al-Tajrid al-Sarih li-Ahadith al-Jami al-Sahih
- Author died
- 893 AH
- Editions
- Mu'assasat al-Risalah Nashirun
al-Tajrid al-Sarih li-Ahadith al-Jami al-Sahih (The Lucid Abridgment of the Hadiths of the Comprehensive Authentic Collection), also commonly known as Mukhtasar Sahih al-Bukhari, is a widely utilized hadith compendium authored by the Yemeni Hanafi scholar Zayn al-Din Ahmad ibn Ahmad ibn Abd al-Latif al-Sharji al-Zabidi (812–893 AH / 1410–1488 CE) . The work serves as a concise abridgment of Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari’s landmark collection Sahih al-Bukhari, systematically stripping the original of its repetitive narrations and chains of transmission (isnads) .
Purpose and Methodology
Al-Zabidi composed al-Tajrid al-Sarih—completed in 889 AH—to make the core hadiths of Sahih al-Bukhari easily accessible to readers and memorizers, reducing the text to less than a quarter of its original size . In his introduction, al-Zabidi observed that while Sahih al-Bukhari is among the greatest and most beneficial Islamic compilations, its repetitions are scattered across diverse topical chapters; locating a specific report often requires extensive searching . He cited Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi’s remark that al-Bukhari frequently dispersed variant transmissions across distant sections—often placing reports under headings outside the reader’s initial expectations to highlight multiple lines of transmission—which occasionally led even later hadith masters to err by assuming certain narrations were absent from the Sahih .
To address this, al-Zabidi extracted the essential text (asl al-hadith) of each report, taking its authenticity as established and dispensing with repeated variant versions . He eliminated the isnads down to the Companion (or primary narrator) conveying the report from the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, maintaining only the book titles (kutub) of the original collection without preserving al-Bukhari's detailed sub-chapter headings . In the preface, al-Zabidi documented his own unbroken chains of transmission back to al-Bukhari, citing transmission certificates and auditions received from several prominent scholars, including Nafis al-Din Sulayman ibn Ibrahim al-Alawi in Taiz (in 823 AH), Abu al-Fath Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Madani, Ibn al-Jazari, Taqi al-Din al-Fasi, and Majd al-Din al-Fayruzabadi .
Commentary and Influence
Because of its clarity and compact structure, al-Tajrid al-Sarih became one of the standard entry points for students and non-specialists studying Sahih al-Bukhari . Several scholars authored extensive commentaries and complementary works on it:
- Awn al-Bari li-Hall Adillat al-Bukhari, a multi-volume commentary by the Indian scholar Siddiq Hasan Khan (d. 1307 AH) .
- A commentary by the Egyptian scholar Abd Allah al-Sharqawi (d. 1227 AH) .
- Zawa'id al-Zabidi by Umar Diya' al-Din al-Daghastani (1265–1340 AH), an addendum identifying 105 non-repeated, connected (muttasil) narrations from Sahih al-Bukhari that he argued al-Zabidi had omitted .
- Hidayat al-Bari ila Tartib Ahadith al-Bukhari by Abd al-Rahim Anbar al-Tahtawi, arranging the contents of al-Zabidi’s abridgment .
The work has been published across numerous classical and modern editions, frequently accompanied by annotations or marginal explanations of difficult terms .
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