“Carry me to Mecca.”
So he was taken there, died in that city, and was laid to rest between Ṣafā and Marwa. His death occurred in Shaʿbān 303 AH.
Al-Dāraquṭnī also said: “In his time he was the most insightful jurist among the shaykhs of Egypt and the most knowledgeable of them in ḥadīth and its transmitters.”
Abū Saʿīd ibn Yūnus records in his History: “Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nasāʾī was an imam, a reliable ḥāfiẓ. He left Egypt in Dhū al-Qaʿda 302 AH and passed away in Palestine on Monday, the thirteenth of Ṣafar 303 AH.”
I say: This version is the sounder one, for Ibn Yūnus was an alert ḥāfiẓ who had studied under al-Nasāʾī and knew him well.
At the dawn of the fourth century no one possessed a better memory than al-Nasāʾī. In his mastery of ḥadīth, its hidden flaws, and its narrators he surpassed Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, and Abū ʿĪsā, and he ran in the same race as al-Bukhārī and Abū Zurʿah—though he did show a slight Shīʿī leaning and some aversion toward the opponents of Imam ʿAlī, such as Muʿāwiyah and ʿAmr; may Allah forgive him.
He authored the Musnad of ʿAlī, a substantial work on kunyas, and the book Khāṣāʾiṣ ʿAlī, which is incorporated into his Major Sunan; likewise, the single-volume Acts of the Day and Night appears inside some copies of the Major Sunan. He also produced a one-volume tafsīr, a book on weak narrators, and other works.
What has reached us of his Sunan is the selection entitled al-Mujtanā, chosen by Abū Bakr ibn al-Sunnī. I heard it pieced together from a group who had heard it from Ibn Bāqā, who transmitted it from Abū Zurʿah al-Maqdisī—most of it by direct audition, and the remainder by written authorisation, explicitly noted in the original.
He said: “Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Ḥamad al-Dūnī informed us; the judge Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Kassār informed us; Ibn al-Sunnī narrated it to us from him.”
Among the portions of the Sunan that are still transmitted today—in the year 734 AH—are two fascicles with a highly elevated chain of transmission.