Imam Ibn Maajah

Imam Ibn Majah lived during the intellectual flourishing of the Abbasid era, at a moment when scholarly activity was expanding rapidly and the need to fix what was authentic had become urgent.

He responded by traveling. His journeys took him across Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Egypt, Syria and beyond, searching out reliable narrators and authentic hadith wherever they could be found. His memory, his persistence and his rigorous verification of narrations placed him among the greatest Muhaddithun of his generation.

Sunan Ibn Majah is the sixth of the canonical collections, and its distinctive value is what it preserves that the others do not — a considerable body of narration that would otherwise have been lost. The biography covers his upbringing, teachers, students, travels and methodology, and gives a clear sense of the painstaking labor that compiling such a work required.

Why Read a Scholar's Life

Knowledge does not transmit itself. It reaches us through particular people who paid a price to preserve it, and seeing how one of them actually lived changes how a reader treats what he inherited. These biographies cover not only scholarly contribution but the private side — manners, piety and worship — because those are the qualities that made the scholarship trustworthy.

The Biography of the Imams Series

Darussalam's Biography of the Imams series covers the scholars who preserved and transmitted this religion — one volume each, written to the same standard. Most are by Salahuddin Ali Abdul Mawjood. Also available:

• Sufyan Ath-Thawri
• Imam Al-Bukhari
• Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal
• Imam Abu Dawood As-Sijistani
• Imam Az-Zuhri
• Imam Sa'eed bin Al-Musayyab
• Imam Sufyan ibn 'Uyaynah
• Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim
• Imam At-Tirmidhi
• Imam Ash-Shawkani
• Shaykh Muhammad Nasiruddin Al-Albani
• Imam Muslim bin Al-Hajjaj

Related Reading

• Glimpses of the Lives of Righteous People — glimpses of the lives of the righteous
• Gems and Jewels — wise sayings and incidents from Islamic history
• History of Islam (3 Vol. Set) — the history within which these scholars worked