Explanation that among the scholars of hadith, some specialized in narrating and collecting hadiths, while others went beyond that by purifying and sifting them

The Shaykh : The scholars of hadith in this field are divided into categories and types. The best of them are those who specialized not only in narrating hadith, but also in sifting and purifying it from weak and fabricated hadiths. The number of these scholars among the hadith scholars was a distinguished group from the early generations and a few from the later ones. At the forefront of the early generations were the Imams al-Bukhari and Muslim (may Allah have mercy on them), who compiled their two books of authentic hadiths before any other hadith scholar, known as "Sahih al-Bukhari" and "Sahih Muslim." Meanwhile, the concern of the hadith scholars who preceded them or were their contemporaries was merely collecting hadith from various narrators who had dispersed to different lands due to the Islamic conquests. We should not forget that the primary merit for enabling these two Imams to compile their "Sahih" collections belongs to those narrators we mentioned, whose concern was collecting hadith from the memories of men in various lands, as we have stated. Otherwise, if there had not been this long and extensive effort by those narrators in gathering the material of hadith, there would not have been before the Imams al-Bukhari and Muslim the material that would help them select what is authentic from what is not. I say this in response to the saying of Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He): .