Sunan Ibn Majah

The six books were not proclaimed a canon by anyone; the collection of collections grew by use, and its final seat was contested. Five members were fixed early: the Sahihs of al-Bukhari and Muslim and the Sunan works of Abu Dawud, at-Tirmidhi and an-Nasa'i. For the sixth place three candidates stood. The Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas was the oldest and most venerated, but its traditions were already absorbed into the later literature; the Sunan of al-Darimi had partisans for its soundness; and Ibn Majah's Sunan offered what the others could not, several hundred traditions, the zawaid, recorded in none of the other five books. It was this supplementary value that decided the matter.

When Ibn Tahir al-Maqdisi in the twelfth century and Ibn al-Salah after him listed the books a scholar must command, Ibn Majah stood sixth, and the reference works built on the six, the rijal dictionaries and concordances, cemented the choice by including it. The cost was acknowledged from the start: critics observed that among its unique traditions the proportion of weak reports is the highest in the canon, and a famous, probably exaggerated, judgment of al-Dhahabi's era put the clearly rejected among them at several dozen. The book therefore carries a double reputation, canonical in rank, and read with the most critical care of the six.

Muhammad ibn Yazid, known by his father's byname as Ibn Majah, was born in 824 CE in Qazwin in northern Iran and made the customary journeys of a traditionist, hearing masters in Rayy, Basra, Kufa, Baghdad, Syria, Egypt and the Hijaz. Besides the Sunan he composed a Quran commentary and a history of Qazwin's transmitters, both now known only in fragments and citations; he died in 887 CE.

The Sunan is his monument. It arranges roughly 4,300 traditions, in the standard printed numbering 4,341, into books following the sequence of jurisprudence from purification and prayer through marriage, commerce, medicine, dream interpretation and tribulations, and its chaptering was admired as unusually systematic, a clean map of the law's topics. Where the other Sunan compilers annotate their materials, Ibn Majah is spare, rarely passing verdicts, which left the grading of his reports to later specialists; the standard editions carry the assessments of scholars such as al-Busiri on the traditions unique to him. The book's zawaid have kept it indispensable: for many rulings and devotional practices it is the only canonical source, and the collection preserves early material on subjects, such as medicine and the trials of the last days, that the stricter books admit more narrowly. Read with its criticism attached, as the tradition itself insists, it completes the canon precisely by being its widest door.