Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj compiles the Jami' al-Sahih over fifteen years, c. 246-261/860-875

Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj compiled the Jami' al-Sahih from three hundred thousand hadiths he had heard, as Muhammad ibn al-Masirjisi heard him say; Ahmad ibn Salama states that he wrote with Muslim on the Sahih for fifteen years and that it runs to about four thousand hadiths ¹. For the traditionists it stands with al-Bukhari's Sahih as the soundest of books and the nearest to the standing known as the Six Books, and some scholars of the Maghrib at times preferred it to al-Bukhari's ². Its mark is that it gathers the strands of each hadith in one place, in the words of Umar ibn Raslan al-Bulkini: "Muslim is distinguished by collecting the routes of a hadith in a single place" ³.