Nasiruddin al-Khattab Biography

Nasiruddin al-Khattab is a Canadian Muslim translator whose body of work — produced primarily through Darussalam Publishers in Riyadh — constitutes the largest single contribution to the contemporary English-language translation of classical Sunni hadith literature. A convert to Islam who studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto and pursued further training in the Arab world, he has spent several decades rendering the canonical hadith collections, classical biographical works, and major creed and fiqh texts into accessible English.

His translations include the complete English-language editions of Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abi Dawud, Jami' al-Tirmidhi, Sunan al-Nasa'i, and Sunan Ibn Majah — together known as the Six Books of Sunni hadith — published by Darussalam in multi-volume bilingual Arabic-English sets that have become the standard reference editions in English-speaking mosques, schools, and personal libraries worldwide. He has also produced English translations of Riyad al-Salihin, al-Targhib wa al-Tarhib, the Mukhtasar of Tafsir Ibn Kathir, and a long list of works of biography, creed, and contemporary Islamic scholarship.

Al-Khattab's translation style is characterized by careful literalism — preserving the technical hadith vocabulary and the structure of classical chains of transmission — combined with sufficiently natural English prose for general readers and students. His work, more than that of any single translator before him, has made the canonical Sunni hadith corpus directly accessible to English-speaking Muslims, and his Bukhari and Muslim editions in particular are present in nearly every serious English-language Islamic library.