Here’s the English translation:
*Imam Nasa’i*
Another important work in this category was compiled by Abu Abd al-Rahman Ahmad ibn Shu‘ayb al-Nasa’i, who was born in 114 or 215 AH [6 or 7 years after Tirmidhi] in Nasa, a town in Khurasan.
After receiving his early education in his home province, he went to Balkh at the age of fifteen, where he studied hadith with Qutayba ibn Sa‘id for more than a year. He traveled extensively in search of hadith and settled in Egypt while one of his teachers, Yunus ibn Abd al-A‘la, was still alive.
In 302 AH / 914 CE he went to Damascus, where he found people following erroneous doctrines. In his vast work on the _Sunan_ [in which he himself admitted there were a considerable number of weak and dubious traditions], al-Nasa’i compiled those legal traditions which he considered either fairly reliable or potentially reliable.
At the request of some of his friends, he also prepared an abridgement of the _Sunan_ called _al-Mujtaba_ or _al-Sunan al-Sughra_. This latter work, in which he included only reliable traditions, is now accepted as one of the six authentic books.
In _al-Sunan al-Sughra_, Nasa’i completely disregarded the approach of his contemporary al-Tirmidhi, who had attempted to apply traditions to specific problems, and organized his book accordingly. Nasa’i’s main objective was to establish the text of the traditions and to record the differences between various versions, almost all of which he has quoted in detail rather than merely referring to them, as Abu Dawud and Tirmidhi had done.
Note: “born in 114 or 215 AH” looks like a typo in the source — al-Nasa’i was born 215 AH / 829 CE. The “114” is likely an error.
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