Abu Abd al-Rahman Ahmad ibn Shu'ayb ibn Ali al-Nasa'i was born around 214–215 AH (829–830 CE) in Nasa, a town in Khurasan in what is now Turkmenistan. He began travelling in search of hadith at about fifteen, studying first under Qutaybah ibn Sa'id — with whom he spent over a year in Baghlan — before continuing through Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria, and Egypt, where he studied under scholars including Ishaq ibn Rahwayh and Abu Dawud al-Sijistani, compiler of [[ABD|Sunan Abi Dawud]]. He settled in Egypt, taught there, and became known as Hafiz al-Hadith; later biographers disagree on whether he ever studied directly under Muhammad al-Bukhari, with al-Mizzi arguing the two never met. Travelling from Cairo toward Mecca late in life, he stopped in Damascus, where, by the traditional account, a lecture he gave on the virtues of the Prophet's companions provoked a hostile crowd amid the city's anti-Alid feeling; he died soon after, in 303 AH (915 CE), from injuries received there. Accounts differ on where he was buried — between Safa and Marwa in Mecca, by one tradition, or in Ramla in Palestine by another.
Of roughly fifteen works attributed to him, six concern hadith. The largest, As-Sunan al-Kubra, he later drew down into a shorter selection known as Sunan al-Sughra ("the smaller Sunan") or al-Mujtaba ("the selected") — the book meant today by the simple title Sunan an-Nasa'i. Exactly who made that selection, and at whose request, is not recorded in the sources consulted for this page. Within it, al-Nasa'i organized hadith by legal topic, as [[ABD|Abu Dawud]] and [[TIR|at-Tirmidhi]] did. The jurist Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani later singled it out as containing, after the two Sahihs, the fewest weak (da'if) hadith and unreliable narrators of the Six Books, and no fabricated (mawdu') hadith at all.
Sunni tradition counts Sunan an-Nasa'i among the Six Books (Kutub al-Sittah), alongside [[BUK|Sahih al-Bukhari]], [[MUS|Sahih Muslim]], [[ABD|Sunan Abi Dawud]], [[TIR|Jami` at-Tirmidhi]], and a sixth book disputed between Sunan Ibn Majah and other candidates. Where exactly it ranks among the four Sunan collections is argued rather than agreed: some sources call it the third most authoritative of the six, after only the two Sahihs, while this corpus's own [[ABD|Sunan Abi Dawud]] and [[TIR|Jami` at-Tirmidhi]] pages reflect the more common ordering, which places Abu Dawud's book third. The hadith count given for it varies in much the same way: 5,758, including repeated narrations, by one widely cited figure for al-Mujtaba, against 5,765 in the edition this corpus draws on — the two are not reconciled in the sources.
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-nasai 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]], 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.