A Brief Sketch of Tirmidhī’s Life and Intellectual Upbringing

Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī, known as al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, was born between 205/820 and 215/830 in Tirmidh, present-day Uzbekistan, where he also died around 298/910. He therefore lived a long life that covered most of the third Islamic century. Tirmidhī composed works in most Islamic disciplines, such as Qurʾānic exegesis, ḥadīth, Sufism, jurisprudence, theology and the Arabic language. Many of his works fused several of these disciplines together in a unique and innovative manner, making them difficult to classify. His greatest legacy is in the field of Sufism, as he is remembered mostly as a Sufi, but he is also counted among the well-known traditionists because of his ḥadīth collection and commentary Nawādir al-uṣūl. Al-Munāwī (d. 1031/1621), the Ottoman-era Sufi biographer and traditionist, said of him: ‘He was distinguished among the Sufis by the amount of his narrations and the shortness of his chains of narration’.

Tirmidhī was without doubt one of the most influential early figures of Sufism, his influence coming mostly through his writings which were very popular. He was ‘by far the most prolific author during the whole period of classical Islamic mysticism’. The early Sufi biographer Hujwīrī described the wide circulation of Tirmidhī’s writings among scholars and theologians in the fifth/eleventh century. The great popularity of Tirmidhī’s works until this day and their large distribution in the libraries and publishing houses of the Muslim world gives evidence of his lasting influence on Sufi thought.

It is difficult to create a clear chronology of Tirmidhī’s life and education. We know that he began his studies at the age of eight, learning ḥadīth and Ḥanafī jurisprudence under the direction of a shaykh. He dedicated himself wholly to these two fields of learning until the age of twenty-seven. Tirmidhī also studied traditions at the hands of both his parents and narrated from them as well as from other scholars from his hometown. Sometime before the year 230/844, when he was still under the age of twenty-five, Tirmidhī began his travels for the acquisition of traditions.