Introduction

Al-Mu'jam al-Kabir is the most extensive of the three mu'jam (dictionary-organized) hadith collections compiled by Abu al-Qasim Sulayman ibn Ahmad al-Tabarani (260–360 AH / 873–971 CE). Al-Tabarani was born in Tabariyya (Tiberias) in Palestine and spent his life traveling the Islamic world in pursuit of hadith, residing for decades in Isfahan where he lived to the remarkable age of one hundred lunar years. He was a major figure of the third and fourth centuries of Islam, a period when hadith scholarship reached its classical culmination, and his collections are among the most significant repositories of narrations from the Companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him.

The Mu'jam al-Kabir is organized by the names of the Companions (Sahaba) from whom the narrations are transmitted — a system that gives the collection its character as both a hadith corpus and a biographical reference for the Companion generation. The collection contains approximately 60,000 narrations and is particularly rich in material from Companions whose reports are less frequently represented in the Six Books (al-Kutub al-Sitta), making it an essential supplement to those canonical works. Al-Tabarani does not restrict himself to sahih (rigorously authenticated) narrations; his aim is comprehensiveness, and scholars use the work with the understanding that it contains varying grades of authenticity.

The collection is accompanied by al-Tabarani's two smaller compilations, the Mu'jam al-Awsat and the Mu'jam al-Saghir, together forming a comprehensive trilogy. The Kabir is the anchor of this triad, covering the major Companions in detail, while the Awsat focuses on the unusual (gharib) narrations of the author's own teachers. Together these three works reflect al-Tabarani's extraordinary network of isnad (chain of transmission), stretching back across generations to the earliest sources of Islamic knowledge.

Hadith scholars and jurists across the Sunni tradition have used the Mu'jam al-Kabir as a critical resource for legal reasoning, biographical study, and the verification of narrations. Later hadith masters such as al-Haythami (d. 807 AH) compiled a separate work, Majma' al-Zawa'id, to extract and evaluate the narrations found in al-Tabarani's three mu'jam collections that are not contained in the Six Books, making al-Tabarani's work practically accessible to later generations. Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani and other hadith critics regularly cite the Kabir when tracing the chains and texts of narrations.

For students of Islamic knowledge, Al-Mu'jam al-Kabir represents an irreplaceable window into the breadth of prophetic tradition as preserved by the Companion generation. Its organization by Companion name makes it a natural companion to biographical dictionaries of the Sahaba, and its sheer scope — covering narrators from nearly every region of the early Islamic world — reflects the global reach of the hadith transmission network that gave Ahl us-Sunnah wal-Jama'ah its shared textual foundation.