The Sahifa of Ali ﵁ on His Scabbard

In the previous article, on the Sahifa as-Sadiqa, we saw how a young companion, Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁, with the express permission of the Prophet ﷺ himself, began to record every word he heard from the blessed mouth. His Sahifah Sadiqah, the truthful parchment, ran to hundreds of ahadith and kept circulating within his family until his great-grandson Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀ was still dictating from it half a century later. That document was, in itself, a crushing counter-proof to the claim that hadith was first put into writing in the second century AH. But one parchment of one young convert can, for whoever stubbornly wishes to doubt, be waved away as a chance exception. An eccentric young man who made his notes and whom no one else imitated.

This article shows that the objection does not hold. For there existed a second sahifa, written in that same first decade after the Hijra, carried by a man whose position in the Umma was at no level comparable to that of an early young convert. He was the cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, raised in his household from his youth. He was the son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ, married to his youngest daughter Fatimah ﵂. He was father of the two grandchildren whom the Prophet ﷺ carried on his shoulders in public. He was one of the first scribes of the wahy, and he would, about twenty-five years after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, become the fourth Caliph of the Umma.

His name is Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁. And the document with which this article deals was not stowed away in a cupboard and was not preserved in a family archive. It hung from the sheath of his sword, rolled or folded into a bundle he took with him everywhere. He quoted from it on the minbar of Kufa during his caliphate. He read aloud from it whenever people asked him what the Law said about blood money, about the freeing of captives, about the sanctity of the boundaries of Medina. And when someone wished to insinuate that the family of the Prophet ﷺ possessed secret legal knowledge withheld from the rest of the Umma, Ali ﵁ answered with a short, sovereign sentence recorded by al-Bukhari ﵀ in the very first book of his Sahih, the Book of Knowledge.

We have nothing except the Book of Allah ﷻ and this parchment that hangs from the sheath of my sword.

That is the sentence we shall dissect in this article. For it is the most concentrated refutation the classical sources have left us of the entire thesis that Islamic Law before the second century AH was handed down purely orally. Here is a written legal document. Here is the man who carries it. Here is the place where it hangs. Here are the questioners, the onlookers, the mosque in which it is read aloud. And here are, in Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and the Musnad of Imam Ahmad ﵀, with further transmissions in later collectors, the chains of scholars who passed the text on century after century.

Whoever takes this documentary mass seriously can no longer maintain with any decency that written legal hadith was an invention of the second century. Unless he is prepared to write off the whole classical source tradition as one great conspiracy. And that is exactly what the orientalist school of Goldziher and Schacht, above all Schacht in his The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, at a certain point in fact had to do. We shall see that the price of that position is unpayably high.

Who Ali ﵁ was in 10 AH

To understand the weight of the sahifa on his sword, we must first call to mind the man who carried it. In 10 AH, the last year of the life of the Prophet ﷺ, Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁ was about thirty years old. He was born in the Ka’bah itself, according to a well-established tradition, and from his early childhood he had been taken into the household of his cousin Muhammad ﷺ, long before the Prophet ﷺ would receive his prophethood. When Abu Talib stood under economic pressure in difficult years, Abbas ﵁ and Muhammad ﷺ each took one of his sons into their homes. Ali ﵁ came under the care of the man who would later become his father-in-law.

This detail, sometimes erased in modern biographies, is of the greatest importance for the history of the hadith. For it means that Ali ﵁, from his early youth until the day of the passing of the Prophet ﷺ in 11 AH, lived uninterruptedly in the closest physical proximity to the Messenger ﷺ. He was the first male Muslim, or the second after Abu Bakr ﵁ depending on which tradition one follows. He slept in the bed of the Prophet ﷺ on the night of the Hijra, wrapped in his green cloak, while the men of Quraish stood around the house with drawn swords. He belonged to the group of wahy scribes whom the Prophet ﷺ called when a new revelation descended. He was one of the advocates, the mediators, the keepers of the secrets of the Message.

In Medina his house was joined to that of the Prophet ﷺ. His wife Fatimah ﵂ was the youngest daughter of the Prophet ﷺ and the only one of his children who outlived him. Their two sons, Hasan ﵁ and Husayn ﵁, grew up with their grandfather, who carried them on his shoulders during the Friday sermon. When Hasan ﵁ as a small child pulled at his beard while the Prophet ﷺ lay in sujud, the Messenger ﷺ waited until the child himself decided that it was enough. This was the family in which Ali ﵁ lived. The family whose intimacy with the revelation was so great that modern readers are often astonished at the volume of material transmitted by the Ahl al-Bayt.

It is within this circumstance that the sahifa on the scabbard receives its meaning. It is not the document of an outsider labouring to remember what he has heard from others. It is the document of a man who grew up in the house in which the revelation descended, and who knows the rules he has noted down at first hand.

The method of the writing

When did Ali ﵁ write this text. The sources give no exact dating, but the contents of the sahifa itself point us in a direction. Several of the rules mentioned in it belong to the legal pronouncements of the Prophet ﷺ during the Medinan period, in particular in the years after the Battle of Khaybar in 7 AH and during the Farewell Pilgrimage in 10 AH. The rules on the sacred boundaries of Medina, haram al-Madinah, were formally proclaimed in Medina itself. The rules on the diya, the blood money, and on the protection of a believer against private retaliation belong to the mature legal system that the Prophet ﷺ articulated in full form in his final years.

It is probable that Ali ﵁ built up the sahifa progressively, verse by verse, rule by rule, in the ten years after the Hijra. Not everything was set on one parchment at one moment. But by the end of the life of the Prophet ﷺ he had a finished bundle with him, fastened to his scabbard. We know this because he quoted from it throughout his caliphate, which ran from 35 to 40 AH, and because his sons Hasan ﵁ and Husayn ﵁ and his cousin Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁ had knowledge of it.

The placement of the document is itself a remarkable detail. A sword hangs at the hip. The sheath is within daily reach, for the man who wears it has it with him in every battle and on every journey. The classical transmission places the parchment on that sheath, close to the body, where it stayed with him. The suggestion that speaks from this is clear. This was no sentimental family heirloom lying in a drawer. This was a working document, a reference work, an instrument consulted daily.

Modern readers must here detach themselves for a moment from the association between writing and formal libraries. A parchment on a scabbard, in the seventh century, was the equivalent of a notebook in an inside pocket. Compact, portable, protected by the leather of the sheath against wind and weather, and always available for consultation. It says something profound about the culture of early Islamic authority that the future fourth Caliph carried a written legal text so close to his body that he literally could not forget it.

The question of Abu Juhayfah ﵁

The famous dialogue that has fixed the whole sahifa tradition takes place during the caliphate of Ali ﵁ in Kufa. Abu Juhayfah Wahb ibn Abdullah as-Suwa’i ﵁, a younger companion who in his youth had still seen the Prophet ﷺ, comes to Ali ﵁ with a question that had begun to circulate in the community. Certain groups, above all people who would later become the proto-Shi’a, claimed that the Ahl al-Bayt possessed secret legal knowledge withheld from the rest of the Umma. Secret exegeses of the Quran, secret ahadith of the Prophet ﷺ, secret rules passed down only through the bloodline.

Ali ﵁ forcefully refuted this suggestion at various moments in his life. The question of Abu Juhayfah ﵁ is one of the moments at which he does so openly, in the presence of listeners, with the piece of evidence in his hand. Imam al-Bukhari ﵀ included this episode in Kitab al-'Ilm, the Book of Knowledge, the very first chapter of his Sahih. That is a placement full of meaning. Out of thousands of ahadith he chose this passage to instruct the reader on the nature of Islamic knowledge. No secret, no esoteric family transfer, but the Book of Allah ﷻ and a second written source accessible to everyone.

In other versions, recorded in Sahih Muslim and in Imam Ahmad ﵀, Ali ﵁ extends the contents of the parchment with the rules on the sacred boundaries of Medina, with the prohibitions resting on the city of Medina like the prohibitions on Mecca, and with the rules on who may grant asylum to a fugitive. The core content, however, remains the same. The parchment contains legal rules laid down by the Prophet ﷺ, written down by Ali ﵁ in the direct presence of the Messenger ﷺ or immediately afterwards.

Three elements deserve separate attention in the quoted dialogue. The first is the oath with which Ali ﵁ begins. By the One who splits the seed and creates the soul. This is no loose formula. It is a heavy oath, an oath by the creative power of Allah ﷻ Himself, with which he makes the listener feel the weight of his answer. The second element is the threefold enumeration of what he does possess. The Book of Allah ﷻ, the parchment, and the understanding granted to a believer. What he does not possess is a secret fourth category. The third element is the naked concreteness of what stands in the parchment. No mystical doctrines, no hidden exegeses, but the three matters every jurist needed to regulate the daily life of the Umma.

The contents of the parchment

What exactly stood on the sahifa on the scabbard of Ali ﵁. When we lay the various versions of the hadith side by side, in Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and the Musnad of Imam Ahmad ﵀, a reasonably complete reconstruction emerges. The document contained at least the following legal headings.

First the diya, the blood money. This is one of the most codified areas of Islamic law. When a Muslim killed another believer deliberately or by accident, or inflicted a wound or severed a limb, the compensation to the victim’s family was legally fixed. A hundred camels for a free adult man. Half of that amount for a woman. Specific fractions for specific wounds. Fingers, teeth, ears, eyes, noses, every one of them had its own tariff, and it was the Prophet ﷺ who had established those tariffs. A judge who had to rule on an injury case could not improvise. He had to know the rules.

Ali ﵁ had written them down. Not in his memory alone, though his memory was brilliant. On his parchment. And when later, as Caliph in Kufa, he had a case to handle, he could reach for his scabbard, unroll the document, and read out the appropriate rule. This is no later reconstruction. This is how Imam al-Bukhari ﵀ presents the matter in Kitab al-Diyat, the Book of Blood Monies. The chapter on the diya in Sahih al-Bukhari opens with the same sahifa tradition. The document of Ali ﵁ is used by al-Bukhari ﵀ as foundational legal evidence for the rules he then sets out.

Second, the freeing of a captive. Fakk al-asir. This was a command the Prophet ﷺ had urged in many situations. After the Battle of Badr, captives were ransomed by their families. Some were released on condition that they taught ten Medinan children to read and write. Others were freed out of mercy. The rule that a Muslim has the duty to work for the release of a captive fellow believer belongs to the heartland of the early Islamic ethos. Ali ﵁ had this rule on his parchment.

Third, the rule that a believer is not killed for the killing of an unbeliever. La yuqtalu mu’minun bi-kafirin. This is one of the more technical rules of criminal law, and it required written recording because it could easily be misunderstood. The rule did not mean that a Muslim could kill a non-Muslim with impunity. The diya was owed, and in the case of deliberate murder of a covenant partner even corporal punishment was possible under certain circumstances. What the rule said was that the qisas, the equivalent retaliatory penalty of life for life, was not automatically applied when the victim was not a Muslim. The legal reasoning behind it is complicated and has been worked out differently by the schools of law across the centuries. But that the original rule came from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ, and that Ali ﵁ had noted it on his parchment, has stood firm since Sahih al-Bukhari.

Fourth, in versions recorded outside Kitab al-'Ilm, the sacred boundaries of Medina. The city of Medina had been declared by the Prophet ﷺ a haram, a sanctified territory like Mecca. The boundaries ran from the lava field of Ayr in the south to the lava field of Thawr in the north. Within these boundaries no tree might be felled, no wild animal hunted, no weapon raised against a believer without lawful cause. Whoever introduced a bid’ah within these boundaries, or deliberately sheltered a fugitive who had sinned, fell under a specific curse the Prophet ﷺ had pronounced. Imam al-Bukhari ﵀ gathered these rules in Kitab Fadha’il al-Madina, the Book on the Merits of Medina, and there the sahifa of Ali ﵁ is again cited as source evidence.

Fifth, in yet other versions, the rules on which of the Muslims may grant asylum. Dhimmah al-muslimin wahidah. The protection a believer grants to an unbeliever holds for the whole Umma. An ordinary Muslim, regardless of his status, could grant an unbeliever asylum, and that asylum was binding on all other Muslims, including the Caliph. This was a revolutionary principle in the seventh century, and it meant that the power to grant asylum was not monopolised by the ruling class. It was a right of the ordinary believing individual. Ali ﵁ had it on his parchment.

This is a minimum list. It is possible that more was in it, but what the sources expressly hand down to us is the core above. As confirmed by Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and the Musnad of Imam Ahmad ﵀, that core comprised the diya, the liberation of captives, the prohibition on killing a believer for an unbeliever, and the sanctity of Medina.

Why Schacht runs aground here

In 1950 Joseph Schacht published a book that would dominate orientalist hadith studies for decades. The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Schacht’s thesis, in its most provocative formulation, was the following. There existed no substantial corpus of legal hadith going back to the Prophet ﷺ himself. What appeared in the canonical collections as Prophetic hadith was in reality the legal opinion of jurists of the second century AH, attributed retroactively to the Prophet ﷺ in order to gain authority. The whole structure of isnads, the chains of transmission that furnish every hadith with its pedigree, was according to Schacht in part a later fabrication. Only from about 100 AH onward, he estimated, did people begin to put legal ahadith into writing and to construct closed isnads for them.

The thesis is, at first sight, a daring one. At second sight it is shaky. For it depends on a capacity to explain away every single early written indication. And the sahifa of Ali ﵁ is exactly such an indication with which the thesis cannot cope. We have a document in which legal ahadith on diya, captives, qisas, and the sanctity of Medina are enumerated. The document hangs from the sheath of a man who in 11 AH was about thirty years old and who died in 40 AH. The document is quoted by Ali ﵁ himself in public questioning, in the mosque, before an audience of witnesses. It is transmitted by his sons Hasan ﵁ and Husayn ﵁, by his cousin Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁, by Abu Juhayfah ﵁ and by a whole series of other companions and tabi’in. The chain runs unbroken until Imam al-Bukhari ﵀ fixes it in the ninth century, spread across several chapters of his Sahih, including the Book of Knowledge, the Book of Blood Monies and the Book on the Merits of Medina.

Schacht’s method of clearing away such evidence was usually to accuse the early testimonies of projection. Later scholars, he claimed, had projected the existing legal practice back into the mouths of earlier authorities, and thus created an illusion of early writtenness. But this reasoning breaks apart on the sahifa of Ali ﵁ for several reasons.

First, the social profile. Who in the second century AH would have an interest in attributing a written legal sahifa to Ali ﵁. Not the Umayyads, who were in power at the time, for they had positioned themselves precisely against the followers of Ali ﵁. Nor the Abbasids, who took power in 132 AH, for although they claimed to rule in the name of the Ahl al-Bayt, they appealed to Abbas ﵁ and not to Ali ﵁. The proto-Shi’a did have reason to want to give Ali ﵁ extra authority, but they claimed precisely that he possessed secret knowledge withheld from the rest of the Umma. And the sahifa hadith does exactly the reverse. It explicitly denies that Ali ﵁ had secret knowledge, and presents him as the possessor of publicly verified legal text accessible to everyone. Imam al-Bukhari ﵀ includes this hadith to refute the proto-Shi’a claim, not to support it. A forgery would have found no forger.

Second, the level of detail and the legal precision. The four or five headings that are named in the sahifa are not the most politically charged headings of the legal system. They are practical, technical, daily usable rules. Diya tariffs, release of captives, qisas rules, haram boundaries. None of these headings offers an argument for a specific political faction. They are neutral in the first civil war and in the rivalries that followed. Whoever fabricated a forgery to support a political position would choose other subjects.

Third, the physical specificity. On the sheath of his sword. In his hand. He unrolled it. These are details that are normally omitted in legal literature because they contribute nothing to the legal argument. Their presence points to a living memory of an actual event, not to a purposeful construction. A forger concentrates on the content he wants to legitimise. He does not add superfluous physical details that prove nothing.

Fourth, the multiplicity of isnads. The hadith occurs in several canonical collections, with chains going back to different companions. Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami ﵀, in his Studies in Early Hadith Literature, keeps his own finding on Ali ﵁ strikingly sober. He notes only that Ali ﵁ was one of the scribes of the Prophet ﷺ, that the Prophet ﷺ once dictated a text to him which he recorded on a large piece of parchment on both sides, and that he possessed a Sahifah confirmed in the names of seven transmitters: Abu Juhayfah ﵁, Abu at-Tufayl ﵁, al-Ashtar, al-Harith ibn Suwayd ﵀, Jariyah ibn Qudamah ﵁, Qais ibn Abbad ﵀ and Tariq ibn Shihab ﵀. More than those seven names and that bare fact al-Azami does not claim. The dramatic details, the scabbard, the minbar of Kufa, the unrolling of the parchment, come not from his pen but from the classical hadith itself, notably the transmission of Abu Juhayfah ﵁ in Sahih al-Bukhari. Precisely that separation is instructive. None of these chains is fabricated from a common source. They come from different geographical milieus, Kufa, Basra, Medina, and they are transmitted by different generations of students. The tawatur on the core fact, that Ali ﵁ possessed a written legal document transmitted in his name, is overwhelming.

For all these reasons the sahifa of Ali ﵁ is a stone against which Schacht’s thesis collides. A written legal text, its contents explicitly stated in Sahih al-Bukhari, carried by the fourth Caliph, quoted in his presence and during his lifetime, transmitted through several independent chains, with witnesses from three different geographical milieus. Its dating lies in the first decade after the Hijra. That is almost a full century before the second century AH that Schacht had proposed as the lower boundary for written legal hadith. The thesis breaks.

It is telling that a portion of Schacht’s successors in Western orientalism, in the last decades of the twentieth century, retreated from the most extreme conclusions of their predecessor. Harald Motzki analysed the early Meccan fiqh, in particular the circle around Ata ibn Abi Rabah and Ibn Jurayj as transmitted in the Musannaf of Abd ar-Razzaq, and came to the conclusion that already in the first century AH an extensive legal tradition circulated that could be reliably traced back to early authorities. That is, in academic jargon, a partial retreat in the direction of precisely the body of evidence that the sahifa of Ali ﵁ hands us. Other sceptics held their position. G.H.A. Juynboll, for example, refined the method of isnad analysis without returning to the authenticity the classical tradition claims. The shift is thus partial, not general, but it is real.

Three social layers

We have now seen two sahifas, both from the first decade after the Hijra. The Sahifah Sadiqah of Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁ from the previous article, and the sahifa on the scabbard of Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁ in this article. They stand in sharp contrast to each other, and precisely that contrast is the proof that the habit of writing was not bound to one type of companion.

Abdullah ﵁ was a young convert from a later phase of Mecca. He was no relative of the Prophet ﷺ. He was not involved in the decision-making of the higher circles. What he did have was the natural curiosity of a student who wanted to record every word of his teacher. His parchment was a student’s document.

Ali ﵁ was something entirely different. He was the cousin, the son-in-law, the closest male relative of the Prophet ﷺ. He was a member of the Ahl al-Bayt. He was one of the wahy scribes. He would later become the fourth Caliph. His parchment was no student’s document. It was a document of authority, a reference work carried by the future highest political authority of the Umma and quoted in public.

That the habit of writing existed both among students and within the highest family of the Prophet ﷺ excludes the possibility that the writing of hadith was a local curiosity. It was a general practice. We see the same habit in other companions. Anas ibn Malik ﵁ had a collection. Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁ had a sahifa. Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁ filled shelves. Samurah ibn Jundub ﵁ left a large document to his son. In the next article we shall meet the most productive of them all, Abu Hurayra ﵁, in whose circle more than eight hundred students were counted who systematically noted down his ahadith.

For now it is enough to record what the two sahifas together prove. The habit of writing hadith was no second-century innovation. It was there from the first decade after the Hijra. It comprised legal material of a technical character, not only pious memories or edifying sayings. And it was practised in public, before witnesses, in a manner confirmed by the whole classical isnad tradition.

The chain of preservation

What happened to the sahifa of Ali ﵁ after his death in 40 AH. The sources give fewer details here than for the Sahifah Sadiqah of Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁, but enough to reconstruct the chain of preservation.

Ali ﵁ was struck down in Ramadan 40 AH in the mosque of Kufa by a Khariji volunteer named Ibn Muljam, with a poisoned sword. He died several days later. His eldest son Hasan ﵁ was briefly recognised as Caliph in Kufa, but after a few months renounced his claims in favour of Mu’awiyah ﵁ to prevent further civil war. Hasan ﵁ withdrew to Medina, where he died in 50 AH. Husayn ﵁ also remained in Medina until his fate took him to Karbala in 61 AH.

The legal inheritance of Ali ﵁, including the sahifa, was not lost. It was passed on through various channels. The primary channel was the family. Hasan ﵁ and Husayn ﵁ knew the contents of the parchment. Zayn al-Abidin Ali ibn al-Husayn ﵀, the son of Husayn ﵁ who as the only man of his household survived Karbala, remained in Medina and passed the legal heritage on to his son Muhammad al-Baqir ﵀, and he in turn to Ja’far as-Sadiq ﵀, the Imam whose circle became an important source both for the Hanafi school through Abu Hanifah and for the Maliki school through Imam Malik ﵀.

A second channel ran through Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁, the cousin of Ali ﵁ and the most learned of his generation. Ibn Abbas ﵁ had access to the family archive and passed much of the material on to his students in Mecca, above all to Ikrimah ﵀, Mujahid ﵀, Ata ibn Abi Rabah ﵀, and Sa’id ibn Jubayr ﵀. Through these students the legal positions of Ali ﵁ entered the mainstream of the Hijazi school of law, where Imam Malik ﵀ included them in his Muwatta, and from where they flowed on to Imam ash-Shafi’i ﵀ and all later schools.

A third channel ran through Abu Juhayfah ﵁ himself and the other direct witnesses of Ali ﵁ in Kufa. They taught the contents to their students among the tabi’in, and those students taught it in turn to Shu’bah ﵀, to Sufyan ath-Thawri ﵀, to Abu Hanifah ﵀, to the whole Iraqi school of law that finally consolidated in the Hanafi tradition.

We know, then, with great certainty, that the legal material of the sahifa survived the centuries. Some aspects have been interpreted differently by different schools of law, above all the third point on qisas and the non-Muslim, on which the Hanafi school takes a different position from the other three schools. But that the material is authentic and stems from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ is not doubted by the overwhelming majority of jurists, Sunni and Shi’i alike.

The physical parchment itself has, as far as we know, not been preserved. That is not surprising. Parchment of the seventh century, in the climate of the Hijaz and Iraq, decays over the centuries. What has been preserved is the text of what stood on it, fixed by dozens of independent chains, and consolidated in its definitive form in the canonical collections of the third century AH.

The wider implications for the science of hadith

We are now in a position to draw some wider conclusions from the two sahifas we treated in the previous article and in this one. These conclusions are of fundamental importance for understanding the science of hadith as a whole.

The first conclusion is that the opposition which orientalists such as Schacht and Goldziher constructed between oral and written transmission is a false opposition. In the Islamic community of the first decade after the Hijra, ahadith were transmitted orally and in writing simultaneously. Oral transfer and written recording complemented each other. The written version served as memory aid and as reference work. The oral version served as the living lesson from teacher to student, with the opportunity to verify, to ask, to correct. Both channels were used cumulatively, and we have seen that even a man like Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ in the compilation of the Quran had both channels tested against each other.

The second conclusion is that the habit of writing existed early in legal material as well. Not only pious stories, not only moral exhortations, but concrete legal rules were put into writing. The sahifa of Ali ﵁ contains diya tariffs, qisas rules and haram boundaries. That is technical law, the kind of material for which written recording is most necessary.

The third conclusion is that the habit of writing was socially widespread. From a young convert to the cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, from the student to the future Caliph. Whoever was able to write, wrote. And even whoever could not write had his son or his nephew or his slave do the writing for him.

The fourth conclusion is that the Islamic community developed from its beginning a scholarly consciousness of the necessity of verification. The Prophet ﷺ himself had commanded that whoever attributed to him something he had not said should seek out his place in the Fire. His companions took that warning very seriously. Writing down a hadith was no light undertaking. It was the assumption of a responsibility that reached into the Hereafter. Whoever does not feel this gravity does not understand why the sahifa of Ali ﵁ existed, and why he carried it so literally on his body.

Closing: three sahifas, three social layers

We saw in the previous article the Sahifah Sadiqah, the document of a young convert who, with the express permission of the Prophet ﷺ, wrote down every word. We have seen in this article the sahifa on the scabbard, the document of the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ, the man who would later become fourth Caliph. Two parchments, two social layers, one and the same period. Both from the first decade after the Hijra. Both filled with material that the Prophet ﷺ had taught. Both transmitted through independent chains into the canonical collections of the third century AH.

But something is still missing from this sketch. For besides the writer-student and the writer-family there was a third figure who for the hadith tradition perhaps meant more than any other companion. A man who became famous not for his parchment, though he certainly wrote, but for the extraordinary scope of his memory and for the size of his circle of students. A man who spent no more than four years in the direct company of the Prophet ﷺ, and who in that short time absorbed so many ahadith that he would become the most productive transmitter of the whole Umma. A man who called himself the poorest of people, who sat listening in the mosque on an empty stomach while other companions were at the market or working in the orchards, and who through this undivided attention gathered a treasure that would feed the whole of later hadith science.

His name was Abu Hurayra ﵁, the Father of the Little Kitten, and the sources agree that about eight hundred students lived around him who systematically noted down his ahadith. Eight hundred students, not one or two. Eight hundred independent channels, many of them writers, some of them later great transmitters themselves in Medina, Mecca, Egypt and Syria. What the two sahifas of the previous article and this one had established on a small scale, that hadith transmission was written and plural, would under Abu Hurayra ﵁ come to an explosion.

In the next article we leave the individual parchments and step inside the teaching circle where the science of hadith found its form. We shall see there how a man who slept on the Suffah in the mosque of Medina gathered in four years the material from which thousands of later scholars would draw. And we shall see how his eight hundred students, each with their own notes and their own memories, formed the definitive refutation of the claim that hadith was a late second-century invention.

The history of the Hadith is not the history of an oral legend. It is, from the first decade after the Hijra, the history of men and women who knew that the Word of the Messenger ﷺ could not be entrusted to the fickleness of memory alone. Abdullah ﵁ wrote in silence for himself. Ali ﵁ wrote and carried it visibly at his side. Abu Hurayra ﵁ would gather a whole generation of writers around him. Three moments, three methods, one single goal. The preservation of what the Messenger ﷺ had said, in a form that would withstand the passage of the centuries.