As for the reports that only one of the two collected, they are indeed sound, yet they do not match those upon which both agreed. For this reason some hadiths in al-Bukhari have been criticized, and a greater number in Muslim. The master scholars have answered these criticisms in two ways.

First: the critique itself runs counter to al-Bukhari’s own judgment. In other words, whoever faults a tradition in al-Bukhari is opposing al-Bukhari, and al-Bukhari is an unrivalled imam and memorizer; his word therefore carries more weight than that of any later critic. As is customary when two scholarly opinions collide, we follow the stronger. They say: al-Bukhari is the leading authority in hadith. If a later scholar declares a report unsound while al-Bukhari has authenticated it and placed it in his Ṣaḥīḥ—and al-Bukhari’s mastery of hadith surpasses that of the critic—then the critic’s judgment conflicts with al-Bukhari’s. This is the summary reply.

The detailed reply lies in the second answer: the hadith experts undertook to examine every objection leveled against al-Bukhari and Muslim, refuting them tradition by tradition. In this way the criticisms are dispelled. Admittedly, some narrators found in al-Bukhari and Muslim may have erred, yet this does not undermine the two compilers’ transmission, for virtually no one is entirely free of error. Absolute infallibility is not a prerequisite for a narrator’s integrity; such perfection simply does not exist.