Abu Hurayra

Abu Hurayra ("father of the kitten," a nickname traditionally said to come from a young cat he carried) is one of the best-known Companions (sahaba, the Prophet Muhammad's contemporaries who accepted his message). His given name is genuinely uncertain: medieval scholars such as al-Dhahabi and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani recorded many versions, with "Abd al-Rahman ibn Sakhr" the most commonly cited. He came from the Daws, a clan of the Zahran tribe in the mountainous Sarat region of southern Arabia (around modern al-Bahah, Saudi Arabia), and is traditionally said to have accepted Islam around the year 7 of the Islamic calendar (c. 629 CE), shortly after the campaign at Khaybar, through his kinsman al-Tufayl ibn Amr.

In Medina he is reported to have lived among the ahl al-Suffa, poor followers who lodged by the Prophet's mosque, and to have stayed close to the Prophet in his final years. Under the caliph Umar he is reported to have briefly governed Bahrain (eastern Arabia) before being recalled.

Sunni tradition counts him the single largest source of hadith (reports of the Prophet's words and deeds), crediting him with thousands of narrations. This standing is contested: several Shia scholars have long questioned his reliability, and traditions in which Umar rebukes him for narrating too freely are read very differently across schools. He is reported to have died near Medina around 57-59 AH (677-679 CE) and to have been buried in the al-Baqi cemetery.