Imam At-Tirmidhi

Imam At-Tirmidhi lived in an age of both remarkable intellectual advance and serious theological dispute — conditions that made the work of establishing what the Prophet ﷺ actually said more consequential than ever.

From a young age he traveled in pursuit of sacred knowledge, across Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz and other centers of learning, and studied under the greatest scholars of his age, including Imam Al-Bukhari and Imam Muslim. Through extraordinary memory and meticulous verification he became a foremost authority in Hadith, Fiqh, Tafsir and Islamic history.

His Jami' is distinctive among the six collections. He did not only compile narrations; he graded them, recorded the differing opinions of the jurists on the rulings they support, and named which Companions had narrated similar reports. That method effectively founded a discipline, and it is why his collection remains as useful to a student of fiqh as to a student of hadith.

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 Ibn Majah
• 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