In private and in earnest

trying my best not to curse you out in the islam thread <3

a quick search will tell you all of his claims are bs btw. not sure what his goal is

First of all, yes — Imam Bukhari was Persian, born in 810 CE in Bukhara (modern-day Uzbekistan). But there is zero credible historical evidence that his family were Zoroastrians or that they were harmed by Arabs. His father, Ismail ibn Ibrahim, was a respected Muslim and hadith narrator in his own right. Imam Bukhari was raised in a devout Islamic household and memorized the Qur’an at a young age. He started traveling in his teens to study hadith, and dedicated his entire life to it.

Now, about the 600,000 hadiths. Yes, Bukhari studied that many — but he didn’t accept all of them. In fact, he applied incredibly strict standards to filter them. From the massive pool of narrations he collected, he included around 7,000 in his book Sahih al-Bukhari (including repetitions). Without repetitions, the number drops to around 2,600. These weren’t picked randomly — he had a famously high bar for authenticity. If even one narrator in a chain had questionable memory, honesty, or precision, he’d reject the hadith.

So the idea that he just flooded the Islamic world with fabricated stories is not only false — it completely ignores the science of hadith authentication. Muslim scholars didn’t just accept hadith blindly. There’s an entire discipline built around verifying the reliability of narrators, the consistency of the content, and the chain of transmission (isnad). Scholars across centuries reviewed, cross-checked, and classified hadith into different categories: authentic (sahih), good (hasan), weak (da'if), and fabricated (mawdu'). Bukhari’s compilation is considered the most authentic hadith collection in Sunni Islam.

And as for the toothbrush vs. miswak argument — it’s true that the Prophet ﷺ used a miswak, but the point of the Sunnah here is cleanliness and oral hygiene, not the specific stick. Scholars today agree: if you use a toothbrush, you’re fulfilling the same goal. No one is banning toothbrushes in serious Islamic scholarship. This kind of debate only becomes a problem when it’s pulled out of context online to make Muslims look backwards.

Finally, the argument that the “West is going to Mars while Muslims argue over toothbrushes” might sound clever, but it’s a false comparison. Technological progress and religious tradition are not opposites. Muslims can and should pursue scientific advancement, but that doesn’t mean abandoning their intellectual and spiritual heritage.

The bottom line is this: Imam Bukhari was not trying to confuse Muslims — he was preserving the most authentic records of the Prophet’s teachings with extraordinary precision. Claims that he had a secret agenda are based on speculation, not evidence, and they disrespect centuries of careful scholarship. If we want to move forward as an ummah, we should do so with both critical thinking and respect for our tradition — not by tearing down our greatest scholars based on internet conspiracy theories.