Abu 'Abdullah Muhammad ibn Yazid Ibn Majah al-Rabi'i al-Qazwini was born in 209 AH (824 CE) in Qazwin, in what is now northwestern Iran, to a family of mawali of the Rabi'ah tribe — Majah, by one account, was his father's nickname rather than a grandfather's or mother's name. He travelled in search of hadith through Iraq, the Hijaz, the Levant, and Egypt, studying under a wide circle of scholars; more than a quarter of his eventual Sunan is said to rest on one teacher alone, Ibn Abi Shaybah. Contemporaries such as Abu Ya'la al-Khalili praised him as reliable, prominent, and an agreed-upon authority. He died in Qazwin in 273 AH (887 CE), though al-Kattani also records 275 AH (889 CE); by the traditional account, after Ibn Majah read him the finished Sunan, Abu Zur'a al-Razi remarked that if people possessed this book, the other Sunan collections would largely become unnecessary.
His Sunan runs, by al-Dhahabi's count, to some 1,500 chapters and about 4,000 hadith, organized by legal topic as [[ABD|Abu Dawud]]'s and [[TIR|at-Tirmidhi]]'s collections are. Alongside sound and acceptable material it also carries hadith later scholars judged weak, including roughly thirty generally agreed to be outright fabrications — the reason some scholars count only "the Five" rather than the Six.
Sunni tradition places Sunan Ibn Majah as the last of the Six Books (Kutub al-Sittah), with [[BUK|Sahih al-Bukhari]], [[MUS|Sahih Muslim]], [[ABD|Sunan Abi Dawud]], [[TIR|Jami` at-Tirmidhi]], and [[NAS|Sunan an-Nasa'i]]. That sixth place is itself argued: the Malikis and Ibn al-Athir, among others, name [[MAL|Muwatta Malik]] instead, and some name al-Daraqutni's Sunan; Ibn Majah's book is generally said to have won the place because its content overlaps least with the other five, not because it is judged soundest of the candidates.
The Arabic text here is the classical matn, in the public domain. Beneath it in the reader sits an English translation, drawn from the fawazahmed0/hadith-api's eng-ibnmajah edition and aligned hadith-for-hadith with the Arabic so the two can be read as a pair — the same companion arrangement this corpus uses for [[BUK|Sahih al-Bukhari]], [[MUS|Sahih Muslim]], [[ABD|Sunan Abi Dawud]], [[TIR|Jami` at-Tirmidhi]], [[NAS|Sunan an-Nasa'i]], and its Qur'an translations. Which published English translation that file itself descends from has not been pinned down on this corpus's side, which is why its licence is marked under review rather than public domain outright; the Arabic above it carries no such uncertainty.