Jami' at-Tirmidhi
Mecca · 892
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al-Tirmidhi
al-Tirmidhi
824 CE–892 CE · Nishapur
Abu Isa Muhammad ibn Isa al-Tirmidhi (c. 209-279 AH / 824-892 CE) was a scholar of hadith — the reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad — from Transoxiana, the region beyond the Oxus river in Central Asia. He was born in Bugh, a village near Tirmidh (Termez, in present-day Uzbekistan), from which his name derives.
From about 235 AH (849-850 CE), sources report, he travelled widely through Khurasan, Iraq, and the Hijaz (the western Arabian region containing Mecca and Medina) to gather and verify traditions. Among his teachers were leading hadith masters of the age, including al-Bukhari, whom he is reported to have met in Nishapur, as well as Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj and Abu Dawud. He is best known for his Jami (also called his Sunan), one of the six hadith collections that came to be regarded as canonical in Sunni Islam, and for the Shama'il, a compilation of reports describing the Prophet's character and appearance.
Al-Tirmidhi is credited with helping to establish the practice of openly grading each tradition, and is widely associated with popularizing the term "hasan" (good) as a middle category between "sahih" (sound) and "da'if" (weak) — though some scholars hold the term was used before him. The historian al-Dhahabi reports that he became blind in his final years. He is said to have died in Bugh in 279 AH (892 CE).
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Stop 2 of 4Studied / Collected Hadith
Nishapur
What they did here
From c. 235 AH (849-850 CE) he travelled widely through Khurasan to collect hadith. He is traditionally held to have studied under al-Bukhari, a leading authority based in Khurasan (al-Dhahabi: 'his knowledge of hadith came from al-Bukhari'). The sources affirm the teacher-student relationship but do not securely fix where they met; Nishapur — a major Khurasani hadith centre where al-Bukhari resided from c. 250 AH (864 CE) — is the conventional locus, hence this stop is marked uncertain rather than attested. The 235 AH date marks the onset of his general travels, not a dated Nishapur meeting.
About Nishapur
Nishapur (Naysabur), in the Khurasan region of northeastern Iran, was one of the four great cities of medieval Khurasan and a major centre of Shafi'i law, hadith, and Sufism. The hadith master Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875), compiler of the Sahih, was born and died there, and the Shi'i imam Ali al-Rida (d. 818) passed through it on his way to Tus.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Tirmidhi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.