All Sunni Six Books

Kutub al-Sittah, the Sunni Six Books, is the canonical grouping of six hadith collections that Sunni Islam treats as its most authoritative record of the sayings, deeds and tacit approvals of Muhammad. The six works, Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, Jami at-Tirmidhi, Sunan an-Nasa'i and Sunan Ibn Majah, were compiled independently in the ninth and early tenth centuries by scholars working across the Islamic world, then drawn together into a single reference set over the following century of hadith scholarship. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, together called the Sahihayn, stand apart within the six as the only two collections that set out to include exclusively material their compilers judged authenticated, and they were the first of the six to be treated as canonical. The sixth position was historically contested: some scholars, particularly within the Maliki school, argued for the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas instead of Sunan Ibn Majah, and others proposed the Sunan of al-Daraqutni, but Ibn Majah's collection prevailed because its content overlaps least with the other five. Together the six works underpin Sunni jurisprudence, theology and everyday religious practice wherever they are cited as a set.