Ibn Tahir
Muslim historian and traditionist (c. 1057–1113)
Abu al-Fadl Muhammad ibn Tahir ibn Ali al-Qaysarani (Arabic: أبو الفضل محمد ابن طاهر ابن علي القيساراني, romanized: Abū al-Faḍl Muḥammad ibn Ṭāhir ibn ʿAlī al-Qaysarānī; 1057–September 1113), known simply as Ibn Tahir, was an Islamic scholar, historian and traditionist. He is largely credited with being the first to delineate and define the Six Books of Sunni Islam after the Qur'an, and the first person to include Sunan Ibn Maja as a canonical work.
Biography
Ibn Tahir was born in Jerusalem in about 1057 to an Arab family originally from Caesarea, hence his name. Because of the Arabic name for Jerusalem being "Bait al-Maqdis," he was often nicknamed "Maqdisi" or the man from Jerusalem instead. His birth date is recorded by Ibn Khallikan as 6 Shawwal in 448 on the Islamic calendar, which William McGuckin de Slane reckoned as December 1056 on the Gregorian calendar.
Ibn Tahir traveled extensively in search of hadith, or narrations and reports, from the Islamic prophet Muhammad. He began learning hadith at the age of twelve and moved to Baghdad at the age of nineteen; after spending some time in Iraq, he returned to his hometown briefly before proceeding to perform the Muslim pilgrimage at Mecca. Eventually, he would travel and study throughout the Tihamah, the Hijaz, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Khorasan. He spent much of his life in Hamedan, in present-day Iran, where he wrote a number of respected works in his chosen field of study and gained wide renown for his scholarship and contributions. During his time in the East, he worked as a paid copyist for his hand-written editions of the collections of al-Bukhari, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Abu Dawud and Ibn Majah.
The public source identifies “Ibn Tahir” as muslim historian and traditionist (c. 1057–1113). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tahir, Muslim and historian.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4170178. VIAF identifies the subject as 90044384. The Library of Congress control number is n85181271. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1057, 1113 and 1056.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ibn Tahir” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.