As-Suyuti and His Commentary on an-Nasa'i

Jalal ad-Din Abd ar-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr as-Suyuti (849–911 AH / 1445–1505 CE) was one of the most prolific scholars in the history of Islam. Born in Cairo to a family with roots in Asyut in Upper Egypt, as-Suyuti received an intensive traditional education in all the Islamic sciences and rose to become one of the leading authorities of his age in hadith, Quran commentary, Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic linguistics, and history. His bibliography is extraordinary — he claimed to have authored over six hundred works — and while not all of these are full-length books, the range and depth of what survives is genuinely remarkable.

As-Suyuti's command of the hadith sciences was particularly formidable. He studied under dozens of scholars in Cairo and elsewhere and eventually achieved the rank of hafiz, meaning one who had memorized a hundred thousand hadiths with their chains of transmission. His major hadith works include the Jami' al-Kabir (a comprehensive collection), the Jami' as-Saghir (widely used to this day), Tadrib ar-Rawi (a major work on hadith terminology), and numerous other compilations and treatises.

His commentary on Sunan an-Nasai, known as Sharh Sunan an-Nasai and sometimes titled Zahr ar-Ruba ala al-Mujtaba, focuses on the version of the Sunan known as al-Mujtaba — the selected, refined version that Imam an-Nasai himself prepared as the stricter recension of his larger work, as-Sunan al-Kubra. An-Nasai's standard for accepting hadiths was among the most rigorous of all the major hadith collectors, and his Sunan contains a high proportion of strong narrations.

As-Suyuti's commentary is relatively concise compared to the extended commentaries of al-Azimabadi or al-Mubarakpuri, but this was by design. As-Suyuti possessed the ability to compress enormous erudition into a compact format, and his commentary on the Sunan is a model of precise, efficient scholarly writing. He focuses on explaining unusual words, identifying the legal principles derived from each hadith, and noting points where scholars differed, without engaging in extended debates unless the issue is of particular importance.