A familiar charge runs like this: Muslims call Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī the most authentic book after the Quran, but when a report in it is embarrassing, such as monkeys stoning an adulteress or a fly dipped into a drink, they suddenly discover that it is weak, or misunderstood, or not really a hadith. Selective hadith use, critics conclude, shows that Muslims follow the sources only when convenient. The charge assumes that Muslim scholarship has no consistent rules for reading reports. It has, and two of the critics’ favourite examples show them at work.
What “authentic” means in hadith scholarship
When scholars call a report in al-Bukhārī ṣaḥīḥ (sound), they make a specific claim: that its chain of narrators is connected, that each narrator was upright and precise, and that the report is free of hidden defects and of contradiction with stronger evidence. The judgement concerns transmission. It says that a statement was reliably passed on from the person it is attributed to. It does not, by itself, say what kind of statement it is, whose words it records, or how it should be applied.
That distinction matters because al-Bukhārī’s collection contains several kinds of material. Most of it records the words and actions of the Prophet. Some records the statements of companions and later figures, their opinions, their memories of pre-Islamic life, and their commentary. The book’s full title describes it as a collection of the Prophet’s affairs, his practice and his days, and al-Bukhārī included supporting reports in chapter headings and commentary that he did not hold to the same standard as his main narrations. Reading every line of the book as a prophetic command is a misreading of the book’s structure.
The monkeys
The report comes from ʿAmr ibn Maymūn, and its first words place it before Islam: “in the period before Islam I saw.” It is his account of something he believed he witnessed in his youth, before he was a Muslim. The Prophet does not appear in it, says nothing in it, and approves nothing in it. Al-Bukhārī placed it in the chapter on the pre-Islamic period, among reports describing what life in that era was like.
Calling the report sound says that ʿAmr ibn Maymūn reliably told this story. Whether his interpretation of what he saw was correct is a separate question, and the scholars answered it plainly. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr rejected the idea that animals bear moral guilt, and Ibn Ḥajar, in his commentary, noted the objections and suggested that ʿAmr was describing what he took the animals’ behaviour to mean. No Muslim legal school derives a ruling from the report. It is a memory of pre-Islamic Arabia, recorded with an honest chain, and no part of Islamic teaching depends on it.
The fly in the drink
This report is a saying of the Prophet with a sound chain, and Muslim scholars accept it as such. Here the critic’s charge of selectivity fails from the other direction: the scholars did not reject it when it became awkward. What they discussed was its scope. The instruction concerns a drink into which a fly has already fallen, and it tells the drinker that the drink need not be thrown away. In a society where food and water were scarce, the instruction prevented waste, and the classical jurists derived from it the ruling that a fly does not make a liquid ritually impure.
The medical clause attracts the criticism. Some modern Muslim writers have pointed to research on antimicrobial substances produced by flies and by microorganisms they carry; others regard that research as too slender to bear the weight placed on it. A fair treatment does not need to settle the microbiology. The report gives a permission and a reason; Muslims who find the reason hard to evaluate remain free to discard a drink, since the instruction removes a prohibition and imposes no duty to drink. The critic who presents it as a command to drink contaminated liquid has added an element the text does not contain.
When scholars do reject a report
Muslim scholars do reject reports, and they did so long before modern critics existed. The grounds are fixed and published: a broken chain, a narrator known for lying or poor memory, contradiction with the Quran or with better-established reports, or content that is impossible. These rules are applied to reports that flatter the Prophet as well as to those that critics find embarrassing. Ibn al-Jawzī’s catalogue of fabricated reports is full of exaggerated praise of the Prophet, his family and his companions, rejected by the same standards that remove the story of Asmāʾ bint Marwān.
The selectivity charge would succeed if Muslim scholars rejected reports in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī for being embarrassing while keeping weak reports that suited them. The record shows something else. The scholars accepted sound reports even when they were awkward, as with the fly. They distinguished the Prophet’s words from a companion’s memory, as with the monkeys. And they rejected weak reports whatever their content.
The fair question
A critic is entitled to ask whether the hadith system as a whole is reliable. That is a serious question with a long scholarly literature, and this site discusses it in its articles on hadith authenticity. The narrower charge, that Muslims are inconsistent in using al-Bukhārī, fails on the two examples most often offered as proof. Both show the rules working as stated: a sound chain establishes that something was said, and the meaning and status of what was said is a second question, answered by reading the report.