240 THE IRAQIANS

porary Abū Ḥanīfa, that is to say, he is more conservative; he also pays more regard to judicial practice. All this is well in keeping with his being a judge.¹

G. THE IRAQIAN OPPOSITION

Towards the end of the second century A.H., Ibn Masʿūd and ʿAlī were considered the main authorities of the Iraqians among the Companions of the Prophet.² We saw in Section D how the name of Ibn Masʿūd became attached to the mainstream of the legal tradition of the school of Kūfa. After this had happened, and as long as the reference to Companions of the Prophet carried weight, any opinions which were to be opposed to the traditional doctrine of Kūfa had to be provided with an equally high or possibly even higher authority, and for this the name of the Caliph ʿAlī, who had made Kūfa his headquarters, presented itself easily. It does not follow that the doctrines which go under the name of ʿAlī embody the coherent teaching of any group or represent a tradition comparable to that indicated by the names of Ibn Masʿūd, his Companions, Ibrāhīm Nakhaʿī, and Ḥammād. We shall in fact be able to distinguish several separate tendencies within the body of legal traditions from ʿAlī.³ All we can say is that these traditions, generally speaking, represent opinions advanced in opposition to, and therefore later than, the ‘living tradition’ of the school of Kūfa.⁴

This is of course a much simplified picture of the complicated development of legal doctrines and traditions in Iraq. Most of the opinions advanced under the authority of ʿAlī remained unsuccessful, but some succeeded in gaining recognition.⁵ The oldest stages of Iraqian doctrine are sometimes embodied in traditions from ʿAlī,⁶ and Iraqian unsuccessful opinions in traditions from Ibn Masʿūd.⁷ But, generally speaking, traditions from ʿAlī are as typical of unsuccessful opinions of the Iraqian opposition as those from Ibn Masʿūd are of the normal doctrine of the school of Kūfa; this appears from the contents of Tr. II, compared with those of Āthār A. Y. and Āthār Shaib.