scholar who was one of the chief authorities on the Ḥadīth, accounts of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad.

Muslim traveled widely; his great work, the Ṣaḥīḥ (“The Genuine”), is said to have been compiled from about 300,000 traditions, which he collected in Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The Ṣaḥīḥ has been unanimously acclaimed as authoritative and is one of the six canonical collections of Ḥadīth. Muslim was careful to give a full account of the isnāds (links in the chain of transmission) for each tradition and to record textual variations. The collection also includes a survey on early Islāmic theology and a discussion on the Qurʾān.