He died at 45, yet his hadith collections are still everyday reading
Al-Nawawi lived only from 1233 to 1277, never married, and ate a single meal each day. In that short life he produced at least fifty books, including the Forty Hadiths, and faced down the Mamluk sultan Baybars over taxes, telling him plainly that threats would not stop his advice.
Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi took his name from Nawa, a town near Daraa in Syria, following the Arabic habit of marking a person by birthplace. Stories about his childhood circulated later: one witness claimed the ten-year-old wept when other boys dragged him into games, preferring Qur'an recitation, and his father told of the boy waking at seven on a Ramadan night to ask about a light nobody else could see.
At 18 he moved to Damascus to study, performed the pilgrimage in 1253 and settled in the city as an independent scholar. He learned from more than twenty masters across hadith, jurisprudence, grammar and etymology. Admirers claimed he studied twelve hours and taught twelve more in his early years, and that he wrote upwards of forty pages a day until he died. In 1267 he became head of the Ashrafiyya Dar al-Hadith, a leading hadith institution, and kept that post for the rest of his life.
His austerity was legendary. He ignored clothing and comfort, eating only after the late evening prayer, and he stayed single out of worry that he would neglect a wife's rights. The historian al-Dhahabi called him the master of hadith scholars. When drought left Damascus struggling, al-Nawawi warned Sultan Baybars that God would punish abusive taxation; Baybars threatened exile but, in both recorded clashes, ended up following his counsel. A popular tale has the sultan admitting he felt fear whenever he considered jailing him.
The Shafi'i school ranks him with Abu al-Qasim al-Rafi'i as one of its Two Shaykhs. His reach goes further, though: Riyadh as-Saaliheen, a hadith collection on ethics and conduct, and the Forty Hadiths, which actually contains forty-two core traditions, earned him respect across every legal school. Nineteenth-century European scholars in Batavia and Göttingen produced editions of his legal and biographical writing. He died on 21 December 1277 and was buried the following morning.
Source: Al-Nawawi
