PART II

THE GROWTH OF LEGAL TRADITIONS

CHAPTER 1

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

THE current opinion regarding the growth of traditions is, roughly, that there originally existed an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet, that spurious and tendentious additions were made to it in every succeeding generation, that many of these were eliminated by the criticism of isnāds as practised by the Muhammadan scholars, that other spurious traditions escaped rejection, but that the genuine core was not completely overlaid by later accretions.¹ Most of these and similar assumptions, by which some later writers tended to minimize Goldziher's fundamental discovery of the character of the traditions from the Prophet,² are unwarranted and certainly do not apply to legal traditions. One of the main conclusions to be drawn from Part I of this book is that, generally speaking, the 'living tradition' of the ancient schools of law, based to a great extent on individual reasoning, came first, that in the second stage it was put under the aegis of Companions, that traditions from the Prophet himself, put into circulation by traditionists towards the middle of the second century A.H., disturbed and influenced this 'living tradition', and that only Shāfi'ī secured to the traditions from the Prophet supreme authority.³ The aim of Part II is to show that a considerable number of legal traditions, which appear in the classical collections, originated after Mālik and Shāfi'ī; to study the growth of legal traditions and of their isnāds in detail; to draw conclusions on their origins in the pre-literary period; and thereby to work out and test a method which enables us to trace the development of legal doctrine during this period for which traditions are our only contemporary evidence; in other