English Translation of Sunan Ibn Majah (5 Volumes)

Imam Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Yazid ibn Majah al-Rab'i al-Qazwini was a ninth-century Persian hadith scholar best known for compiling Sunan Ibn Majah, one of the six canonical Sunni hadith collections (Kutub al-Sittah). Born in Qazwin — a major center of Islamic learning in northwestern Persia — in 209 AH / 824 CE, he came from a family of mawla origin (his name 'Majah' is sometimes rendered as a maternal grandfather's name).

Ibn Majah began his hadith studies in his teens and undertook the rihla — the scholarly journey in pursuit of hadith — that took him through Khorasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Egypt, Syria, and Rayy. He studied with major traditionists of his era including Ali ibn Muhammad al-Tanafisi, Mus'ab al-Zubayri, Jubarah ibn al-Mughallis, and Abu Bakr ibn Abi Shaybah. His Sunan, organized around the topics of fiqh, contains roughly 4,000 hadith — including some forty that he uniquely transmits — and is distinguished by its clear arrangement, though later critics noted that it includes a number of weak narrations alongside its rigorous core.

Ibn Majah also authored a Tafsir al-Qur'an and a Tarikh ('History') of the scholars and transmitters of his region, neither of which survives in complete form. He died in Qazwin in 273 AH / 887 CE. Sunan Ibn Majah was the last of the six canonical collections to be widely accepted as part of the Kutub al-Sittah, and remains a standard reference in Sunni hadith scholarship.

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.