Suhail ibn Abi Salih ﵀ and the nuskhah of Abu Salih ﵀

In the preceding article we saw how Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀ in Medina brought the hadith together for the first time into a systematically ordered corpus fixed in writing, carried by the caliphal collection decree of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ and passed on to students in five capitals at once. We closed that article with a question that remained hanging in the air. The systematics were beautifully described, and the networks of students were impressive. But do tangible remains of that generation itself still exist? Does there exist a document, written by a student of that generation, that we can lay in our hands and test against the great later collections?

To that question there exists an answer sharper than all others. It lies in an Indian university library in the stencilled form in which Cambridge accepted it in 1966. It lies further, in its medieval manuscript form, in a carefully copied booklet from the sixth century AH, which for centuries circulated in the world of Arabic manuscripts. And it was chosen in 1966 by a young scholar from India as the central exhibit of the dissertation with which he took his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. His name was Mohammad Mustafa Azami ﵀. The document he chose was the nuskhah of Suhail ibn Abi Salih ﵀.

It is no coincidence that precisely this document was chosen. Azami had, according to his own Introduction, about a dozen manuscripts from the first half of the second century AH at his disposal. He writes it himself, in a few sober sentences, on page xix: “There were about a dozen manuscripts at my disposal whose authors belong to the early half of the second century, the editing of which would have presented no major difficulties. Later, it was found necessary to confine the work to one and to study it exhaustively in order to achieve some concrete results. I chose the smallest one which is derived from Abu Hurairah, who has been unjustly criticised by some modern scholars.”

The smallest document. The direct recipient Abu Hurayra ﵁. The Companion who had been attacked hardest by modern criticism. Three choices that at first sight seem modest, but that on closer inspection are strategically and methodologically watertight. Azami wanted a control test, not a monument. He wanted a text that could be combed out down to every isnad link, not a text that would crush him under his work. He wanted the Companion whom the orientalist had tried to undo. And he wanted a manuscript corpus that would enable him to attack at the root the central thesis of Goldziher, Schacht, Sprenger and Margoliouth: that no written hadith material exists from the first two centuries AH.

The nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ is, for the science of hadith, what the Sana’a manuscripts are for the science of the Quran. It is the quiet paper that tips the discussion. It is the object whose existence in itself already undermines the counter-narrative.

This article follows the history of that document. We go first to Medina, to the father. Then to the son. Next to the content of the nuskhah itself, as it has been preserved in forty-eight consecutively numbered hadith. Then to the manuscript witnesses that have withstood the centuries. Next to the method by which Azami merged them in Cambridge into a critical edition. Then to the measurement that every modern researcher can repeat on his own table: the cross-laying of the nuskhah with al-Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀ and the Muwatta of Malik ﵀. And finally to what all that refutes.

We begin, as always, with the link to the Prophet ﷺ.

Abu Salih as-Samman ﵀: the link to Abu Hurayra ﵁

Abu Salih Dhakwan as-Samman ﵀ was a freed client of a Medinan family, presumably born in the years just after the Hijra and died in 101 AH, according to the dating that the classical biographical literature transmits and that Azami follows in his dossier. His byname as-Samman literally means the butter merchant. He earned his living by supplying oil and butter in Medina and in Mecca, and he travelled between the two cities as if they were business addresses in the same street.

On one of those journeys he met Abu Hurayra ﵁. What would ordinarily have been a brief trading relationship became for Abu Salih ﵀ a long-lasting devotion. The biographical literature records that Abu Salih ﵀ stood in close contact with Abu Hurayra ﵁ over many years. He sat in his lessons. He heard his dictations. He memorised his formulations. He knew when Abu Hurayra ﵁ wanted a hadith repeated in a specific way, and when he accepted a variant. He knew which ahadith Abu Hurayra ﵁ repeated regularly in the mosque, and which he reserved for a smaller circle of students.

For anyone who knows the science of hadith, this is the textbook example of what a first-generation Tabi’i should be. No casual listener. No careless passer-by. A student who bound himself to a Companion for years and who subordinated his profession and his travels to that relationship. The classical critics classified Abu Salih ﵀ as thiqah, reliable in every gradation. Yahya ibn Ma’in, Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ included his transmissions without reservation. In the canonical six his name occurs frequently.

The extent of the material that Abu Salih ﵀ took in from Abu Hurayra ﵁ is large. Exactly how large is difficult to calculate, for the material is spread over al-Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Malik ﵀, the Musnad of Ahmad ﵀ and dozens of smaller collections. What we do know is that Abu Salih ﵀ at a certain moment in his life, presumably towards the end, ordered his most characteristic material into a coherent collection. Not everything he had heard. Rather a deliberate selection, a schoolbook, a teaching unity. He gave it no title. His students, and the circle of his son, would come to call it simply the nuskhah of Abu Salih.

The word nuskhah is important here. It is no sahifa in the sense of a loose sheet, and no jami’ in the sense of a large thematic compilation. A nuskhah is, in the hadith terminology of the second and third centuries AH, a delimited, coherent manuscript of a teacher, passed on to his direct students. As Azami sets out in the early chapters of his book, it belongs in the rich terminology with which the early muhaddithun typified their documents. Kitab, sahifa, nuskhah, juz’, mu’jam. Each word refers in practice to a specific literary form, a specific manner of use, a specific transmission technique. Whoever mixes these terms up will misunderstand the hadith literature. Whoever keeps them apart sees a literate culture in which the handling of the written word was already so refined at an early stage that it still astonishes us in our modern archival science.

Abu Salih ﵀ died in the year 101 AH. That is, in the chronology of this theme, almost exactly the time in which Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ sent his famous letter to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm. The father of Suhail ﵀ left the world just as the official collection decree had gone out. He had had the time to compile his nuskhah. He no longer had time to see it circulate in the institutions the decree would call forth.

But he had a son.

Suhail ﵀ as heir

Suhail ibn Abi Salih ﵀ was born in Medina, presumably in the eighties or nineties of the first century AH. He grew up in a house where the name Abu Hurayra ﵁ was spoken like that of a family member. He heard his father repeat what he had heard in the mosque. He heard the formulas. He saw the manuscript come into being, sheet by sheet, in the hands of the man who taught him the butter trade and hadith at the same time.

For the modern reader it is important to be careful here. Suhail ﵀ is not the original compiler of the nuskhah. He is its heir. He received the material from his father, he learned it in his youth, and he passed it on in his adulthood to his own students. In the transmission formula that stands on the title page of the transmitted manuscript, one reads it in exactly this order: Suhail ibn Abi Salih, 'an abihi, 'an Abi Hurayra. Suhail from his father, from Abu Hurayra ﵁. Father is the first link back to the Companion. Son is the link along which the nuskhah enters history.

The son was, in the transmission of the classical critics, not the prodigy his father had been. Some biographers note that his memory in his later years was less sharp than in his youth. Others report that in a specific period he suffered from a condition that temporarily weakened his recollection. But all these critics, without exception, accept his transmissions insofar as they go back to his father. The reasoning is methodologically clear. What Suhail ﵀ took in from some arbitrary teacher in some arbitrary year can be tested. But what he took in from his father, in his youth, in his own house, and made available in written form, is a distinct category. It is material he already knew before his memory began to falter. It is material he did not reconstruct out of thin air, but out of a schoolbook he had lying at home.

It is precisely for that reason that Muslim ﵀ included in his Sahih a large quantity of material from Suhail ﵀ from his father from Abu Hurayra ﵁, and that al-Bukhari ﵀ did the same in his Sahih, albeit with somewhat more selectivity. The presence of these Suhail-from-his-father transmissions in the Sahihayn has been extensively mapped in the classical and modern rijal literature, and it is no exaggeration to say that the nuskhah, in whole or in parts, returns in the canonical six.

Suhail ﵀ died in Medina, in about the year 138 AH. That is a date worth holding on to. He died under the early Abbasids, in the reign of the second caliph al-Mansur, on the threshold of a new dynasty and a new scholarly movement. He died in the city in which Malik ibn Anas ﵀ was at that moment building up his own school, in the Prophet’s Mosque in which the young Malik ﵀ met Suhail ﵀ personally and transmitted from him. He died in a period in which the written character of the science of hadith, which his father had still practised informally, was on the point of being systematically institutionalised in the great musannafat and muwatta’ of the second half of the second century AH.

When Suhail ﵀ died, his nuskhah was no longer a private possession. It was a text that had already been copied by numerous students, had been heard, had been read back and had been authorised. The isnad chains that the manuscript title page documents lead us via this broad fan of students, generation after generation, into the sixth century AH, where the manuscript copies that still exist today were produced. We shall visit those witnesses in a moment.

But before we do so, we must look into the text itself. For it is ultimately the content, not the transmission, that gives this nuskhah its weight.

What is in the nuskhah

The edition of Azami, published in the Arabic section of his dissertation, numbers forty-eight consecutively numbered hadith. He writes explicitly in chapter VIII that he chose the smallest of the manuscripts, “which contained only 48 traditions, which were derived from Abu Hurairah”, and that all these transmissions carry the same isnad: Suhail ﵀, from his father Abu Salih ﵀, from Abu Hurayra ﵁. For our purposes that narrow reading suffices: forty-eight hadith, in a continuous numbering scheme, with the same isnad formula on every line.

The formula runs:

Haddathana 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar, 'an Suhail ibn Abi Salih 'an abihi 'an Abi Hurayra 'an an-Nabi salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam qala…

In English:

Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar transmitted to us, from Suhail ibn Abi Salih, from his father, from Abu Hurayra ﵁, from the Prophet ﷺ who said…

Forty-eight times the same opening. Forty-eight times the same chain of four links between the pen of the writer and the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ. Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar al-Basri is the direct student of Suhail ﵀ to whom this redaction is attributed; he is a Basran of the second half of the second century AH, and his name stands first on the title page. Behind it stand Suhail ﵀ himself, his father Abu Salih ﵀, and the Companion Abu Hurayra ﵁. The chain is, in the terms of the classical science, short, clear, authorised and documented.

What are the subjects?

A number of great themes emerge in the first hadith of the nuskhah. There are transmissions in it about travelling, about how a believer must conduct himself during a journey towards his mount and the earth he traverses. There are ahadith in it about the prayer: how the imam is followed, when one pronounces amin and how that amin sounds together with the amin of the angels. There is a beautiful transmission in it about the arwah, the souls, as recruits in ordered army units: those who recognise one another there form friendship here; those who do not recognise one another there remain strangers here.

Next come ahadith about fasting, about the rules of buying and selling, about what a muezzin earns and how sounds testify for someone on the Day of Resurrection. There are transmissions in it about the times of the prayer in relation to sunrise and sunset. An extensive passage deals with the prophet Adam ﵇ and the creation, with the special place of Friday, and with the hour in which a prayer is answered.

Further on in the nuskhah come the great eschatological ahadith. There is a transmission in it about what a martyr is in the terms of the Prophet ﷺ, with the question of a listener and the answer with the extended enumeration. There is a detailed report in it of the gathering of the angels at the assemblies of dhikr, the report they deliver to Allah ﷻ, and the judgment that Allah ﷻ pronounces over the group, with the beloved statement that the worst among them is nonetheless forgiven for the sake of the company he kept.

In the nuskhah stand further ahadith about the manner in which a lie against the Prophet ﷺ is punished, about the ritual of washing the hands after waking, about people gathering in an assembly without dhikr, about attending a janazah and the reward of the two qirat, about the prophetic explanation of what al-muzaffat and an-naqir and al-hantam are, about the gates of Paradise that are opened on Monday and Thursday, and about diverse practical and eschatological matters that occupied the community daily in the second century AH.

It is no systematic treatise. It is no legal codex. It is what it had also been with Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀: a cross-section, a schoolbook, a transverse cut of the prophetic teaching as a student in the second century AH took it down from the memory of his master. But it is a cross-section with a peculiarity that the Sahifa of Hammam ﵀ did not have. Suhail’s ﵀ nuskhah stands methodologically one link closer to the Companion. Hammam ﵀ had seen Abu Hurayra ﵁ directly. Abu Salih ﵀ had seen Abu Hurayra ﵁ over many years, in the mosque and at the market. Suhail ﵀ had seen Abu Salih ﵀ daily, all through his youth, in their own house. Between the writing of Abu Salih ﵀ and the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ stands exactly one Companion. Closer than that no post-prophetic text can come.

That is, in two sentences, why Azami chose this nuskhah as the central exhibit of his dissertation.

The manuscript witnesses

The manuscript that Azami held in his hands was not a uniquely surviving original. No Sana’ani find of Hamidullah from 1953. It was, remarkably enough, a text that had been preserved in medieval manuscript form and that was known in the modern manuscript catalogues as a coherent juz’. Azami could therefore proceed systematically: he brought the available material together, he compared it line by line, and he produced a critical edition in which every variant was accounted for in the margins.

The principal manuscript witness is a copy that was made at the end of the sixth century AH in the chain of the Hanbali scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi, whose sama’ annotation on the title page is still legible. At the top of that title page the complete chain of transmission is written out: A juz’ in which stands the nuskhah of Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar al-Basri, from Suhail ibn Abi Salih, from his father, from Abu Hurayra ﵁. The last links of that chain Azami gives in chapter VIII with their death dates: Abu al-Futuh Yusuf ibn al-Mubarak ibn Kamil al-Khaffaf (527-601 AH), who transmitted from al-Qadi Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Baqi al-Bazzaz (442-535 AH), who transmitted from Abu al-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Narsi (367-456 AH), and so on back into the early transmission of the nuskhah. Above the chain stands the sama’ of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi and his brothers, may Allah ﷻ let them benefit by it.

Whoever reads this chain reads generations from Baghdad to Damascus at once. Every name can be traced in the classical biographical works. Every link is a sama’, an attested teaching session, no anonymous handover. The unbroken chain runs from the second century AH into the sixth, in which the manuscript we still have was produced. The death dates of the last witnesses, 527 to 601 for Yusuf ibn al-Mubarak, place the transmitted copy unmistakably at the end of the sixth century AH.

Beside this principal witness, Azami had at his disposal a second, independent indication of the authenticity of the text. For Suhail ﵀ had passed his material on not only to Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar, but also to a second prominent student: Wuhaib. In his chapter on the authorship, Azami shows that a number of transmissions of the nuskhah have come down exclusively via these two students, Abd al-Aziz and Wuhaib. Wuhaib’s recension of the material has been preserved in the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ (volume ii, pp. 388-389). That means that the text of the nuskhah does not hang on a single line of transmission: the same transmissions of Suhail ﵀ from his father from Abu Hurayra ﵁ come to us along at least two distinct students, and the Wuhaib line is independently attested by one of the greatest hadith collections of the third century AH.

This is a stronger datum than two identical manuscripts would have been. For two independent students converging on the same material rule out every explanation in which a single copyist or a single library could have invented the text. The manuscript is not the story of an isolated sheet; it is the node of a network of transmissions that mutually confirm one another.

Here a distinction matters that easily gets confused. Azami published in Part Two of his dissertation more than just the Suhail nuskhah. He also edited two other second-century documents: the Nuskhah of Nafi’ (died 117 AH), the client of Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁, and that of al-Zuhri (died 124 AH). But these are separate nuskhahs, not additional witnesses of the Suhail text. Azami included them in order to be able to examine Malik’s ﵀ sources and his method of processing material, not to confirm the Suhail nuskhah. Whoever sweeps the four names, the Maqdisi witness, the Wuhaib line, Nafi’ and al-Zuhri, onto one heap as “four copies of the same nuskhah” confuses three different things. For the Suhail nuskhah in the proper sense, the load-bearing witnesses are the Maqdisi juz’ and the Wuhaib recension in Ahmad’s ﵀ Musnad, supplemented by the citations of the individual transmissions in the canonical six and in the Muwatta of Malik ﵀.

Azami’s ﵀ edition

When Azami began his doctoral work at the University of Cambridge, he was a young Indian scholar, raised in Mau in Uttar Pradesh, trained in the classical Islamic sciences at Deoband and further formed at al-Azhar in Cairo. He worked in Cambridge under the Arabist A. J. Arberry, a scholar who had built his own reputation on the translation of the Quran and on the study of Sufism. Arberry left Azami free in the choice of his subject. Azami chose the hadith.

More specifically: he chose to contest the thesis of Schacht. Joseph Schacht’s The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, published in Oxford in 1950, was at that moment the most influential work on early Islamic jurisprudence in the Western academic world. Schacht had argued, in the line of Goldziher before him, that the legal ahadith of the first two centuries AH were largely later fabrication, projected back onto the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ by second- and early-third-century jurists who wished to legitimise their own doctrines. Hardly any of these traditions, as far as matters of religious law are concerned, can be considered authentic; they were put into circulation from the first half of the second century onwards, wrote Schacht. Azami cites that sentence directly in chapter II of his dissertation, on page 19.

Azami’s ﵀ counter-argument was not primarily theoretical. He wanted to conduct it in the most concrete manner possible in a dissertation. He wanted to lay a document on the table. He wanted to edit a second-century-AH nuskhah, in a critical text, with a complete apparatus of variants, and then test it for correspondence with the great third-century compilations that according to Schacht had arisen independently and later. If the correspondence proved word for word, the thesis of Schacht was untenable. If the correspondence was substantive but not verbal, then Schacht had an argument. And if there was no correspondence at all, then Azami would himself have demonstrated the opposite of his dissertation.

He chose the nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ for reasons that he makes explicit in his Introduction and in chapter VIII. First: it is the smallest of the manuscripts at his disposal, which made exhaustive study possible. Second: it derives from Abu Hurayra ﵁, who has been unjustly criticised by some modern scholars, and it was precisely this Companion whose reputation he wished to restore through the quiet measurement of the text itself. Third: it had been transmitted through a short, verified chain accepted by the classical critics. Fourth: it was available in a well-preserved medieval copy with a sama’ annotation showing the transmission into the sixth century AH.

The edition itself consists of three parts. The first is the Arabic text of the nuskhah, consecutively numbered, with a complete isnad for every hadith and with an apparatus of variants in the footnotes. The second is a system of cross-references in which Azami traces every hadith from the nuskhah to the place where the same hadith is included in al-Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Abu Dawud, an-Nasa’i, Ibn Majah, Tirmidhi ﵀, Malik ﵀, Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ and the mu’jams of at-Tabarani; in this he follows the method of the Concordance of Wensinck, with reference by volume and page. The third is a biographical dossier of every link in the chain of transmission, with references to Ibn Sa’d, Ibn Hajar, al-Dhahabi and the other classical rijal works.

The work was submitted to the University of Cambridge in October 1966 and accepted for the degree of Ph.D. Shortly afterwards Azami published it, virtually unchanged, in its original form. In the Preface he writes that he has preferred to leave the work in its dissertation form, with a few small additions, rather than delay publication further for a revised edition. Now that I am free from the work of revision, he writes, I hope soon to be able to discuss the weakness of Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. That promise he would fulfil in his follow-up work On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, published in 1985. But the nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ was, in itself, already the central refutation in 1966. The further book only added the juridical elaboration.

The measurement against the later collections

What did the comparison show?

When Azami laid the forty-eight hadith of Suhail’s ﵀ nuskhah beside the Sahihayn and the Muwatta, and looked up every transmission in the system of classical concordances, he saw exactly what he hoped to see. Hadith after hadith proved to be found again in the later collections, not substantively-by-approximation and not moderately-with-variation, but with a striking correspondence down to the wording. Where the nuskhah used a specific formulation, the later compilation as a rule used the same formulation. Where the nuskhah employed a synonym, the later text mostly employed the same synonym. The deviation, where it occurred, was of the order of an added or omitted wa or fa, or of a single synonym that in one of the parallel transmissions had been replaced by a neighbouring term.

The hadith about the souls as ordered army units, for example, is to be found in al-Bukhari ﵀, in Muslim ﵀ and in the Musnad of Ahmad ﵀. The Suhail chain is noted there every time; the Sahihayn likewise make use of Suhail ﵀ as a transmission link, sometimes via his father, sometimes via other transmission lines that run parallel. The eschatological hadith about the angels who seek out the assemblies of dhikr and deliver their report to Allah ﷻ is likewise to be found in al-Bukhari ﵀, in Muslim ﵀ and in Tirmidhi ﵀. The comparison is, for anyone who lays the Arabic of the texts side by side, a meditation. Not only the same content. Not only the same structure. The same dialogue, the same questions that Allah ﷻ asks the angels, the same answers, the same closing sentence about the worst who is forgiven because he sat in the company.

The picture that rises from Azami’s ﵀ cross-references is qualitatively clear, and it is important to formulate it precisely without ascribing to it figures the source does not give. The transmissions of the nuskhah are found again and again, along different channels of transmission, in the classical hadith collections. They are no loose stock of ahadith that remained lying somewhere in the margin of the literature. They have been incorporated, along the channels of Suhail’s ﵀ own students and along parallel chains, into the great stream of the canonical hadith literature. That is the real weight of the text: not that a particular percentage returns word for word, but that a written second-century document can be found again as one coherent whole in the collections that according to the orientalist theory could have had no access to such early material.

Here a short parenthesis about the term bil-ma’na may be made, because the modern reader easily misinterprets it. Bil-ma’na does not mean freely retold. It is a regulated technical category within the classical science of hadith that permits a transmitter, under strict conditions, to replace a word with an immediate synonym without the meaning changing: a demonstrative pronoun may be made explicit, a variant of a verb in the same stem is accepted. The ahadith that are passed on according to bil-ma’na are therefore still regarded by the critics as factually the same text, provided the transmitter was known for his linguistic precision. Suhail ﵀ was known for that, and his father Abu Salih ﵀ even more. The limited variation that becomes visible between nuskhah and later collections falls largely within this regulated margin. It is no loose paraphrase. It is precision transmission with a narrowly bounded tolerance.

What does Azami hold in his hands with this? It is good to name this briefly before we take up the orientalist opposition. He has a physical manuscript from a chain that runs from a Basran teacher of the second half of the second century AH back to a Medinan Tabi’i of around 100 AH, and from there to a student who sat for years at the feet of Abu Hurayra ﵁. He has the exact text of that nuskhah in forty-eight numbered hadith. He has the mirror of those hadith in the third-century Sahih collections which according to the orientalist theory could have had no access to a second-century written source and which according to that same theory would only have given their material shape anew in their own time. He has, in other words, the smoking gun.

But the smoking gun was not the first surprise of the dissertation. The first surprise was that the manuscript existed at all.

What this refutes

Ignaz Goldziher published his Muhammedanische Studien in two volumes with Niemeyer in Halle, the first volume in 1889 and the second in 1890. In the second volume he argued that the hadith literature was largely a product of the Umayyad and early Abbasid period, arisen out of political, sectarian and theological disputes, and only in the third century AH more or less settled into its definitive form. Concerning the prose writers of the period [the Umayyad Dynasty] we can make only a few general observations, inasmuch as their works have almost entirely perished, Azami cites in his chapter I on page 8, from Nicholson who in his turn cites Goldziher. The thesis was refined by Schacht in 1950 in a specifically legal register: Hardly any of these traditions, as far as matters of religious law are concerned, can be considered authentic; they were put into circulation from the first half of the second century onwards.

Schacht’s phrase put into circulation is telling. It implies that the second-century hadith was a new creation, a literary construction, and that the older oral transmission either did not exist or was not reliably reproducible. The thesis stood or fell with an empirical fact: the absence of physically preserved written second-century hadith collections that correspond with the canonical third-century works.

This is precisely the fact that the nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ undermines.

Not approximately. Not on a single point. At the root.

The nuskhah is a second-century AH document, written material of a Medinan Tabi’i from a period that even in the most conservative dating schemes lies below the threshold at which, according to Schacht, the legal ahadith would have been put into circulation. It is physically preserved in a medieval copy with a sama’ chain that can be followed into the sixth century AH. It corresponds in its content with the Sahihayn of the third century AH. And its chain of transmission can be crossed with the Muwatta of Malik ﵀, which was compiled in the same Medinan school in the second half of the second century AH by a scholar who personally transmitted from Suhail ﵀.

Goldziher and Schacht could have known nothing of all this. Goldziher wrote in 1889 and 1890. Schacht wrote in 1950. The manuscripts did meanwhile lie in the manuscript libraries, but they had not been published, not compared with the Sahihayn, and not made present in any Western academic publication. Goldziher had, in the most literal sense, an excuse for his ignorance. Azami points to it directly in his Introduction on page xvii: quite obviously, many theories and conclusions of Goldziher now need to be changed or modified. Had he been aware of these documents, he would, most probably, have formed some other conclusions. Azami formulates it politely. Schacht, he adds, wrote his refinement of Goldziher’s position without paying any attention to recent discoveries of manuscripts or research. For that the excuse is smaller. In 1950 the Sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀, the manuscripts of Abd ar-Razzaq, the papyri of the first two centuries AH and the catalogue of the Damascus Zahiriyya were all known in academic circles. Schacht chose not to engage with them.

It is useful at this point to say something about what refuting means in this connection. The nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ does not refute every individual orientalist criticism of every individual hadith. That would be a quixotic ambition, and not what Azami ever intended. What it refutes is the central historical premise on which the orientalist counter-narrative rests. That premise runs: in the first two centuries AH no written hadith collections existed, and therefore all hadith that stands in writing in the third century AH is by definition a late construction. The nuskhah is a written second-century hadith collection. With that, the premise is untenable. With that, at one stroke, the whole edifice that rests on this premise, at least in its general form, can no longer be maintained. Individual criticisms of individual ahadith may continue to exist, but they must then be conducted hadith by hadith on the own merits of the text and the chain, not on the general argument that no early manuscripts exist.

And it is here that the importance of Azami’s ﵀ choice for the smallest manuscript and for Abu Hurayra ﵁ reveals itself in full. By choosing the smallest exhibit, he defused the objection that his example was marginal or atypical. By choosing the Companion who had been attacked hardest by modern criticism, he defused the objection that his example was a privileged exception that did not touch the rule. He chose the narrowest, most burdened, most contested corner of the evidence, and he showed that even there the thesis of Goldziher and Schacht became indefensible as soon as the paper came onto the table.

In the academic reception the impact was initially muffled. Azami’s ﵀ dissertation was published in an edition that did not circulate widely in Western university libraries. The British and American hadith departments continued for years to work within a scheme in which Schacht had the last word. Only with the gradual appearance of Azami’s ﵀ follow-up works, and with the later development of isnad-cum-matn research by scholars such as Harald Motzki from the nineteen-eighties onwards, did the central observation penetrate the broader academic consciousness. Motzki, a German hadith researcher, directed his early work at the early Meccan fiqh, and in particular at the material of ‘Ata’ and Ibn Jurayj as preserved in the Musannaf of Abd ar-Razzaq. His analysis was a reasoned critique of Schacht’s late dating: the transmission lines leading back to the second century AH proved substantially more reliable than Schacht had assumed. The Sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀ from 1953 had delivered a first measurement. The nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ from 1966 delivered the second and methodologically broadest. Motzki’s work from the eighties onwards delivered, along a path entirely its own, a kindred conclusion. Different manuscripts, different chains, different methods, converging results.

Since 1966 there has been, in the most literal sense, no academic reason left to maintain that no early hadith manuscripts exist.

There is at least one, edited in Cambridge, published in Beirut, preserved in Damascus and in other libraries, to be consulted in forty-eight numbered hadith, with complete isnad chain, with complete sama’ history, with complete apparatus of variants, and with complete cross-reference to the six canonical collections.

It waits for the table on which someone will lay it.

The quiet measurement between father and son

At this point the believing reflection may be given a moment of rest, for without that moment the story would again become too dry.

We have listed many data in this article. Forty-eight hadith. One load-bearing manuscript witness and a second, independent line of transmission. A chain of transmission of four links up to the Prophet ﷺ. A sama’ chain of generations up to the transmitted manuscript. A dissertation of 1966 in Cambridge. These are data with which a scholarly discussion can be conducted, and it is good that they do their work in such a discussion. But the data conceal, if we are not careful, the human side of the story.

The human side is this. A Medinan man, presumably born during the reign of Mu’awiya ﵁, learned his trade of butter selling and his life’s bearing of reliability in the same city in which he sat for years at the feet of a Companion of the Prophet ﷺ. He took in the material of that Companion in a manner that does not exclude that most of his contemporaries heard it too, but that is unique in its perseverance. He ordered his notes. He compiled a schoolbook. And when he died, in the time in which the decree of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ still echoed, he left that schoolbook to his son.

The son was no prodigy. He was, in all probability, an ordinary Medinan scholar who in his youth had carefully absorbed everything his father had handed him, and who at a later age, as his memory declined, leaned all the more on the material he had at home. He passed it on to his students. Two of those students, Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar al-Basri and Wuhaib, dictated the text onwards. Thus it moved to Basra, to Baghdad and to Damascus. A Maqdisi family copied it at the end of the sixth century AH. A later librarian catalogued it. An Indian doctoral candidate drew it from his case when he wished to defend his dissertation in Cambridge.

What all these links did not know, and what none of them could have known, is that their quiet and modest routine labour would ultimately deliver a central measurement against which the worldly hadith scholarship of the twentieth century would be weighed. Neither father nor son would ever themselves have heard the word orientalism. Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Mukhtar did not know that his dictation in Basra would end as a piece of evidence with which Schacht’s thesis totters. The Maqdisi brothers in the sixth century AH thought that they were giving a religious juz’ in waqf to a madrasa, not that they were making a twentieth-century Cambridge dissertation possible.

What they did know, each of them, was something simpler. They knew that they were passing on a text that goes back directly to the Prophet ﷺ through a verifiable chain. They knew that they stood in the service of a tradition whose preservation, in the words of the Quran, is entrusted to Allah ﷻ himself. They knew that their routine meticulousness, entirely independent of what they personally could foresee, formed part of a broader mechanism whose outcome was safer than the outcome of any individual effort. They wrote. They passed on. They authorised. They died. And the manuscript continued to exist.

For the believer, the Cambridge result of 1966 is thereby no surprising result. It is the expected outcome of a process that ran in silence for fourteen centuries. The Prophet ﷺ has promised that his umma would not come together upon error. The Quran has entrusted the preservation of the message to Allah ﷻ himself. That the written transmission of his ahadith, via a father, a son, a student, a copyist, a madrasa and a doctoral candidate, would nonetheless land on the Cambridge table is, from a believing point of view, not unexpected. It is how a divinely promised preservation manifests itself in history: not through spectacular interventions, but through the cumulative faithfulness of thousands of ordinary believers who took their specific link in the chain seriously.

For the scholar, approached without faith, the result is a measurement. A control test. A double attestation of a text across a distance of time and place that would have brought any other textual corpus from antiquity to its knees.

For both points of view it is the same document. For both it tells the same story.

The other Tabi’un and the broader stream

Before we close and look ahead, we must not create the impression that the nuskhah of Suhail ﵀ stands in isolation. As al-Azami himself writes in his Preface, it belonged to a corpus of about a dozen manuscripts from the first half of the second century AH that he held in his hands and that he could in principle have edited. It is, to return to a musical metaphor, one line in a polyphonic composition.

Elsewhere in this series we have met Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, the Medinan qadi to whom Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ addressed his collection letter. He belonged to the same Medinan Tabi’i generation in which Abu Salih as-Samman ﵀ also compiled his nuskhah. That generation was no loose collection of individuals. It was a breathing intellectual structure, a network of teachers and students that branched between the Prophet’s Mosque, the market, the home circle and the journeys to Mecca and Damascus.

In that same generation worked other Tabi’un too, whose documents al-Azami includes in his dossier. He names Nafi’ (died 117 AH), the client of Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁, whose corpus of transmission belongs to the basis of Malik’s ﵀ Muwatta. He names al-Zuhri (died 124 AH), whose material came into the hands of scholars in Damascus, Jerusalem and beyond. He names ‘Ata’ ibn Abi Rabah, whose students set his teaching down in writing. He names Hisham ibn 'Urwah, whose father instructed him to copy and revise hadith. He names al-Hasan al-Basri, who dictated his commentary to his students. The list is longer; the picture that rises from it is a literate Tabi’i generation that in every great city of the realm performed the same methodological labour in parallel.

What makes Suhail’s ﵀ nuskhah so special within this polyphonic composition is only that it has been preserved in physical form and that it has been published by Cambridge in a critical edition that enables the modern researcher to repeat the measurement personally. The other documents of the same generation can often only be reconstructed through citations in later authors. Suhail’s ﵀ nuskhah lies on the table. That is why it is the central exhibit.

But it is not the last exhibit that al-Azami included in his dissertation. In Appendix IV of the same dissertation he published a folio from the Maghazi of Ibn Ishaq, the first systematic biography of the Prophet ﷺ. That folio is important for entirely different reasons than the nuskhah of Suhail ﵀. It shows that beside the hadith nuskhahs there already existed in the same period a written sirah literature, documented in physical manuscripts. That is the material for the next article in this series.

We leave Medina in the year 138 AH with the image of a scholar, died in the city in which his father had sat for years at the feet of a Companion. We leave his nuskhah with the image of a schoolbook that has survived the centuries and that awaits its reader in a Cambridge edition. And we step over in the next article to another scholar from virtually the same generation, Muhammad ibn Ishaq, whose Maghazi would repeat the quiet measurement once more, this time for the biographical literature instead of for the hadith. A second appendix in the same dissertation. A second smoking gun on the same table.

Two documents. Two Tabi’un. Two schoolbooks. One dissertation that was accepted in Cambridge in October 1966 and that since then, in silence but with great consequences, has dismantled a central piece of the orientalist criticism of hadith.

The smoking gun still lies on the table. And it is still smoking.