THE MEDINESE AND MECCANS 245

authorities provided Shāfiʿī with an argument against the legal theory and positive doctrine of the school of Medina.¹

We can sometimes observe the growth of this spurious information about the ancient authorities, for instance, in the short period between Mālik and Ibn Wahb,² or in the time between Mālik and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr.³ Mālik’s younger contemporary Darāwardī is responsible for some of it.⁴

This makes it impossible to regard information on the Medinese lawyers in the time of the Successors as genuine unless it is positively shown to be authentic. It would be rash to exclude this possibility a priori, but as far as I have been able to investigate the development of the Medinese doctrine, I have not found any opinion ascribed to one of these ancient lawyers which is likely to be authentic. The general history of legal doctrine makes it improbable that the Medinese in the time of the “seven lawyers” had progressed farther than their Iraqian contemporary Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī.⁵ That the doctrine of Ibn Musayyib showed ten essential differences from that of Mālik,⁶ presupposing as it does that both doctrines are comparable, is obviously the result of later systematizing.⁷

As an example of the negative result mentioned in the preceding paragraph, it will be useful to analyse one case in which the information on the doctrine of two of the “seven lawyers” would seem, on the face of it, most likely to be authentic. An ancient Medinese way of expressing “practice” or consensus was to refer to what men or people used to do (al-nās ʿalaih). This term is attested for Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd (Mud. i. 36), and occurs in non-legal literature in Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (Ṣaḥāba, 121); it had almost fallen out of current usage in the time of Mālik, one generation later,⁸ and may well go back as far as the year A.H. 100, little more than a generation earlier. The same kind of reference to the usage of men is in fact ascribed to Qāsim b. Muḥammad in his version of a legal maxim which he