Al-Nasa'i Biography

Imam Abu Abd al-Rahman Ahmad ibn Shu'ayb ibn Ali al-Khurasani al-Nasa'i was a ninth-century hadith scholar and the compiler of one of the six canonical Sunni hadith collections, Sunan an-Nasa'i. Born in 215 AH / 829 CE in Nasa — a town in the Khorasan region, in present-day Turkmenistan — he memorized the Qur'an in his youth and began travelling for hadith at the age of fifteen, studying first under the great traditionist Qutaybah ibn Sa'id in Baghlan for over a year.

His travels in pursuit of hadith took him across the Islamic world: Khorasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria, the Levant, and ultimately Egypt, where he settled and taught. He compiled an extensive hadith collection, al-Sunan al-Kubra, which he presented to the governor of Ramla; when asked whether all its narrations were rigorously authentic, he replied honestly that not all were, and at the governor's request produced an abridgement, al-Sunan al-Sughra (also known as al-Mujtaba) — the work commonly referred to today as Sunan an-Nasa'i. Counted among the Kutub al-Sittah alongside the collections of al-Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, and Ibn Majah, it is regarded by many critics — including al-Dhahabi — as the most rigorously selective of the six.

Al-Nasa'i was renowned for his piety, his austere discipline in worship, and his exceptional precision in evaluating hadith narrators. Late in life he travelled from Egypt toward Damascus and was attacked there after delivering a public lecture on the merits of the family of the Prophet ﷺ. He died from his injuries on 13 Safar 303 AH / 915 CE. The traditional reports differ as to whether his burial was in Palestine or between Safa and Marwa in Mecca.