understanding.

Then a second of the ten stepped forward and questioned him as the first had done, and al-Bukhari—may Allah have mercy on him—answered exactly as he had before. Next came the third, then the fourth, and so on until all ten had finished presenting the hadiths they had prepared.

When al-Bukhari realized they were done, he turned to the first man and said, “As for your first report, you said such-and-such, whereas its correct wording is such-and-such. Your second report—you said such-and-such, and its correct wording is such-and-such,” and he proceeded likewise with the third and the fourth, one after another, until he had completed all ten. Thus he restored every text to its proper chain of transmission and every chain to its proper text.

He then treated the remaining men in the same manner, returning the texts of all the hadiths to their rightful chains and the chains to their rightful texts. At that, the assembly acknowledged the breadth of his memorization and conceded his pre-eminence.

Commenting on this incident, the hadith master Ibn Ḥajar—may Allah have mercy on him—said, “Here one must submit to al-Bukhari’s mastery. The wonder is not that he corrected their mistakes—he was, after all, a memorizer—but that he retained the very mistakes in the precise sequence in which they were recited to him after hearing them only once.”