Reasons for preferring his Ṣaḥīḥ to Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim:

We have already quoted a number of statements by the leading imams which show that the two Ṣaḥīḥs—those of al-Bukhārī and Muslim—are placed above all other ḥadīth collections and have been universally received with acceptance. Some of those statements explicitly give precedence to Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī over Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, and this is well known among the scholars for several reasons:

First: The narrators from whom al-Bukhārī alone transmitted, without Muslim, number roughly 430 men, eighty of whom have been criticized for weakness. Muslim, on the other hand, uniquely narrated from 620 men, 160 of whom have been criticized for weakness. Clearly, reporting from transmitters who have never been criticized is preferable to reporting from those who have, even when the criticism is not ultimately damaging.

Second and Third: Of the criticized narrators unique to al-Bukhārī, he recorded only a small number of their ḥadīths, and most of them were his own teachers—men he had met, sat with, come to know personally, scrutinized their narrations, and sifted the sound reports from the mistaken ones. Muslim does not match him in either of these two respects…

Fourth: Al-Bukhārī stipulated that actual meeting between the narrator and the shaykh he reports from be proven, even if only once, whereas Muslim was satisfied with mere contemporaneity. This clearly indicates the superiority of Ṣaḥīḥ