CHAPTER 5

THE MEDINESE AND MECCANS

A. THE 'SEVEN LAWYERS OF MEDINA'

IN tracing the history of the Medinese school of law, we must leave out of account 'Umar and Ibn 'Umar, its main authorities among the Companions of the Prophet.¹ We have seen that traditions from Companions cannot be regarded as genuine,² that the name of 'Umar, to whom many important institutions of Muhammadan law and administration were ascribed, was invoked both by the Medinese and by the Iraqians,³ and that the traditions transmitted from Ibn 'Umar by Nāfi' in one of the best existing isnāds are the product of anonymous traditionists in the second century A.H.⁴

The conventional picture of Medina as the home of the sunna of the Prophet is artificial and late;⁵ we have seen that the development of legal theory and doctrine in Medina was secondary to and dependent on that in Iraq.⁶ We are therefore justified in starting our study of the Medinese school with the 'seven lawyers of Medina', a group of persons in the time of the Successors, all of whom died shortly before or shortly after the year A.H. 100. They are, according to the most widely accepted list:

• Sa'īd b. Musaiyib (d. after 90)

• 'Urwa b. Zubair (d. 94)

• Abū Bakr b. 'Abdalraḥmān (d. 94)

• 'Ubaidallāh b. 'Abdallāh b. 'Utba (d. 94 or 98)

• Khārija b. Zaid (d. 99 or 100)

• Sulaimān b. Yasār (d. about 100)

• Qāsim b. Muhammad (d. 106)

The concept of seven representative lawyers of Medina at the end of the first century has no foundation in fact. When it was a question of singling out the representative lawyers of Medina, numbers other than seven were often mentioned in the earlier