al-Nasa'i

Abu Abd al-Rahman Ahmad ibn Shu'ayb al-Nasa'i (c. 215-303 AH / c. 830-915 CE) was one of the major collectors of hadith — the reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad — in Sunni Islam. He took his name from Nasa, a town in the historical region of Khurasan (in present-day Turkmenistan), where biographers say he was born; the year is usually given as 215 AH (c. 830 CE), with 214 AH also reported.

Like other hadith scholars, he travelled widely in search of reports, studying in Iraq, the Hijaz (the region of Mecca and Medina), Syria and Egypt before settling in Egypt, where students came to him. His best-known work is al-Sunan al-Sughra ("the smaller Sunan"), also called al-Mujtaba ("the selected"), an edited selection drawn from his larger Sunan; it became one of the six hadith collections (al-kutub al-sitta) that Sunni tradition came to treat as canonical. He is reported to have been especially demanding in evaluating the trustworthiness of narrators.

Later biographers also credit him with Khasa'is Ali, a collection on the merits of Ali ibn Abi Talib, which led some to question his leanings; others read it simply as defending Ali against detractors. Tradition holds that he was attacked over this in Damascus near the end of his life and died soon after in 303 AH (915 CE). Sources disagree on whether he died at Ramla in Palestine or at Mecca.