and risen above all idle talk and gossip, too eminent for anyone to speak ill of them, or for the darts of a critic or the weakening of a detractor to reach them.
Al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar said in the introduction to Fath al-Bari: “Shaykh Abu al-Hasan al-Maqdisi used to say, when a man’s narrations were recorded in the Sahih, ‘He has crossed the bridge,’ meaning that no attention is to be paid to anything said against him.”
He also said in his commentary on Nukhbat al-Fikar: “The transmitters of the two Sahihs have, by necessary implication, been unanimously declared upright; their reports therefore take precedence over those of others, and this is a principle that may only be set aside with clear evidence.” End quote.
Accordingly, scholars would sometimes suffice, when introducing a narrator, with the statement, “He is one of the narrators of the two Sahihs,” or “of one of them.”
Nevertheless, some hadith masters criticized roughly eighty of the transmitters found in Sahih al-Bukhari, as was noted earlier when listing the factors that give Sahih al-Bukhari precedence over Sahih Muslim. Ibn Hajar devoted, in the introduction to Fath al-Bari, a chapter in which he named them one by one and replied to each objection. While enumerating the ten chapters of that introduction he said: “The ninth discusses, in alphabetical order, all those among his transmitters who have been censured, together with a fair and just reply to that censure, and an apology on the compiler’s behalf for including some whose side of criticism appears stronger—whether because he avoided reporting the material for which they were criticized, or because he cited only what was corroborated by someone stronger than they, or for other reasons.”
At the beginning of that chapter he wrote: “Before embarking on this discussion, every fair-minded person should realize that Bukhari’s inclusion of any narrator in his Sahih is in itself a declaration of that narrator’s uprightness, sound retention, and freedom from heedlessness—especially when reinforced by the broad consensus of the leading scholars who have come to refer to the two books as ‘the Two Sahihs.’ Such standing has been granted to no one other than those whose reports appear in the Sahih, and it is virtually equivalent to the majority’s collective endorsement of the reliability of everyone named therein. This applies when a narrator is cited in the main body of the work; if he is cited only in corroborating chains, supporting reports, or in suspended form, then his rank varies according to his precision and other qualities, even while retaining the designation…"