Abu Sa'id al-Khudri

Abu Sa'id al-Khudri (personal name Sa'd ibn Malik ibn Sinan) was a Companion (sahabi) of the Prophet Muhammad and, in the standard biographical tradition, one of the most prolific narrators of hadith — the reports of the Prophet's words and deeds. He belonged to the Ansar, the Muslims native to Medina, specifically the Khazraj tribe and its Banu Khudra clan, from which his epithet "al-Khudri" derives.

He is reported to have been born in Yathrib (later Medina) around 612-613 CE — a date back-calculated from accounts of his age, not an independently attested one. By the standard reports he was still a boy at the Battle of Uhud (625), where his father Malik ibn Sinan fell fighting alongside the Prophet; tradition holds he was turned away as too young to fight. He is said to have taken part in later campaigns of the Prophet's lifetime; for example, the expedition against the Banu al-Mustaliq is associated with him through a hadith he is reported to have transmitted (a narration about the campaign rather than independent documentation of his presence).

The tradition holds that he spent essentially his entire life in Medina, with one reported journey to Syria to visit the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya. In old age he lived through the Battle of al-Harra (traditionally dated 63 AH / 683 CE), when an army sent by the Umayyads attacked Medina; the historian Ibn Qutayba reports that soldiers entered his house and, finding nothing, mistreated him — though other reports hold that he, like Ibn Umar and Jabir, stayed neutral during the events.

Sunni tradition counts him among the seven most prolific Companion-narrators, crediting him by one common reckoning with well over a thousand reports preserved in collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. In the Shia view he is esteemed as a pious Companion loyal to Ali and is named among those who testified to the event at Ghadir Khumm — a framing that rests on Shia sources and is presented here as a position held, not as established history. He is said to have died in Medina and been buried in the al-Baqi' cemetery. The year of his death is genuinely disputed in the sources (63, 64, 65, or 74 AH); 74 AH (693-694 CE) is the most commonly cited.