Why so much came through him

It was noticed in his own lifetime. People said openly that Abu Hurayrah narrated a great deal — more than Companions who had been there far longer than he had — and some of them meant it as a question about his reliability.

His answer is recorded, and it is entirely practical.

The Muhajirun, he said, were occupied with their business in the markets. The Ansar were occupied with their property and their land. And he was a poor man who kept to the Prophet ﷺ on a full stomach, and was present when they were absent, and remembered when they forgot.

There is no claim to special ability in that. It is an argument about attendance.

It is worth pausing on the economics of it, because they are the whole point. Everyone else had a living to earn. Trade does not pause and date palms do not wait. Being present for the ordinary hours — not the battles and the great occasions, which everybody attended, but the afternoons — was a luxury available almost exclusively to men with nothing else to do.

So the single largest channel through which this material reached later generations was open because one man was poor enough to have nowhere else to be, and chose to spend that liability sitting in the right place.

He arrived roughly three or four years before the Prophet ﷺ died. Almost everything he transmitted, he acquired inside that window.

The account is in Sahih al-Bukhari.