ADDENDA 351

(Āthār A.Y. 669). It is difficult to say whether this attribution is genuine; if it is, the opinion of the school of Kufa must have changed between Ibrāhīm and Abū Ḥanīfa (cf. Muw. Shaib. 275).

p. 244: The 'Seven Lawyers of Medina'. Ibn al-Nadīm (wrote 377) attributes to Ibn Abil-Zinād (d. 174; cf. above, p. 7) a Book on the ra’y of the seven lawyers of Medina and their points of difference (Fihrist, p. 225, ll. 28 f.). According to Ibn Ḥajar (Tahdhīb, vi. 353), Ibn Abil-Zinād derived his Book of the Seven [Lawyers] from his father. But according to the same Ibn Ḥajar (iii. 807, on the authority of Aṣma'ī), Ibn Abil-Zinād singled out three persons as the prominent scholars of Medina; according to Dhahabī (A. Fischer, Biographien von Gewährsmännern, 46), he singled out four—and both short lists contain names outside the group of Seven. I therefore regard the reference in the Fihrist as Ibn al-Nadīm’s description, in the terms of his own time, of the work, and not an exact quotation of its title as formulated by the author. R. Brunschvig, in al-Andalus, xv (1950), 399, refers to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. Zaid b. Aslam (d. 182; Tahdhīb, s.v.) who, according to Ibn Ḥazm (Iḥkām, ii. 113), composed a book in which he collected the opinions 'on which the seven lawyers of Medina, to the exclusion of others, agreed—but this only amounted to a few pages.' As the person in question is known only as an exceedingly unreliable traditionist and not as a Mālikī scholar (he occurs neither in the Dībāj of Ibn Farḥūn nor in the Shajarat al-Nūr of Muḥammad Makhlūf), I am not prepared to accept this statement as authoritative. The Mudawwana, iv. 8, refers to the opinion of “the seven” and enumerates them painstakingly one by one, “together with other authorities among their equals” (ma‘a mashyakha siwāhum min nuẓarā’ihim); it is possible that the idea of the group of the “seven lawyers” started from this passage.

p. 246, n. 4: Ibrāhīm b. Saʿd was born in A.H. 108 and died between 182 and 185, and doubt was thrown on the traditions which he related from Zuhri because he was too young when he heard them from him (Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Tahdhīb, i. 216).