Ibn Tahir of Caesarea

Ibn Tahir of Caesarea
Title	Hafiz
Born	Muhammad al-Shaibani December 1056 Jerusalem
Died	September 1113 Baghdad
Resting place	The Old Cemetery, west bank of the Tigris
Ethnicity	Arab
Religion	Islam
Denomination	Sunni
Jurisprudence	Zahiri
Creed	Athari
Movement	Sufism
Disciple of	Khwaja Abdullah Ansari

Abu al-Fadl Muhammad bin Tahir bin Ali bin Ahmad al-Shaibani al-Maqdisi, commonly known as Ibn Tahir of Caesarea ("Ibn al-Qaisarani" in Arabic), was a Muslim historian and traditionist. He is largely credited with being the first to delineate and define the six canonical works of Sunni Islam after the Qur'an, and the first person to include Sunan ibn Majah as a canonical work.

Ibn al-Qaisarani was born in Jerusalem in the year 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 al-Qaisarani traveled extensively in search of hadith, or narrations and reports, from the Muslim 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 was a student of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, and worked as a paid copyist for his hand-written editions of the collections of Muhammad al-Bukhari, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Abu Dawood and Ibn Majah.

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