi. His family belonged to the Arab tribe of Qushayr, but were settled in Khorasan for generations. Like al-Bukhari, he was raised in a learned household and undertook his first hajj at the age of fourteen — the moment, by his own account, that the road of seeking hadith opened before him.
He travelled extensively in pursuit of the masters of his age: to the Hijaz, to Iraq (where he studied in Baghdad and Kufa), to Egypt, and to Syria. Among his teachers were the same great names that shaped al-Bukhari — Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ishaq ibn Rahawayh, Yahya ibn Ma'in, and 'Ali ibn al-Madini — and, most importantly, Imam al-Bukhari himself, with whom Muslim formed a deep bond of student and master. When al-Bukhari was tested in the famous Naysabur fitnah and shunned by some of the people, Imam Muslim publicly defended him, taking his books and returning them in protest — a measure of his loyalty and his refusal to compromise scholarly truth for political convenience.
His methodology was distinctive. Where al-Bukhari required clear evidence that consecutive narrators in a chain had met (liqa'), Imam Muslim accepted the chain so long as the two narrators were contemporaries who could plausibly have met. This slight relaxation gave him room to incorporate a broader range of well-authenticated material, while still applying the strictest criteria on the uprightness and precise memory of each narrator. In his introduction (Muqaddimah), he laid out the theoretical foundation of his work — a small treatise on hadith methodology that scholars have studied as a discipline in its own right.
Imam Muslim was famously gentle, generous, and meticulous. He was also a successful merchant, which freed him from financial pressure and allowed him to spend long periods writing and teaching without payment. He died in 261 AH / 875 CE at the age of 57, after a strange and beautiful incident: searching for a single hadith one night, he was offered a basket of dates by a visitor; absorbed in his study, he ate from it without noticing until dawn — when he had finished both the search and the basket, and shortly thereafter died, the tradition says, from the strain. His grave is at Nasrabad on the outskirts of Naysabur.
Imam Muslim opens his Sahih, as Bukhari did, with the Book of Faith (Kitab al-Iman) — and within it, the long Hadith of Jibreel that defines Islam, Iman, and Ihsan. From there he proceeds through the foundational acts of worship — purification, prayer, mosques, the traveller's prayer, Friday prayer, the two Eids, eclipse and rain-seeking prayers, funerals, zakat, fasting, i'tikaf, and hajj. The middle sections cover family law — marriage, suckling (rada'), divorce, mutual imprecation (li'an), and manumission of slaves — followed by commercial law (sales, sharecropping, inheritance, gifts, and bequests). The later books cover vows, oaths, retaliation, punishments, jihad, and leadership (imarah). The collection then turns inward toward character — the great Book of Righteousness and Kinship (al-Birr wal-Silah), the Book of Remembrance and Supplication, the Book of Repentance, and the Book of Asceticism — and concludes with the books of virtues, the merits of the companions, tribulations, and the description of Paradise.
Unlike al-Bukhari, Imam Muslim did not insert chapter titles representing his own legal positions — he kept the work as a pure compilation of narrations. The chapter divisions of the printed editions are largely the work of Imam al-Nawawi (d. 676 AH), whose famous Sharh Sahih Muslim remains the most widely used commentary.
Sahih Muslim contains many of the best-loved narrations in Islam: the full Hadith of Jibreel (#8); "Faith has seventy-odd branches" (#16); the hadith of the believer who has even an atom of pride being barred from Paradise — followed by the matchless statement "Allah is Beautiful and loves beauty" (#91); the foundational hadith qudsi on "I am as My servant thinks of Me" (#2675); the Prophet's counsel "Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a traveller" (#2956); the hadith on relieving the distress of a Muslim (#1599); the unforgettable hadith qudsi describing the reward of Paradise — "what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and what has never crossed the heart of any human" (#2829); and the long, magnificent Farewell Pilgrimage narration of Jabir (RA), which scholars have called one of the greatest narrations in the entire body of hadith.
Use the sidebar to browse the 54 books of the Sahih — selecting any book filters the main panel to the famous hadiths from that book in our curated selection. The search field at the top filters across Arabic text, English translation, narrators, and themes. Each card shows the full chain of narration (isnad), the Arabic متن (unchanged regardless of language), an English translation, and a brief commentary drawing on the commentaries of al-Nawawi and others.
Use the per-hadith buttons to copy a proper citation, bookmark hadiths for later study, and mark as read hadiths you have studied — the read state persists in your browser between sessions. Toggle the page to Arabic from the language switch in the navigation bar; the entire interface, book names, translations and commentary will flip — only the original Arabic متن stays as it is, because it is the authoritative text.
Both are graded as the most authentic books of hadith. Al-Bukhari arranged his material by fiqh topic and used chapter titles to express his rulings; Muslim kept each hadith intact and gathered all its chains together. Al-Bukhari required documented meetings between narrators in a chain; Muslim required only that they be contemporaries who could plausibly have met. Most scholars consider al-Bukhari slightly stronger; Muslim is preferred by specialists studying the routes of a single narration.
Yes. Every narration in the main body of the Sahih meets the conditions Imam Muslim laid out in his Muqaddimah and is graded sahih.
Approximately 7,470 narrations including repetitions for different chains and wordings, and roughly 4,000 unique narrations once duplicates are merged. The standard numbering follows the edition of Muhammad Fu'ad 'Abd al-Baqi.
This page presents a curated selection of famous hadiths. For the complete Arabic text with multiple English translations, the open scholarly portal sunnah.com is the standard online reference.