Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj

Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj al-Naysaburi was a scholar of hadith (the reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) born in Nishapur, a major city of Khurasan in northeastern Iran. His birth date is genuinely uncertain: traditional accounts give 202, 204, or 206 AH (roughly 817, 819, or 821 CE), so any single year should be read as an estimate. He carried the tribal name al-Qushayri, indicating descent from the Arab tribe of Banu Qushayr.

Like other hadith scholars of his age, he is reported to have travelled widely to gather traditions, studying in Iraq, the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina), Egypt and Syria, with repeated visits to Baghdad. His teachers are said to have included Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ishaq ibn Rahawayh, and Yahya ibn Ma'in. He is best remembered for his admiration of Muhammad al-Bukhari: when his Nishapur teacher al-Dhuhali quarrelled with al-Bukhari over a point of creed, tradition reports that Muslim publicly sided with al-Bukhari and broke with al-Dhuhali.

His life's work is the Sahih ("the sound"), in which he sifted a very large body of reports to retain only those meeting his standard of reliability. Counts of its contents vary (commonly cited as about 4,000 without repetitions, more with them). Sunni scholars rank it, alongside al-Bukhari's collection, as the most authoritative of the canonical hadith books. He died in 261 AH / 875 CE and was buried at Nasarabad, a suburb of Nishapur.