230 THE IRAQIANS

C. SHA'BĪ

Ḥasan's contemporary Sha'bī was one of the worthies of Kufa. He does not occupy a well-defined place in the conventional picture of the school of Kufa;¹ his name was used by the traditionists in order to discredit, by statements hostile to reasoning and analogy, the doctrine of the ancient Iraqians; these last, by equally spurious statements, tried to claim the authority of Sha'bī in favour of the doctrine of the school.

The conventional idea of Sha'bī as 'the strongest critic of ra'y and qiyās among the Iraqians' is a fiction created by the traditionists;² and when Sha'bī is declared, against the evidence of the Kufian texts themselves, to be the representative scholar of Kufa, this is meant to support the thesis of the traditionists.³

Against this, the Iraqians make Sha'bī relate traditions in favour of Iraqian ra'y,⁴ and make him endorse the authority of the Companions of the Prophet and, by implication, the teaching of the ancient schools of law.⁵ A later tradition puts into Sha'bī's mouth extravagant praise of Ibrāhīm Nakha'ī,⁶ the conventional bearer of the Kufian Iraqian doctrine. This retrospective incorporation of Sha'bī into the Iraqian school was so successful that the traditionists, at a further stage of their argument, adduced Sha'bī's faithful adherence to the doctrine of Ibn Mas'ūd, or of the Companions of the Prophet in general, in confirmation of his alleged rejection of ra'y and qiyās.⁷ For instance, Sha'bī is made to say: 'Is that not extraordinary? I give him information on the authority of Ibn Mas'ūd, and he asks me for my own ra'y.⁸ . . . I would rather become a singer than give you my own ra'y.' Or: 'Beware of the use of qiyās. . . . If you take to the use of qiyās you will make the forbidden lawful and the lawful forbidden; but what is reported to you on the authority of men who remember it from the Companions, that act upon.'