The commission that travelled to two cities
In the previous article we stood in Damascus, at the court of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, and we saw how the caliph, in the year 100 AH, gave the writing of hadith the force of a state mandate. We read the text of his summons, short, sober, built in three movements: a fear that the knowledge would die with those who carried it, an instruction to write down whatever still remained, and a condition that only what was attributed to the Prophet ﷺ himself would be included. We saw how Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀ was addressed by the caliph and how he accepted the commission.
What we touched on only in passing in that article is that the summons did not reach one man in one city. The classical sources record that the caliph directed his request to a group of scholars. In the report that al-Azami ﵀ cites at the opening of his Studies, it reads as follows: Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ was the first to ask Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, al-Zuhri and others to collect the hadith. Two names are singled out here, and the rest are indicated with “and others”. What the caliph had in mind was, in other words, not a singular commission to one archivist, but a broad anchoring of the work in several hands at once.
This article follows one of those hands. While al-Zuhri ﵀ in the north was laying out his empire-wide network, in the south, in Medina, the other explicitly named man received the commission in his own house. That man was Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀. He was at that moment the highest civil authority of the city. He was governor and he was judge. He was moreover a jurist, an Ansari from a lineage in which hadith and fiqh had been handed down from father to son. And he was, for anyone who knew the circles of Medina from the inside, one of the few men still living who dealt with everyday familiarity with two sources that were of inestimable value for the prophetic transmission from the house of Aisha ﵂: Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ﵀, and al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀.
In this article we are going to look at that Medinan commission from close by. We are going to see who Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was, what the commission to him entailed, on which sources he had to rely for it, and why the presence of precisely this Medinan compilation, in precisely this other city, in the same months as the work of al-Zuhri ﵀, constitutes a refutation all of its own of an argument that has lain on the orientalist desk ever since Goldziher. For the difference between one scholar who writes on commission and several scholars who write on commission side by side and independently is not a quantitative difference. It is a methodological difference of the highest order.
Whoever wonders why the classical tradition is so confident about the continuity of the transmission will find a large part of the answer in this work carried out in distributed fashion, and in the scholars who bore it. We note in advance that the classical sources describe the commission as one collective request; the picture of two parallel, independent compilations that we shall develop in this article is the reasoning that this article builds upon those sources, not a formulation that al-Azami himself derived from the sources.
The city in which he was born
Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Amr ibn Hazm al-Ansari ﵀ was born in Medina, around the year 50 of the hijra. Whoever briefly sets out the chronology sees at once what that means. He was born in the year in which the power of Mu’awiyah ﵁ in Damascus had consolidated itself, well over two decades after the passing of Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, a little under twenty years after the passing of Uthman ﵁, and at a moment when there were still living in Medina dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women who had known the Prophet ﷺ himself. The city of his youth was still the same city the Prophet ﷺ had entered at the hijra. The mosque in which he will have prayed as a child was still the same mosque in which the Prophet ﷺ had led the prayer. The graves of Abu Bakr ﵁ and Umar ﵁, beside that of the Messenger of Allah ﷻ himself, lay a stone’s throw from the house in which he grew up.
He grew up in an Ansari family, that is to say: in a family of that Medinan tribe which had come out to receive the Prophet ﷺ in the year 1 of the hijra. His grandfather was Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, one of the younger Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ. We have already met his name in the article on the early written transmission, in the context of the written pattern that already existed in the time of the Prophet ﷺ himself. Amr ibn Hazm ﵁ had been sent out personally by the Messenger of Allah ﷻ to Najran as an administrator. For that assignment the Prophet ﷺ had given him a detailed letter in which rules were set down concerning the times and manners of the prayer, concerning ablution, concerning zakat and taxation, concerning spoils and concerning diya, in a manner that left no room for doubt. That letter was later edited and passed on by his son, and it remained in the possession of the family, for generations.
That is no marginal detail. It means that Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ grew up in a family in which a written document of the Prophet ﷺ was kept and guarded. He grew up in a lineage in which written prophetic transmission was not an abstract category, but a concrete heirloom that was preserved from generation to generation. The naturalness with which he would later deal with written hadith, and the ease with which he would accept a state commission for written compilation, find their foundation not in an ideology. They find their foundation in a family habit that goes straight back to the time of the Prophet ﷺ himself.
His father, Muhammad ibn Amr ibn Hazm, was likewise an Ansari, and moved in the same Medinan circles in which the juristic tradition of the city was crystallising. The father was a contemporary of men such as Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, Urwah ibn al-Zubayr ﵀ and al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, scholars from the circle that would later, through the classification of subsequent generations, be designated by the name of the seven jurists of Medina. It is in this circle of senior tabi’in that Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ received his formation. He was not a governor who happened to collect hadith. He was a hadith-jurist who later, for reasons of political suitability on the part of the caliph in Damascus, also became governor.
Governor and judge under Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀
The Umayyad dynasty had never treated Medina as a capital, and that was, for anyone who knew the political memory of the city, sometimes a relief and sometimes a wound. A relief because the centre of power lay in Damascus and the Medinan scholars were therefore left relatively undisturbed in their own teaching circles. A wound because the city in which the Prophet ﷺ had lived was, for the Marwanid branch, often little more than a province that had to pay taxes and a symbol that could be honoured on occasion. The governors appointed over Medina were as a rule Umayyad relatives or clients, of varying reputation.
When Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ accepted the caliphate in 99 AH, that changed. He knew Medina from the inside, for he had himself been its governor from 87 AH to 93 AH, in his younger years under caliph Walid. We saw in the previous article how in those gubernatorial years he had surrounded himself with a council of ten scholars from the city, how he had had the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ restored, and how he had learned what it was to see governance and scholarship not as competing worlds, but as one shared responsibility. When, after his accession as caliph, he had to look for a new governor for Medina, he did not look in the Marwanid family tree, but in the scholarly circle of the city itself. He chose Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀.
It was an unusual choice, and it was deliberate. The caliph wanted someone in Medina who would govern the city not as an occupied territory, but as the mother city of the umma. He wanted someone for whom the legal opinions of the senior fuqaha counted not as a hindrance, but as a guideline. He wanted someone who, when a question arose in the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ about inheritance law or marriage law or the postures of prayer, would consult not his administrative handbook, but the transmission. Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ answered to every one of those criteria. He was moreover judge of the city, an office he continued to hold even after his appointment as governor. Governance and judicature converged in his person, and that was, for the work the caliph had in mind, no coincidence but a requirement.
Here we must pause for a moment over what it meant in 100 AH to be a judge in Medina. A judge ruled on disputes over land, over inheritances, over marriages and divorces, over debts and contracts. He did not rule on them from a codified law book, for no such law book existed, and would not exist in any form for centuries to come. He ruled on them on the basis of the Quran, on the basis of the sunna of the Prophet ﷺ, and on the basis of the established practice of the Companions ﵃ who had lived and acted in the same city. A judge in Medina in 100 AH was, in other words, compelled to consult the transmission every single day of his work. He needed it in order to pass judgment. A man who had served years in this office knew the hadith sources of his city the way an experienced physician knows the medicine cabinet of his practice. He knew which transmission belonged to which question, which source could tip which issue, and which elders in the city still possessed knowledge that lay outside his own collection.
It is to this man, in this position, with this habit of daily consultation of hadith, that the caliph’s commission travelled.
The content of the Medinan commission
The commission to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ has, unlike the general summons to the scholars, been preserved in its specific wording. The classical sources, and in particular Ibn Sa’d in his Tabaqat, cite the content briefly but precisely: the caliph gave instruction to write down the hadith that came from Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ﵀ and al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, as well as from others.
Two names are explicitly mentioned here. Not by chance. Not as a random sample. The caliph asked for the transmission of precisely these two people, and around that, for whatever else could still be gathered. Who these two were, and why their names made it into the text of a caliphal commission, deserves attention of its own. We shall return to it at length in the following sections.
What first deserves our attention here is that the commission was no general formula, no standard administrative text, no generic summons to the scholars of Medina to write down something in their possession. The commission was, though short, methodical. It identified sources. It pointed fingers. It said: this person, and this person, and the people who live around them and still carry their transmission. It is a commission that cannot have been drawn up by a palace official. It is a commission that must have been dictated by someone with insight into the Medinan world of sources, or at least by someone advised by a person who possessed that insight.
We know that Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ himself had that insight. He had grown up in Medina, he had learned to be governor there, he had known the senior fuqaha personally. It is quite conceivable that in the years he served in Medina he had gone in person to Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ﵀ or had received her transmission through intermediaries. It is quite conceivable that he had sat, in the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ, at the feet of al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀. Whether that personal contact was so direct, we do not know with certainty. What we do know is that, when he sat as caliph in Damascus and had the commission sent out, he knew with great precision which names mattered in Medina. The commission is the proof of it.
For Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ the content of the commission must have been reassuring. He was not asked to do the impossible. He was not asked to collect everything that circulated in the entire umma, for that could not be achieved from one city. He was asked for what lived in his immediate vicinity, for what circulated in his own teaching circles, for what was told by the elders in the houses he regularly visited. He was asked to write down the Medinan trunk of a much larger tree, while al-Zuhri ﵀, beside him, would take upon himself the whole crown-work of the empire-wide network.
This is, in one sentence, what makes the choice of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ so considered. He gave each of the scholars a commission that lay within their reach. Of al-Zuhri ﵀, who had travelled throughout Hijaz and Syria and had ties with scholars in every province, he asked the broad, empire-wide gathering. Of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀, who was rooted in Medina and had institutional access there, he asked the deep, local gathering. The two commissions were complementary. The one would do what the other could not. And, if the execution proceeded honestly, both would overlap on the central Medinan core, and would thereby be able to verify one another independently.
Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ﵀
Who was Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ﵀, and why was her name explicitly included in a caliphal commission.
Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ibn Sa’d ibn Zurara al-Ansariyya ﵀ was, at the moment the commission went out, advanced in age. She had been born in the thirties of the hijra, into an Ansari family of Medina. What characterised her above all, and what would later earn her the honoured standing of one of the most reliable female transmitters of the tabi’in generation, was her residence in the house of Aisha bint Abi Bakr ﵂.
Aisha ﵂ passed away in the year 58 AH, at an age at which she was still being consulted as a living source of prophetic transmission by every serious student in Medina. In the final years of her life, Amrah lived with her in her house. It was not a formal teacher-student relationship of the kind that would later take shape in a madrasa. It was domestic presence. Amrah ate with Aisha ﵂, slept in the same house, heard her in informal moments just as much as in formal teaching circles, lived day and night in the presence of the mother of the believers who had lived nine years under the same roof with the Prophet ﷺ.
That kind of residence produces a transfer of knowledge that is unattainable in any other form. What Aisha ﵂ knew of the private night prayer of the Prophet ﷺ, of his conduct with his wives, of the exact order of his actions in the ablution before prayer, of the ways in which he ate and slept and dressed, all of that was absorbed by Amrah not in a teaching circle, but in daily shared life. Many dozens of transmissions that would later be included in the canonical hadith collections under the chain “Aisha narrated” pass through Amrah as direct transmitter.
When a caliph in 100 AH sends a commission to Medina and explicitly names her in it as a source whose hadith must be written down, that says something about the status she held in the umma at that moment. She was not a shadowy figure who happened to have lived in Aisha’s ﵂ house. She was, for anyone who knew the history of transmission from the vantage point of Medina, one of the few still-living key bearers of the Aisha channel. Her passing, which the sources place around 98 AH, lay only shortly behind at the moment of the commission of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀. It is quite possible that the caliph, when he had the commission drawn up, heard of her passing and realised precisely thereby how urgent the work was. The next bearer could die the next month, and if his or her transmission had not been written down, it was gone.
It deserves a brief remark here that Amrah ﵀ is designated in this article with ﵀, the honorific rahimahu Allah that otherwise applies to male scholars. The reason is technical. ﵂, the honorific radi Allahu anha, is reserved for the Sahabiyyat, the female Companions of the Prophet ﷺ. Amrah ﵀ was not a Sahabiyya. She was a tabi’iyya, a scholar of the generation that heard the Companions ﵃ but had not known the Prophet ﷺ himself. For the tabi’in scholars, male or female, this series of articles uses ﵀, the honorific of the scholar. It is not a degree lower, it is a degree different. It marks her in her correct historical place, and it honours her precisely as what she was: not a Sahabiyya, but one of the first central female scholars of the young science that would later be called hadith.
What Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was to write down from her was, in other words, not a personal preference, not a marginal source, not a supplement to a main collection. It was the Aisha stream of Medina, in the most direct form still available.
Al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀
The second name in the commission was al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵀.
Whoever reads these names sees the descent immediately. He was the son of Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, and he was the son of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq ﵁ himself. He was, in other words, a grandson of the first caliph, and thereby also a nephew of Aisha ﵂. In his youth he had been raised in Medina by his aunt, or at the very least intensively guided by her in his early years. He belonged to the circle of senior tabi’in that was later designated by the name of the seven jurists of Medina: Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, Urwah ibn al-Zubayr ﵀, al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, Kharijah ibn Zayd, Sulayman ibn Yasar, Ubayd Allah ibn Abdullah ibn Utbah, and Abu Bakr ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Harith.
For anyone who knows the juristic history of Medina, that is an exceptional position. The seven jurists formed, in the second half of the first century of the hijra, the scholarly college of the city. What they judged in consensus counted in Medina as binding. Their fatwas were consulted by judges, carried along by travelling scholars, noted down by students. Al-Qasim ﵀ belonged to this group from the top down. Unlike Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, who was known for his reserve towards the rulers, and unlike Urwah ﵀, who in the biographical literature counts above all as a collector of the prophetic biography, al-Qasim ﵀ was known above all as a jurist who knew the private life of the Prophet ﷺ through the direct transmission of Aisha ﵂ to him as her own nephew.
He passed away in 107 AH, so at the moment of the commission of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ in 100 AH he was still alive. He was very old, for he had been born around 37 AH, and he was, for anyone counting the elders of Medina, one of the last living bearers of both the Abu Bakr line and the Aisha line. He was moreover blind in his final years, a detail that the biographical literature mentions regularly because it affected the way he received students: without a book before him, in a form of oral instruction that was for that very reason carefully checked by the students present, who wrote down his dictation.
That the commission from Damascus named him alongside Amrah ﵀ tells us something about the combination the caliph was aiming at. Amrah ﵀ represented the Aisha stream through domestic shared life. Al-Qasim ﵀ represented the Abu Bakr stream and the Aisha stream through blood kinship and juristic elaboration. The two together formed, for the Medinan pillar of the entire transmission, a double confirmation. What the one would have taken in could be confirmed by the other, or, where necessary, corrected or supplemented. It was, in a sense, a built-in control mechanism within the city compilation itself, even before the Damascus-Medina comparison would come into play at all.
Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ knew them both. He was judge in the same city, he belonged to the same circle of jurists in which al-Qasim ﵀ was the senior. He knew the houses in which Amrah ﵀ had spent her final years. He knew which students lived around them both, which students had already heard their transmission, which students could still be consulted for verification. For him the commission was not abstract. It was concrete, and it was executable.
How he carried out the work
The sources give us no diary account of the manner in which Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ took the compilation in hand. We have no letter from him to a colleague in which he describes how he sat, with which pen, on which sheets of parchment. What we do have is a number of traces mentioned in the biographical literature about him, and from those traces we can reconstruct the pattern of the work with some confidence.
The commission was, to begin with, not limited to Amrah ﵀ and al-Qasim ﵀. The wording stated expressly that collection was to be made from others as well. Which others in Medina were consulted by him we cannot fully reconstruct from the surviving literature, but we know that he lived in the same city where students of Anas ibn Malik ﵁ still walked about, where old women who as children had known Sahabiyyat were still alive, where mawali of Sahaba ﵃ still lived in the old quarters. The phrase “and others” in the commission opened a window that Abu Bakr ﵀ presumably threw open as wide as possible, precisely because he knew that a specific designation in a caliphal commission is not meant to restrict, but to anchor.
The work was moreover spread out over time. Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ did not pass away until 117 AH, seventeen years after the commission. It is therefore wrong to picture the compilation as a short hectic operation of a few months. It was, rather, a commission that structured his work for the rest of his life. Every time he encountered an older transmitter, there was an obligation to note down what he heard from that person. Every time a student asked him for a hadith, there was an obligation to be able to transmit that hadith in writing. The state commission had, after the short caliphate of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, anchored itself in his personal scholarly practice, and would cease only with his death.
We can moreover say something about the manner in which the knowledge left the house of Abu Bakr ﵀ and spread. For the younger generation of his own family continued the work, and it is precisely for that generation that the biographical documentation gives us a sharper picture. We shall return to this at length in the section on the son and the legacy. What counts here is the pattern: the compilation that began in Medina on state mandate did not remain lying in one cupboard, but was carried further by students and family members, copied and passed on, as was the norm in this culture.
The lost books
Here, however, we must discuss an honest objection, for it is sometimes used to belittle the entire compilation. Ibn Sa’d records in his Tabaqat that the son of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀, when he was later asked about the books, answered that they were lost. What are we to make of that answer.
At first sight it sounds like a disaster. The caliph gave the commission, the scholar collected for years on end, he produced books, and one generation later those books are no more. The story seems to end in failure. For anyone who knows the Islamic scholarly tradition of that time from the inside, however, the picture is the reverse.
Books in the second century of the hijra were, physically, fragile. Parchment yellowed, fell apart, was eaten by insects, was destroyed in floods, went missing in removals, burned in conflicts. A book that lay undamaged in one house for a whole century was the exception. The norm was that books were copied, passed on, read in the teaching circle, and that their physical form eventually perished while their content lived on in newer copies, often with additions and commentaries.
That the same elders who later asked after the fate of a specific book were sometimes answered with “it is lost” means that the original manuscript was no longer present in the family’s house. It emphatically does not mean that the content was gone. The content was, if the transmission had worked well, by that moment already dispersed into dozens of copies in the houses of his students, into the compilations of his own descendants, and moreover, and this is of great importance, into the considerably larger collection that al-Zuhri ﵀ had assembled in the same period and which, thanks to the students of al-Zuhri ﵀ (Imam Malik ﵀, Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀, Ibn Uyaynah ﵀ and many others), would reach the second and third centuries of the hijra.
In other words, the loss of the physical books of Abu Bakr ﵀ went hand in hand with the preservation of the content through multiple parallel channels. That is precisely what the hadith tradition wanted to build in as a mechanism of resilience. No single collection would ever be so isolated that its loss meant loss of substance. No single autograph would ever be so irreplaceable that its destruction would leave a gap in the transmission. The system was, in modern jargon, redundant. And the redundancy was not accidental. It was built in from the moment the written work was spread over multiple scholars and multiple cities.
Whoever says, then: “the books of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ are lost, therefore the compilation failed”, does not understand the scholarly structure of the time. A more accurate picture is: the books of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ have not been preserved as a separate physical collection, while their content was absorbed into the broader, distributed culture of transmission of which his work was an initiating part. That is not failure. That is the success of the system.
Two cities, one commission
We now come back to the central point of this article, namely the methodological significance of the fact that the written work in 100 AH was not entrusted to one man in one city, but was spread over multiple scholars in multiple cities. We stress once more that the classical sources describe this as one collective request; the analysis that follows is the reasoning that this article distils from that request, and not a formulation that al-Azami himself derives from the sources.
Imagine, hypothetically for a moment, that the work had been entrusted to one man. Suppose al-Zuhri ﵀ in Damascus had been the only addressee. What would the structure of the transmission then have been. One scholar, in one capital, at the court of a dynasty, his work dependent on the patronage of the rulers. One stream, one bookcase, one personal archive. For anyone who distrusts the transmission in hindsight, that scenario would indeed have given room for the orientalist line of argument as Goldziher set it up. One scholar, at one court, can be worked upon, can be put under pressure, can, whether he wishes it or not, produce a collection that reflects the taste of his patrons. We explained in the previous article why that line of argument does not hold even in that hypothetical scenario in the case of al-Zuhri ﵀, given his character and his methodological independence. But the structure of the scenario would make the discussion possible in the first place.
The actual structure, however, was a different one. The commission reached al-Zuhri ﵀ and Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ alike, in two separate contexts, in two cities lying well over 1300 kilometres apart. The journey between the two took, in the second century of the hijra, presumably about a month for a courier, longer for a caravan. The scholars in the two cities did have contact through travellers, but they did not work together in a shared office. Their collections were built up independently. What al-Zuhri ﵀ had heard from his teachers in Hijaz and Syria went into his book. What Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ heard from Amrah ﵀, al-Qasim ﵀ and the other elders of Medina went into his book. On the central Medinan core the two collections would overlap, for al-Zuhri ﵀ had also studied in Medina and had also collected transmissions from the Aisha stream. On that overlapping core, for anyone wishing to check in hindsight, an independent verification was possible. If both scholars, working in different cities, at different moments, recorded the same transmission with the same chain and the same text, then the probability that they had invented it together was practically zero. If they recorded different chains for the same transmission, then the choice of their transmitters was once again exposed to independent scrutiny.
This is not a modern scientific concept that we impose on the sources from outside. It is a principle that already came up in the article on the Uthmanic compilation of the Quran, where a second independent stream was deliberately brought in to be laid beside the primary archive. It is the same principle that we shall see return in the article on Imam Malik ﵀‘s Muwatta’, where the Medinan practice serves as a corrective mechanism for the chain transmission. And it is the same caution that forms the heart of classical isnad criticism: a transmission with multiple independent chains (tawatur) is stronger than a transmission with one chain, and a transmission recorded in different cities in different circles is stronger than a transmission that was known only in one city.
Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ has, by spreading his commission over multiple scholars and multiple cities, built in at the level of the state the principle that the individual scholars already applied in their isnad criticism. He subjected the entire compilation itself to the same redundancy requirement that the transmission applies internally as a mark of quality. He did, in other words, for the hadith what a scientist does for his own experiment: he made it possible for an independent replication to be added to the primary work, so that the result did not hang on one source, one person, one location.
What this refutes
In the previous article we discussed Goldziher’s thesis in its general form, namely the thesis that the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ was supposedly in large part a product of Umayyad political manufacture. We saw there that this thesis already founders on the character of the man who gave the order, and on the methodological wording of the order itself, and on the choice of the scholars who received the commission. Here, in this article, we must name one more variant of the orientalist line of argument that is directly undercut by the distributed structure of the work.
That variant might run: yes, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ was indeed a pious man, but his compilation depended in practice on one single scholar, al-Zuhri ﵀, who did sit at court. What al-Zuhri ﵀ wrote down was what he wanted written down, and what he left out was what he wanted left out. The fact that the caliph was pious does not protect his compilation if its execution lay in the hands of a possibly politically malleable scholar. So, even if the order was sincere, the result is open to distrust.
This variant was advanced in the twentieth century by various orientalists in various formulations, and it has a certain intuitive appeal. It no longer makes the mistake of placing Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ himself in the role of manipulator. It places the manipulation one step later, with the scholar who carried out the work. It accepts the sincere intention and distrusts the flawed execution.
The problem with this variant is that it requires that there was one executor. As soon as it appears that the work was divided over multiple scholars in multiple cities, the argument collapses. For if al-Zuhri ﵀ in Damascus had wanted to withhold something, then Abu Bakr ﵀ in Medina would still have recorded the same material from his own local sources. And if Abu Bakr ﵀ in Medina had wanted to falsify something, then al-Zuhri ﵀ would not have picked this up from his own broader network. The two compilations, precisely because they were carried out independently, formed a living check upon one another. Neither could leave anything out without this becoming visible in the other. Neither could add anything without this being open to refutation by the other.
For anyone who distrusts, this is not an argument that one scholar gives. It is an argument that the structure of the whole operation gives. It is precisely for this reason that the classical scholars, and al-Azami in his modern re-evaluation of those same scholars, attached so much weight to the institutional context in which the early compilation was undertaken. It is not merely a biographical detail. It is a methodological foundation.
A third layer of refutation emerges from the choice of the two sources explicitly named in the commission to Abu Bakr ﵀. Amrah ﵀ was no Umayyad client. She was an Ansari woman from Medina, raised in the house of Aisha ﵂, without any tie to the court in Damascus. Al-Qasim ﵀ was no Umayyad ally. He was a descendant of Abu Bakr ﵁, a nephew of Aisha ﵂, and his father Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ had been killed in Egypt in 38 AH in a context that did not exactly stand in a favourable light with respect to the later Umayyad dynasty. An Umayyad caliph wishing to falsify hadith in order to legitimise his dynasty would not choose to have written down the transmission of a family member of the Abu Bakr branch and a student of the Aisha stream. He would choose men at his own court, clients of the Marwanid branch, secretaries he had personally appointed. That Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ had precisely these two names mentioned is in itself proof that his motivation was not a political one. He chose the sources that precisely did not belong to his dynasty, and whose transmission carried precisely that authority which no Umayyad courtier could ever supply.
The son and the legacy
We have already briefly mentioned the son of Abu Bakr ﵀, in the context of his answer to later enquirers that his father’s books were lost. But his son was not merely a recipient of questions. He was a scholar himself, and the transmission continued through him.
Abdullah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Amr ibn Hazm ﵀ lived from around 65 to around 135 AH, and belonged to the group of Medinan scholars of the second generation of tabi’in who supplied the fundamental building blocks for the work that would be set down in compilation form in the decades that followed. He was, in other words, a link between the generation of his father, who had received the commission of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, and the generation of Imam Malik ﵀, who would complete the Muwatta’ in Medina.
It is with this son, and not with the father, that we find a number of concrete traces of written dissemination. Al-Azami records in his Studies that Abdullah ﵀ wrote down transmissions and sent them to Ibn Juraij ﵀ in Mecca. That detail is more than a biographical aside. Ibn Juraij ﵀ was one of the great Meccan hadith scholars of the next generation, and the fact that Abdullah ﵀ sent transmissions to him means that what was recorded in Medina left the city, at least in part, in copied form. We see here the pattern that has come up more than once in this series of articles: transmission is set down in writing, and almost immediately copies go out to fellow scholars in other cities. The original could be lost, but the content, because of this dissemination, was no longer bound to one place.
Al-Azami adds that Abdullah ﵀ appears to have possessed a book on al-maghazi, the military campaigns of the Prophet ﷺ, which was transmitted by his nephew Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵀. We see here a second aspect of the working method: the younger family members were enlisted as scribes and transmitters, so that the knowledge did not remain bound to the age of one scholar, but was spread over a network of family hands. It is precisely this kind of dissemination, from father to son, from son to nephew, from nephew to student, that explains why the loss of an original manuscript in this culture did not mean loss of content.
We must be precise here with the generations, for the earlier parts of this series have pointed to this. The letter of the Prophet ﷺ rested with Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, the grandfather. The state commission of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ went to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀, the governor-jurist. And the written dissemination through Ibn Juraij ﵀ and through the al-maghazi book is connected with Abdullah ﵀, the son, together with his nephew Abd al-Malik ﵀. Three generations, three roles, each with its own share in the same unbroken chain.
Imam Malik ﵀ included in his Muwatta’, on multiple occasions, transmissions he had received from Abdullah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀. What those transmissions contain is thereby derived in direct line from the Medinan stream carried by the house of Ibn Hazm, and what that stream contained was presumably to an important degree the same Amrah transmission and al-Qasim transmission of which the caliphal commission of 100 AH had spoken. The chain runs on. Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ sends his commission in 100 AH to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀. Abu Bakr ﵀ collects and writes. His son Abdullah ﵀, supported by the nephew Abd al-Malik ﵀, passes the work on and disseminates it in writing. Abdullah ﵀ transmits to Imam Malik ﵀. Imam Malik ﵀ includes it in the Muwatta’. The Muwatta’ is transmitted by his students in dozens of recensions. The recensions reach the third century of the hijra, in which Imam Malik ﵀'s work becomes the foundation both for the legal methodology of the Maliki school and for the broader hadith criticism of the musnad and sahih tradition.
What that means is that the short commission of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ in 100 AH has a direct causal line to the Muwatta’, and thereby to the whole classical hadith legacy. We shall discuss that connection at length in the article on Imam Malik ﵀‘s Muwatta’. For now it suffices to establish that the work was not lost with the physical books of Abu Bakr ﵀ himself. It passed over, through the chains of transmission that in this culture were designed for precisely this kind of passage, into works that have been preserved and that we can still open today.
In a sense, the fact that we know Abu Bakr ﵀'s name not through his own book, but through the books of his successors, is precisely the confirmation that the system worked. An individual autograph is lost, but the content that autograph held has come down to us through dozens of hands. No single hand was irreplaceable, for the system was not designed around single hands. It was designed around multiplicity, and in that multiplicity it found its durability.
What this moment means in history
Let us, before we move on to the next article, pause for a moment over what was happening in these months of 100 AH in Medina and Damascus at once. Multiple scholars, in different cities, with different biographies, with different access to the prophetic transmission, with different working methods, received almost simultaneously a commission from the same caliph. They began, each in his own house, with the same fundamental act. They took parchment, they took ink, and they began to write down what they found of prophetic transmission in their memory, in their loose notes, in the houses of their elders.
That seems, from a modern perspective, an unspectacular act. A few scholars set about writing something down. For the culture of that time, however, it was a reversal. For the first time in the history of the umma, the written recording of the hadith was not left to the personal initiative of individual Companions ﵃ or tabi’in, but was recognised by the state as a public priority. And the state recognised it not by burdening one person with the whole work, but by spreading the commission over multiple scholars, including over cities lying well over a thousand kilometres apart.
It is an institutional decision of an order that one does not readily find in the history of many religions, or even in the history of many sciences. Christianity waited centuries for the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon to codify its dogmatic texts, and even then this happened under great political tension. Ancient Judaism waited centuries for the redaction of the Mishna by Yehuda haNasi around 200 CE. The Islamic engagement with the hadith, thanks to the distributed state commission of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, did not have to wait. It laid, within one century of the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, the written foundation on which all later systematic collections would build. And it did so without surrendering the content to one scholar, one city, one ruler or one branch of the transmission.
We stand, in the year 100 of the hijra, on a threshold whose consequences will keep unrolling through the next four centuries, and in fact through the whole remainder of the history of the umma. The musnad of Imam Ahmad ﵀, the sahihs of Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, the sunan of Abu Dawud ﵀, al-Tirmidhi ﵀, al-Nasa’i ﵀ and Ibn Maja ﵀, the Muwatta’ of Imam Malik ﵀, the musannafat of Abd al-Razzaq ﵀ and Ibn Abi Shayba ﵀, all works that would be produced in the following two centuries, would build on the foundation that in these months, in Medina by Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ and in Damascus by al-Zuhri ﵀, received state mandate for the first time.
Not one scholar. Multiple scholars. Not one city. Multiple cities. Not one source of control. A built-in mutual check from the very first day.
Towards the next article
We have seen in this article who Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was, how he functioned in Medina as governor-jurist, what commission he received from Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, to which two sources that commission pointed him in the first place, how he carried out the work, how his son Abdullah ﵀ and his nephew Abd al-Malik ﵀ carried it further in writing, why the loss of his physical books was no loss of his content, and why the mere presence of his Medinan compilation alongside that of al-Zuhri ﵀ constitutes a refutation of its own of a whole line of modern criticism of the early hadith tradition.
What we have touched on only implicitly in this article is the question: do we today, thirteen centuries later, still possess any physical artefact that connects us directly with this generation. Do we have, beyond the chains of transmission carried orally by scholars and copied by their students, also a tangible surviving nuskhah, a manuscript, a document from this tabi’in century whose content has been preserved and whose textual transmission can be compared with later canonical works.
The answer to that question is remarkable. It is affirmative. And it will form the centre of gravity of the next article.
In the next article we shall look at the Sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀ in Sana’a, a document from precisely the same tabi’in generation as that of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ and al-Zuhri ﵀, whose text has been preserved in two independent manuscripts and in modern times has been published and compared word for word with the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀. We shall see how this one surviving sahifa, as a physical witness from a world in which Abu Bakr ﵀ wrote his compilation and al-Zuhri ﵀ laid out his network, forms a direct material confirmation of the work that was undertaken on state mandate in multiple cities at once in the months around 100 AH.
The commission was not merely an order. It was, for anyone who wishes to trace its consequences through the centuries, the beginning of a chain that was preserved in dust and that we can still hold in our hands today.