Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib

Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib (kunya: Abu Muhammad) was an early Muslim jurist and hadith transmitter of Medina, of the Banu Makhzum clan of Quraysh. He belonged to the Tabi'un ("Successors") — the generation that followed the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad. Tradition reports that he was born in Medina around 15 AH (c. 637 CE), during the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab, and that he grew up meeting many surviving Companions.

He is consistently counted as the most prominent of Medina's "seven jurists" (al-fuqaha al-sab'a) and is honoured in Sunni tradition with the title "Sayyid al-Tabi'un" (leader of the Successors). He is said to have married a daughter of the Companion Abu Hurayra and to have transmitted extensively from him and from other senior Companions. Later Sunni scholars — Ahmad ibn Hanbal among them — held that even his mursal reports (hadiths he related without naming the Companion link in the chain, or isnad) were reliable, an unusual distinction.

Reports widely held in the sources describe his refusal to swear the oath of allegiance (bay'a) demanded by the Umayyad authorities, for which the Medinan governor Hisham ibn Isma'il had him flogged; the caliph al-Walid I is said to have later dismissed that governor (c. 706). The year of his death is genuinely disputed in the sources — 89, 91, 92, 94, and even 105 AH are all reported — with most authorities favouring 94 AH (712-713 CE), a year traditionally remembered as "the year of the jurists."