Among the obligatory acts of the prayer

In his documentation of the ḥadīth, “Whoever performs a prayer in which he does not recite Umm al-Qurʾān—in another wording: the Opening of the Book—his prayer is defective, defective, defective; it is not complete,” he writes: “Related by Aḥmad and the two Shaykhs.”

I say: two points need to be made here.

First: He attributed it to “the two Shaykhs,” which gives the impression that it is found in al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ. This is a mistake, for the narration is unique to Muslim; al-Bukhārī did not include it in his Ṣaḥīḥ. The likely source of the confusion is that al-Bukhārī recorded the report in his tract Juzʾ al-Qirāʾah and in his monograph Afʿāl al-ʿIbād. Either he himself, or someone who quoted him, then referred to the hadith as being “with al-Bukhārī” without specifying those two lesser works. That led to the error, because citing a report from those treatises does not imply its authenticity, whereas attributing it to “Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī” does. In scholarly convention, an unqualified reference to al-Bukhārī automatically means the Ṣaḥīḥ.