Ibn Sirin Biography

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Sirin al-Basri was a major scholar of the Tabi'in — the generation that followed the Companions — and one of the foundational figures of early Islamic jurisprudence, hadith transmission, and the science of dream interpretation. Born in Basra in 33 AH / 653 CE, his father Sirin was a freed slave of the Companion Anas ibn Malik (RA), and his mother Safiyya was a freed servant of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (RA) — a household saturated with direct connection to the earliest generation of Muslims.

Ibn Sirin studied under more than thirty Companions, including Anas ibn Malik, Imran ibn Husayn, Abu Hurayrah, and Abdullah ibn Umar (RA). He was widely celebrated for his rigorous standards in hadith transmission — he refused to narrate from anyone whose probity he doubted, and his insistence on isnad (chain of transmission) is often cited as one of the formative influences on the discipline. He worked as a cloth merchant to support his scholarship and famously refused payment for issuing legal verdicts. His piety, his deep knowledge of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and his reputation for penetrating insight into the meaning of dreams made him a towering figure of his era.

While the well-known dream interpretation manual Tafsir al-Ahlam ('Interpretation of Dreams') is widely attributed to him in Islamic literature, modern scholarship has shown that the surviving compilation in his name is a later attribution that draws on his transmitted sayings rather than a work he himself authored. He died in Basra in 110 AH / 729 CE, just one hundred days after his contemporary and fellow Basran giant al-Hasan al-Basri. Al-Bukhari, Muslim, and the other compilers of the canonical hadith collections relied heavily on his narrations.