“Allah has restored your son’s sight through the abundance of your supplications”—or, he said, “through your tears”—“and this morning he can see.” (1)

Al-Bukhārī said, “Last night I reflected and realized that I have written in my compilations some two hundred thousand isnād-linked ḥadīths, and I have them all committed to memory.” (2)

On one occasion he entered Samarqand, where four hundred specialists in ḥadīth gathered. They constructed for him composite chains, inserting Syrian isnāds into Iraqi ones, intermixing the narrators, and assigning the texts of certain reports to other chains. They then recited all of this to al-Bukhārī; he returned every ḥadīth to its proper isnād, corrected every chain, and they could not catch him in a single lapse—neither in chain nor in text. (3) He performed the same feat with one hundred ḥadīth scholars from Baghdad.

They recounted that he would look into a book only once and, from that single glance, retain all that it contained; reports of this sort about him are plentiful. (4)

The scholars of his age—from his teachers to his peers—lavished praise upon him.

Imām Aḥmad said, “Khurāsān has produced no one like him.” (5)

Isḥāq ibn Rāhwayh remarked, “Had he lived in the era of al-Ḥasan, the people would have been in need of him, because of his mastery of ḥadīth and his fiqh.” (6)

Abū Bakr ibn Abī Shaybah and Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Numayr said, “[We have never seen] his equal.” (7)(8)

ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī said, “He has never seen the like of himself.” (9)

ʿAlī ibn Ḥujr stated, “I know of no one like him.” (10)

Maḥmūd ibn al-Naḍr ibn Sahl al-Shāfiʿī said, “I entered Basra, Syria, the Ḥijāz, and Kūfa, and I met their scholars; whenever the name of Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī was mentioned, they counted him superior to themselves.” (11)

And Abū al-ʿAbbās said: