Ibn Majah

Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Yazid al-Qazwini, known as Ibn Majah, was a hadith scholar of Persian background, born in 209 AH (824 CE) in Qazwin, a city in the Jibal region of northwestern Persia, from which he takes his nisba (place-name) al-Qazwini. The biographical tradition disagrees over the name "Majah": some early authorities hold it was a nickname of his father, others (such as al-Nawawi) that it was his mother's name, and still others that it belonged to an earlier ancestor. According to the standard accounts he memorized the Qur'an as a youth, developed a passion for hadith (reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), and around 230 AH set out on a rihla — the scholarly "journey in search of knowledge" — to study under hadith authorities across the Islamic world. The sources report that he traveled through Iraq, the Hijaz (the region of Mecca and Medina), greater Syria (al-Sham), Egypt, and the eastern lands of Khurasan, collecting from teachers including Ibn Abi Shayba. He then returned to Qazwin, where he taught and compiled his Sunan, a fiqh-ordered (law-arranged) collection of roughly 4,000 to 4,300 hadith. He died in Qazwin in 273 AH (887 CE); one later authority gives 275 AH. His Sunan was not counted among the canonical collections in his own lifetime: scholars report that Ibn Tahir al-Maqdisi (d. 507/1113) first added it to the two Sahihs and the sunan works of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi and al-Nasa'i to form the "Six Books," a grouping that gained wide Sunni acceptance only in the seventh/thirteenth century. Its inclusion remained the most debated of the six, since it contains many reports of weak authority.