244 THE MEDINESE AND MECCANS

period. Even when seven is the number given, there are often considerable differences over the names. According to the narrator, Qabīṣa b. Dhuʿaib, his circle in the mosque of Medina consisted of ʿUrwa b. Zubair, ʿUrwa’s brother Muṣʿab, Abū Bakr b.ʿAbdalraḥmān, the future Caliph ʿAbdalmalik, ʿAbdalraḥmān b. Miswar, Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbdalraḥmān b. ʿAwf, and ʿUbaidallāh b. ʿAbdallāh.¹ Another list is purely adventitious and contains in addition the name of a woman traditionist: Ibn Musayyib, Sulaymān b. Yasār, Abū Bakr b. ʿAbdalraḥmān, ʿIkrima, ʿAṭāʾ [who is usually counted amongst the Meccans], ʿAmra bint ʿAbdalraḥmān, ʿUrwa, and al‑Zuhrī.² The earliest mentions, to my knowledge, of the conventional group occur in Ṭaḥāwī, i. 163 and, slightly later, in Aghānī, viii. 96; here ʿUbaidallāh b. ʿAbdallāh, in verses addressed to a lady, calls the six other lawyers as witnesses of his love; I need hardly insist that these verses are spurious.

The 'living tradition' of the school of Medina is to a great extent anonymous, and, where individual authorities are mentioned in the ancient legal texts, there is no trace of any fixed group. Mālik, for instance, mentions Qāsim b. Muḥammad, ʿUrwa b. Zubair, and Abū Bakr b. ʿAbdalraḥmān besides 'some [other] scholars' (Muw. i. 269), and the Mudawwana, iv. 54, refers to Mālik’s authorities as “the ancient scholars, that is Ibn Musayyib and others'. The same is true of al‑Shāfiʿī who makes a point of collecting spurious information on the ancient Medinese authorities and confronting with it the Medinese of his time. He says, for instance: 'How can you say that the lawyers in Medina (al‑fuqahāʾ bil‑Madīna) did not differ from one another?' (Tr. III, 85).⁴

The actual doctrine of the Medinese school often does not agree with the alleged opinions of the Medinese authorities in the time of the Successors, and the information concerning these last is to a great extent spurious.⁵