Usool al Hadith - Forever Islam

he studied hadeeths with Qutaybah ibn Sa‘eed for over a year. 53 He travelledwidely in pursuit of hadeeth, to Iraq, Arabia, Syria, etc., and settled down inEgypt, where one of his teachers, Yoonus ibn ‘Abdil-A‘laa, was living. In 914 hewent to Damascus, where he found the people holding erroneous views against‘Alee ibn Abee Taalib, due to the past influence of the Umayyads. In order toguide the people, he composed a book on the merits of ‘Alee and wanted to read itfrom the pulpit of a mosque. But the congregation, instead of giving him a patienthearing, maltreated him, beat him, and drove him from the mosque. He died in theyear 915, perhaps as a result of this incident.An-Nasaa’ee was recognised as the leading traditionist of his day. ‘Abdullaahibn Ahmad ibn Hambal, Muhammad ibn Ibraaheem, ‘Alee ibn ‘Umar and othermajor traditionists, regarded him as such. His scrupulousness is evident from thefact that in connection with the traditions related by his teacher al-Haarith ibnMiskeen, he never used the term haddathanaa or akhbaranaa, as he did in thecase of those traditions which had reached him via other scholars, for although thematerials he acquired from al-Haarith were read by the latter in a public class, an-Nasaa’ee had been prohibited from attending, and thus was obliged to hear themby concealing himself at the gate of the lecture hall. He would write: I heard thishadeeth while it was read to al-Haarith ibn Miskeen. 54In his large work on Sunan (which he confessed contained a fair number ofweak and dubious traditions), an-Nasaa’ee compiled the legal traditions which heconsidered to be either fairly reliable or of possible reliability. At the request ofsome of his friends, he also produced a synopsis of the Sunan, called al-Mujtabaa,or as-Sunan as-Sughraa. This latter work, which he claimed contained onlyreliable traditions, is now accepted as one of the six canonical collections. 55In as-Sunan as-Sughraa, an-Nasaa’ee entirely ignores the point of view of hiscontemporary at-Tirmithee, who had sought to apply traditions to specificproblems, and arranged his book accordingly. An-Nasaa’ee’s main object wasonly to establish the text of traditions and record the divergences between theirvarious versions, almost all of which he extensively quotes, instead of merelyreferring to them, as Aboo Daawood and at-Tirmithee had done. In many places,he gives headings to the differences between the various narrators, and mentionsthe smallest differences between them. In some cases, after giving the variousversions of a hadeeth, an-Nasaa’ee points out that some of them are incorrect. Heis known, likewise, for his strictness in assessing and selecting his authorities; infact, it is said that his principles of criticism were more rigorous than those of53 Tabaqaat ash-Shaafi‘iyyah al-Kubraa, vol. 2, pp. 83-4.54 Hadith Literature, p. 112 and Studies in Hadith Methodology, p. 97.55 Hadith Literature, p. 113.