Abu Dawud Sulayman ibn al-Ashath was born in 817 CE in Sijistan, the region straddling present-day eastern Iran and Afghanistan, and made the scholar's circuit of his age: Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and Egypt, hearing traditions from the generation of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, with whom he studied and whose respect for him the biographers record. He settled finally in Basra, tradition says at the request of the governor, who wanted the city, ruined by the Zanj rebellion, rebuilt around a great teacher. He died there in 889 CE. His Sunan won its standing quickly. Jurists of every school found the book indispensable precisely because it was organised for their work and honest about its materials, and within a few generations it was being named with the two Sahihs among the collections a scholar must master.
Commentaries accumulated around it, from al-Khattabi's Maalim al-Sunan in the tenth century, often counted the first true hadith commentary, to the vast modern Awn al-Mabud. When the six books hardened into a canon in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sunan Abu Dawud's place in the four Sunan beside al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa'i and Ibn Majah was never in doubt, and the traditions it preserves remain load-bearing across Islamic law, from the details of prayer to the ethics of rulers.