Sunan an-Nasa'i

The book known to the canon descends from a larger one. An-Nasa'i first compiled al-Sunan al-Kubra, the Great Sunan, a comprehensive gathering of legal traditions with their variant chains; asked, in the traditional account, whether everything in it was sound, he answered by producing a selection purged of the reports he judged defective, al-Mujtaba, the Chosen, and it is this Small Sunan that took the canonical place. His criteria for transmitters were famously severe.

Later critics observed that an-Nasa'i would abandon a narrator on grounds gentler judges excused, and that his standard for accepting a man approached the standard of the Sahih compilers; the tradition preserves his refusal to transmit from narrators others tolerated. The result is a collection prized for the fineness of its chains and for its craft in exposing hidden defects, since an-Nasa'i often sets variant transmissions of a report side by side precisely to show where a narrator erred, making parts of the book a practical course in criticism. Its coverage tilts heavily toward ritual: the chapters on purification and on prayer, its times, postures, recitations and lapses, are the most detailed of the six books, which made the Sunan a first reference for the law of worship in particular. Roughly 5,700 numbered reports stand in the Mujtaba, against more than double that in the Kubra.

Ahmad ibn Shuayb an-Nasa'i was born around 830 CE in Nasa in Khurasan, in present-day Turkmenistan, travelled young for traditions through Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and the frontier districts, and settled in Egypt, where he taught for decades and was acknowledged the leading hadith master of his generation there. The biographers describe a man exacting in scholarship and unbending in judgment, qualities that marked both his book and his end.

Late in life he composed a work on the virtues of Ali and, visiting Damascus, was pressed to relate comparable virtues of Muawiya; his refusal provoked a crowd that beat him severely, and he died in 915 CE, by differing accounts in Ramla in Palestine or in Mecca, from the injuries. His Sunan entered the canon without serious challenge, its severity serving as its credential, and later scholarship coined the observation that its conditions were the strictest of the four Sunan. Commentaries attached themselves more thinly to it than to its companions, the classic being al-Suyuti's brief gloss, which has left the book somewhat less popularly read than at-Tirmidhi's or Abu Dawud's despite its technical rank. Among specialists that rank has never wavered: when the six books are ordered by rigour, the customary sequence places the two Sahihs first and an-Nasa'i's Sunan immediately after them.