Ibn Majah

Ibn Majah was a medieval scholar of hadith of Persian origin. He compiled the last of Sunni Islam’s six canonical hadith collections, Sunan Ibn Mājah.

He was born in Qazwin, the modern-day Iranian province of Qazvin, in 824 CE/209 AH to a family who was a member (mawla) of the Rabīʻah tribe. He left his hometown to travel the Islamic world visiting Iraq, Makkah, the Levant, and Egypt. He studied under Ibn Abi Shaybah (through whom came over a quarter of al-Sunan).

The Sunan consists of 1,500 chapters and about 4,000 hadith. Upon completing it, he read it to Abu Zur’a al-Razi, a hadith authority of his time, who commented, “I think that were people to get their hands on this, the other collections, or most of them, would be rendered obsolete.”

He died on approximately February 19, 887 CE/with eight days remaining of the month of Ramadan, 273 AH.