Abu Isa Muhammad ibn Isa at-Tirmidhi was born around 824 CE near Termez on the Oxus, in present-day Uzbekistan, and travelled for traditions through Khurasan, Iraq and the Hijaz. His most important teacher was al-Bukhari, whose critical judgments he cites constantly and whose respect for his student the biographers record; he also transmitted from Muslim and Abu Dawud. Returning to his home region, he taught, went blind in his last years, in the tradition's account from weeping, and died near Termez in 892 CE. Besides the Jami he composed the Shamail, the beloved collection of traditions describing the Prophet's appearance and manner, which has a devotional life of its own.
The Jami's reception took time. Because it admitted good and even some weak traditions with their defects labelled, a minority of early critics ranked it cautiously, but its usefulness overwhelmed the hesitation: it preserved traditions the two Sahihs passed over, it documented the legal practice of the early schools, and its grading vocabulary became the common language of the discipline. By the era in which the six books were fixed as a canon, the Jami held its place among the four Sunan securely, and later hadith science treats at-Tirmidhi's verdicts, weighed against those of other critics, as primary data for the evaluation of thousands of traditions.