International Research Center "Imam Bukhari"

About

The centre was established by a decree of 23 May 2008 to study the legacy of Imam Bukhari, a native of this district and the founder of the science of hadith. It stands in the Payarik district of Samarkand region, next to the memorial complex that draws pilgrims.

It is not a museum in the usual sense: there is no display, but research and teaching. The hadith department works on the hadith tradition and the legacy of Imam Bukhari, Imam Termizi and other scholars. The source studies department examines old manuscripts and lithographs and turns them into teaching material.

What is most interesting to a visitor is the archive of sources, which keeps rare manuscripts and printed books, collects historical works still held privately, and restores them.

Over the years the centre has published more than ten monographs and popular works, among them Sultan of the Science of Hadith and Imam Bukhari, translated over 4,000 pages from Arabic, issued more than two hundred articles, and puts out the quarterly journal Lessons of Imam al-Bukhari.

The second strand is a two-month training course for the imams of congregational mosques: sixty study at a time, and more than a thousand have passed through. The centre has a hundred-seat lecture hall, an electronic library, a hostel and a canteen, while its international department runs conferences and joint projects with universities abroad.

The reason to come here is chiefly the memorial complex; the centre adds the scholarly context.