Online religious arguments sometimes draw upon sources that most would not encounter. For instance Muslim posters who disparage the Bible in order to promote the Koran are being met increasingly with quotations from the Hadith of Sahih al-Bukhari (870 AD). This text contains interesting traditions about the origins of the latter, and quotations from it are found in the Wikipedia article on the Uthmanic Codex.
Also found in the same article are quotations from a 15th century Arabic commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d.1449) called the “Fath al-Bari”. Many of these quotations are themselves interesting.
This commentary is apparently the standard Islamic commentary which sums up everything that has gone before. But can we access it? Can we access it in English?
There are a bunch of PDFs of page images of the Arabic text at Archive.org here. The page images are pretty awful, as is common with cheap printed books in the orient, with no searchable text. But Archive.org have run OCR software upon them, and the results are in the same directory as “_djvu.txt” files. These resisted the translate function in the Google Chrome browser. But if you select a section of the Arabic, it will translate it.
A rather better resource is proper electronic text, from www.al-islam.com, a now vanished website archived here.
None of this is very satisfactory, tho. In matters of controversy it is always essential to verify sources and to use reputable editions. Oriental editions often omit important bibliographical information, such as the name of the editor or the place of printing. But it is possible that reliable editions do exist.
But what about English translations?
In 2017 a translation of volumes 1-3 was published by a certain Khalid Williams through “Visions of Reality” publishers with ISBN-13: 9781909460119. According to the publisher, this is a single volume of 552 pages. The publisher webpage is here. The UK-based Islamic Vision Bookshop (part of the IPCI organisation created by Ahmed Deedat) has a useful blurb, which tells us that the volume is merely the first of a complete translation:
Fatḥ al-Bārī sharh al-Bukhārī (‘Victory of the Creator: Commentary on Bukhārī)’ by Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalānī is widely considered to be the finest commentary on the greatest book of hadith. The initiation of its English translation is a seminal moment which we hope will represent a major contribution to a new wave of Islamic classics in English to meet the needs of Muslim communities in the English-speaking world and also the growing interest on the part of non-Muslims.
Together with the Majestic Qur’ān, Hadiths– the recorded words, actions, approvals and disapprovals of the Prophet ﷺ, – are the main sources of Islamic law and doctrine. Hadiths were evaluated through a rigorous selection process and were compiled in collections in book form of which Imam al-Bukhārī’s al-Jāmi‘ al-Ṣaḥīḥ is considered the greatest.
Over the centuries, hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī. None, however, have received the same degree of acclaim and critical approval as the Fatḥ al-Bārī of Ibn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 852/1449). This critically important work has retained its immense status and popularity over six centuries since it was completed, as is evident from the many editions available in Arabic today. The main reason for which is the tremendous breadth and depth of the author’s erudition, and the acuteness of his insights and judgement as are evident on every page, can be said to have set a new standard in Hadith scholarship.
Not a single complete commentary of any major Hadith work has ever been published in English, yet the need for them has never been greater than it is today. Hadith studies have suffered from widespread misrepresentation by orientalist scholarship along with the reductionist tendencies of many modernist ‘self-made’ scholars with no traditional training or qualifications freely propagating their own opinions and fatwas, now pose a real threat to the future centrality and stability of the mainstream traditional Islam of Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jamā‘a especially in the West.
About this edition
This is an immense publishing project, it is hoped that a new volume will be added every few months; the total number of volumes will be in the region of twenty.
At present about one-third of the entire work has been translated.
This volume includes biographical entries for Imam al-Bukhārī and Ibn Hajar, from classical works by al-Sakhāwī and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s, as well as Ibn Ḥajar’s Hādi al-sārī, whose partial translation includes an introduction to Fatḥ al-Bārī, as well as a biography of Imam Bukhārī. This leads to the commentary of Books 1, 2 and 3 of Sahih al-Bukhari.
All well and good. Except that no further volumes seem to have appeared. However the project still seems to be alive, as may be learned from Ælfwine Mischler, “Indexing the translation of Fath al-Bari, a multi-volume Islamic classic”, The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing 39 (2021), p.165-182. Unfortunately I have no access to this, but the abstract online here tells us:
Ibn Hajar is only being translated now. Ælfwine Mischler was asked to write multiple indexes for the translation of this multi-volume classic Islamic text. In this article, she describes the nature of Ibn Hajar’s work, some of the challenges in indexing it, and her solutions for writing both cumulative and single-volume indexes.
From somewhere that I can no longer locate, I found the following additional details:
Context: Fath al-Bari is the definitive, multi-volume commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani.
Translation Scope: While the Arabic consists of 97 books in 14 volumes, the English translation, which began in recent years, is estimated to span 15-20 volumes.
Indexing Approach: Ælfwine Mischler is creating indexes for this work, addressing the challenges of translating complex, classical Islamic terminology into English while maintaining usability.
Volume 1 Re-indexing: The first volume of the translation was published with inadequate, non-comprehensive indexes; it is being reprinted with improved, thorough indexes.
Cumulative Indexing: The project aims to produce cumulative indexes to cover the entire work, with two to three new volumes planned for publication annually.
I have written to Dr Mischler to enquire, and if I hear anything back, I will add it. She is also the author of an earlier paper on the thorny task of indexing Arabic names, which must be a useful contribution.
A google search reveals other materials in English translation.
A completely anonymous but beautifully typeset PDF can be found here, of 148 pages, covering only the first 30 hadiths. On p.11 there is the following information:
The translation of Ahadith 1 to 30 from Fath al Bari was done by students of knowledge studying in both Madina Munawara and Egypt at al Azhar… It should be noted the translation is only of Hadiths 1 to 30, the last section was translated by Muhtar Holland and taken from his work “Selections from Fath al Bari”. Fath al Bari itself spans many volumes.
But this is not the source of the Wikipedia quotations.
A nicely typeset pamphlet of 25 pages, “Selections from the Fath al-Bari by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani”, translated by Abdal Hakim Murad, Cambridge: Muslim Academic Trust (2000) can be found here.
Undoubtedly we must wish Khalid Williams all strength to his arm in translating the whole thing. Everybody benefits from having such sources available in the most widely spoken language in the world.
In the 1950s the Americans transferred the ownership of the western oil industry in the Persian Gulf over to various petty local rulers. This had the effect of making a handful of mainly Arabic-speaking individuals wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. This has enriched firms like Mercedes-Benz and similar. But none of this money seems to have flowed in the direction of making Arabic literature better known to the world. We still rely on Brockelmann’s hopeless Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur as an index. Nor has it funded the immense task of turning that literature into English. I have no idea why this is. The efforts of Muslim translators in the west seem so plainly the work of an underfunded few. Let us admire those efforts therefore, and hope that one day things will be otherwise.