CHAPTER 5

THE ORIGIN OF LEGAL TRADITIONS IN THE

FIRST HALF OF THE SECOND CENTURY A.H.

MOST of the 'common transmitters', whose importance for the dating of traditions we discussed at the end of the preceding chapter, occur in the generation preceding Mālik and his contemporary Abū Yūsuf, and we have found numerous traditions for which other considerations pointed to the same period of origin.¹ On the other hand, we have found genuine legal traditions from Companions as elusive as those from the Prophet.² We have even seen that the traditions pretending to express the doctrines of the Successors, in the second half of the first century A.H., are to a great extent fictitious.³ Without attempting a rash generalization, we are therefore justified in looking to the first half of the second century A.H. for the origin of the bulk of legal traditions with which the literary period starts. The present chapter is intended to show this in detail on the test case of the traditions related by Mālik on the authority of Nāfi' from Ibn 'Umar. We choose this group of Medinese traditions (a) because the available sources are most complete on the Medinese, (b) because the Nāfi' traditions are the most important single group of Medinese traditions, (c) because the isnād Mālik—Nāfi'—Ibn 'Umar is one of the best, if not the very best, according to the Muhammadan scholars.

Already Shāfi'ī considers the transmission of traditions from Nāfi' to Mālik as very reliable, and he says in Ikh. 378 f., where he has to choose between two traditions related on the authority of Nāfi' by Mālik and by Aiyūb respectively: 'I think no one who knows traditions and their transmission can doubt that Mālik remembers the traditions of Nāfi' better than Aiyūb, because Mālik was more closely associated with him, and had the merit of remembering the traditions of his associates particularly well.' But as Nāfi' died in A.H. 117 or thereabouts, and Mālik in A.H. 179,⁴ their association can have taken place, even