Jami at-Tirmidhi

At-Tirmidhi's collection contains just under four thousand traditions arranged by legal and thematic chapters, but its lasting contribution is what he wrote after them. Following a report he will typically remark that it is sound, or good, or good and sound, or strange, meaning transmitted by a single narrow channel, sometimes combining the terms in formulas whose exact force scholars still analyse.

The middle grade, hasan, was his signature. Earlier critics had worked with a sharp division between sound and weak; at-Tirmidhi gave systematic standing to the report whose transmitters fall a little short of the highest accuracy yet whose content is supported from elsewhere, good enough to establish practice though not the strongest proof. He explained his terminology himself in the Ilal, the discussion of hidden defects appended at the end of the collection, which became a foundational text for the science of hadith criticism. Alongside the grades he records the fiqh: after a tradition on prayer or sales he notes that some of the people of knowledge acted on this, that Sufyan al-Thawri held one position and the people of Medina another, and what Ahmad and Ishaq preferred. A reader therefore learns not only what the Prophet is reported to have said, but how strong the report is and what the schools made of it, three layers of information in one book.

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.