…what al-Bukhari placed for it in the appropriate chapters; this alone cannot match the strength of al-Bukhari’s chains of transmission nor the care he took, in the Sahih, when selecting material he had already cited in the Jami, together with his insistence that the transmitter be a contemporary of his shaykh and have actually heard from him. Ibn Hajar states in Tahdhib al-Tahdhib (10/127): “Muslim’s book attained an exceptionally high standing that no one else achieved; some people even preferred it to the Sahih of Muhammad b. Ismail because of Muslim’s distinctive concern for gathering all the routes, the smooth arrangement of the material, and his strict preservation of the original wording without fragmentation or paraphrase.” Imam al-Nawawi says, in his Commentary on Sahih Muslim (p. 14): “The scholars unanimously agree that, after the Noble Quran, the soundest books are the two Sahihs of al-Bukhari and Muslim, and the ummah has accepted them. Al-Bukhari’s work is the sounder of the two and the richer in both obvious and subtle benefits and insights. “It is authentically reported that Muslim used to learn from al-Bukhari and acknowledged that no one equalled him in the science of hadith. The preference we have expressed for al-Bukhari’s book is the view chosen by the majority—those who are exacting, skilful, and capable of delving into the secrets of hadith.” Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn b. ‘Ali al-Naysaburi, the teacher of al-Hakim Abu ‘Abd Allah b. al-Bayyi‘, said: “Muslim’s book is more authentic,” and a few scholars from the Maghrib agreed with him, but the correct opinion is the first. The imam, hadith master, jurist and critical scholar Abu Bakr al-Isma‘ili, in his work al-Madkhal, argued for the superiority of al-Bukhari’s book. We have likewise transmitted from Imam Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Nasa’i that he said: “Among all these books, none is better than al-Bukhari’s.” Al-Nawawi comments: One of the briefest proofs of its superiority is the scholars’ agreement that al-Bukhari was greater than Muslim and more knowledgeable in the craft of hadith. He drew on Muslim’s learning, distilled what he approved into this book, spent sixteen years refining and selecting it, and compiled it from tens of thousands of authentic hadiths. Another factor favouring al-Bukhari is that Muslim—and he even reports consensus on this at the beginning of his Sahih—considered a chain introduced by the formula “on the authority of” (*an‘ana*) to be effectively continuous, equivalent to “I heard”, provided the narrator and the one from whom he transmits lived in the same era, even if their meeting is not proven. Al-Bukhari, however, will not deem it connected unless their actual meeting is established. This position gives preference to al-Bukhari’s book. Muslim, nevertheless, enjoys a distinct merit: his work is easier to consult, because he assigns every hadith to a single suitable place, where he gathers all the routes he approved and chose to mention, citing their various isnads and wordings. This allows the student to view all its aspects and draw on them, acquiring confidence in every route Muslim includes. Al-Bukhari, by contrast, scatters those variant routes across widely separated chapters, and often places one in a chapter that, at first sight, does not seem to be its most obvious location—something al-Bukhari perceived for a subtle reason of his own. Consequently, it is difficult for the student to assemble all of al-Bukhari’s routes and to gain equal confidence in every chain he records for a given hadith.