Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ and the Folio of His Sahih

A Last Surviving Folio

In the previous article we saw how the muhaddithun built the reliability of the transmitters themselves out into a science: Jarh wa-Ta’dil, the detailed criticism and confirmation of the men in the chain. We followed how three generations of scholars in Basra, Baghdad and Nishapur designed an apparatus with its own vocabulary, its own degrees of reliability and its own biographical dictionaries, and we saw that this apparatus made the canonical six collections possible. At the close of that article we established that the science of narrator criticism did not close itself off with the canon, but that it remained, generation after generation, in the service of scholars who did not copy the canon but tested it anew with the same means.

Precisely that is the trail we follow in this article. The canonical six were no endpoint; in the century that followed, in the late third and the early fourth century AH, a second layer of critical compilations was built. But even with that, the building activity was not over. In the late third and the early fourth century after the hijra, when al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ had long lain in their graves, a second layer of critical compilations opened up in Khurasan. That layer deserves more attention than it usually receives, for it shows something one does not always expect: that the canonical six were no endpoint, but a threshold after which the hadith criticism continued for generations, often upon the work of the canon itself, and always with the same apparatus that had made the canon possible.

One of the central names in that second wave is Imam Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Khuzaymah an-Naysaburi ﵀, born in Nishapur in 223 AH and died in the same city in 311 AH. He is addressed by his contemporaries and by the generations after him with a title that in the whole classical literature has been awarded to only a handful of men: Imam al-A’imma, imam of the imams. His principal work, al-Mukhtasar min al-Musnad as-Sahih, better known as the Sahih of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, is a hadith collection that is ranked by the classical criticism immediately after the two canonical Sahihs and above the four Sunan. It is, in modern language, a post-canonical edifice that delivers an independent verification of the hadith corpus with the same methodological strictness as al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀.

Of that edifice a physical trace has been preserved. Mohammad Mustafa Azami ﵀ included in Studies in Early Hadith Literature an appendix with a photographic plate of a surviving folio from a manuscript of Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ Sahih. The caption is sober and precise: folio forty-two from the manuscript of the Sahih of Ibn Khuzaymah. No argument, no dating, no description of the hand; only the plate and, on the adjacent photographs, the source-citing footnotes in Arabic. And yet that bare image is of great importance for the question of the reliability of the transmission. Where a text can in theory be suspected of late fabrication, here lies a tangible document: no reconstruction, no supposed source behind a supposed source, but a written page from an early manuscript of a work that was composed in Nishapur half a century after al-Bukhari ﵀.

This article follows the figure behind that folio. We follow Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ life in Nishapur, his formation with the masters of Khurasan, his methodological principles, the surviving folio that Azami reproduces, and his continued influence through two pupils whose names every Islamic student of hadith still knows today: Ibn Hibban ﵀ and Ibn al-Mundhir ﵀. The article closes at the bridge between this Nishapuri manuscript and the defence of a dissertation in a British university, twelve centuries later, in 1966.

Nishapur in the Third and Fourth Centuries AH

Whoever wishes to understand the hadith science of the first five centuries after the hijra geographically cannot pass by Nishapur. The city lay in Khurasan, the vast region that stretched from the eastern Iranian plateau deep into what is today called Central Asia, and it was, beside Bukhara and Samarkand, one of the three great intellectual nodes where the Arabic and the Iranian-Khurasani heritage met one another. Nishapur had been built in Sassanid times and restarted by the Muslim conquerors in the first century AH. By the third century AH it had grown into a metropolis with tens of thousands of inhabitants, walled, crossed by water channels, in possession of a great Friday mosque in which the scholarly lessons went on deep into the night.

What made Nishapur special was its geographical position at the crossroads of several hadith traditions. From the southwest came the Hijazi-Iraqi tradition of Mecca, Medina, Basra, Kufa and Baghdad. From the north came the Transoxanian tradition of Bukhara, Samarkand and Tirmidh. From the southeast came the Indo-Iranian tradition via Sijistan and the ports of the Indian Ocean. A Nishapuri scholar could, without leaving the city, receive pupils from all these directions. And a Nishapuri student could, with a reasonable travel allowance, visit in a few months the masters who elsewhere still cost years of travelling.

Three names mark the Khurasani flowering of the hadith science in successive generations, and all three are Nishapuris or worked a large part of their lives in Nishapur. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj an-Naysaburi ﵀, born in 206 AH and died in 261 AH in his native city, wrote there his Sahih, the second of the canonical two. Half a generation later Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ was born, in 223 AH, while Muslim ﵀ was still in full scholarly activity; the two lived for a time in the same city, though there is no indication that the young Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ studied with Muslim ﵀ in the usual way. Half a generation after Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ came al-Hakim Muhammad ibn Abdullah an-Naysaburi ﵀, born in 321 AH, died in 405 AH, writer of the Mustadrak 'ala as-Sahihain, a work that collects hadiths which according to al-Hakim ﵀ meet the conditions of the two Sahihs but are not included in them.

Between these three Nishapuris, Muslim ﵀, Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ and al-Hakim ﵀, lies the flowering of the Khurasani hadith science. They were not the only ones; around them moved dozens of scholars of rank. But if one draws the family tree of the post-canonical critical apparatus, the main lines run through their hands. The city that housed them was, in the last quarter of the third century and the whole fourth century AH, something that Western university cities would reach only much later: an academic ecosystem with public lectures, with manuscript copyists in the market, with halqas in dozens of mosques, with biographical registers kept up by scholars of the city itself, with a hadith community that could verify itself backwards and plan forwards.

The political context played its part. Nishapur fell under the rule of the Tahirids and afterwards the Samanids, two dynasties that nominally recognised the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad but de facto governed Khurasan independently. Both dynasties were culturally outspokenly pro-Sunni and encouraged the building of mosques, madrasahs and libraries. When Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ died in 311 AH, the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir ruled in Baghdad over a realm that was politically falling apart, but scholarly experiencing precisely a high point. The arrears that prevailed in the capital through internal power struggles and military collapses were amply compensated by Khurasan. Whoever in the year 300 AH really wished to study did not go to Baghdad. He went to Nishapur.

Who Was Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Khuzaymah as-Sulami ﵀ was born in Nishapur in the year 223 AH, about 838 CE. His descent was Arab; the tribe of Sulaym, to which his family belonged, had moved generations earlier from the Hijaz to Khurasan in the wake of the first campaigns of conquest. His father Ishaq was a well-to-do merchant who taught his son Arabic and writing early. The story that returns in the biographical literature about his youth is that at the age of eleven he already sat with the masters of Nishapur in the hadith lectures, and that at the age of seventeen he undertook his first rihla, to Marw, to study with Ali ibn Hujr as-Sa’di ﵀.

What the young Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ had in his favour was the concurrence of two things. First, he lived in the city where the hadith science was just then at its second high point. Second, he lived in a time in which the generation that had studied with Muslim ﵀ and al-Bukhari ﵀ was still largely alive. His teachers were men who had themselves experienced the canon or were closely connected to it. Among them are named in the classical sources: Ishaq ibn Rahawayh ﵀, the great scholar from Marw, in whose lecture circle both al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ had sat; Muhammad ibn Humayd ar-Razi ﵀; Bishr ibn Mu’adh al-Aqadi ﵀; Mahmud ibn Ghaylan al-Marwazi ﵀; Ahmad ibn Mani’ al-Baghdadi ﵀; Abd al-Jabbar ibn al-‘Ala’ ﵀; Abu Kurayb Muhammad ibn al-‘Ala’ al-Hamdani ﵀; and Ali ibn Hujr ﵀, the teacher in Marw with whom he followed his first lessons as a seventeen-year-old. The biographers emphasise that he sat with a great number of masters, spread over Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Egypt, Syria and Iran.

But what struck his contemporaries and his later biographers above all about him was not his rihla and not the number of his teachers. It was his memory, combined with an implacable critical judgement. Adh-Dhahabi ﵀ records in Siyar A’lam an-Nubala’ a statement of a contemporary that runs: “Under the heaven there was no man who knew the hadith of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ better than Ibn Khuzaymah.” Another contemporary says: “Ibn Khuzaymah was the imam of the imams in his time.” This title, Imam al-A’imma, was given him in his lifetime; it was no posthumous homage. In the whole classical biographical literature only a few men carry this title: Malik ﵀, ash-Shafi’i ﵀, Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, al-Bukhari ﵀, and after them Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀. The presence of his name in this row says enough.

The man who carried the title lived soberly. Adh-Dhahabi ﵀ mentions that Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, despite the prosperity of his family and the gifts that were made to him in the course of his life, dressed simply and spent most of his income on books and on his pupils. Toward the end of his life he taught daily to a large circle of students in the Friday mosque of Nishapur, where his lessons went on into the evening.

He remained unmarried until well into his thirties and eventually married late. He had a son, Abu Tahir Muhammad, who himself became a hadith scholar and who after his father’s death took upon himself the editing and transmission of his works. The relationship between father and son was, according to the account, methodologically so close that Abu Tahir ﵀ knew at which hadith his father had made certain choices and why; much of what we know today about the editorial working method of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ has been passed down to us through Abu Tahir ﵀.

He died in Nishapur on the second day of the month of Dhu al-Qa’da of the year 311 AH, at the age of eighty-nine years. His funeral was, according to the biographical sources, attended by a crowd that filled the streets of Nishapur. His books were bequeathed by his son and by his direct pupils to the libraries of Nishapur and of Baghdad, and thereby to the world.

His Sahih as a Post-Canonical Edifice

The principal work of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ is called in full al-Mukhtasar min al-Musnad as-Sahih min al-Akhbar 'an Rasul Allah ﷺ, the Abridgement from the Authentic Musnad of the Reports about the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. In the classical and modern literature it is called in short Sahih Ibn Khuzaymah. The complete text of the work, as Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ designed it, was large; later sources estimate the original extent at several thousands of hadiths, arranged by legal subject matter according to the chapter division that was beginning to become standard in his time. Of the original work a considerable part has been lost in the centuries of political collapses and library fires that struck Khurasan. What has reached us in completeness is a portion of the original extent, enough to preserve many hundreds of hadiths in reliable transmission. It is that surviving portion that has been published in modern times, reportedly in a scholarly edition said to have been prepared by Mohammad Mustafa Azami. That precisely his name is connected with the modern edition of this work is telling for the story of this article; we return to it in the closing section.

What makes the work methodologically a post-canonical edifice and not simply a latecomer in the same row as the six? Three characteristics stand out.

The first characteristic is the independent test of authenticity. Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ included in his Sahih exclusively hadiths of which he himself, with his own critical apparatus, could establish that they were sahih. That means: he did not trust blindly in the judgement of al-Bukhari ﵀ or Muslim ﵀, even though that judgement already counted in his time as the highest norm. He tested anew. Every chain was examined for its own connectedness, every transmitter was traced in his own biographical dossier, every possible subtle defect was weighed against the background corpus. The result was a collection that overlaps in many places with the two Sahihs, but that in other places contains hadiths which the canonical two did not have, and conversely excludes hadiths which the canonical two did include. That is, in the classical science, no shortcoming but an indication: it shows that Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ did not copy, he verified.

The second characteristic is the making explicit of doubt. In the canonical two Sahihs one finds, after a thorough selection, only hadiths of which the authors were convinced without reservation. In Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ Sahih, by contrast, the author himself marks his hesitation in various places. At one hadith he writes in the heading “in shaa Allah sahih”, authentic if Allah ﷻ wills it. At another he notes that the chain is in his judgement strong but that one transmitter has been slightly weakened by some masters, and he cites the counter-arguments. This transparency is, for the student of the science, worth gold. It shows the workshop of a hadith scholar from the beginning of the fourth century, with his own uncertainties made visible.

The third characteristic is the cumulative relationship to the canon itself. Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ Sahih is, in modern language, a work that confirms the canonical project by repeating it with independent means. When two independent scholars, using the same apparatus but their own rihla and their own teachers, come to the same judgement of authenticity for the same hadith, the epistemological value of that hadith increases. When a third scholar, with the same method but again his own journeys and his own masters, comes once more to the same judgement, the value increases again. It is what in modern philosophy of science is called triangulation. Several independent measuring instruments that read off an identical result give a more reliable picture of the phenomenon to be measured than one instrument alone, however accurate that one may be. Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ Sahih is, for hundreds of hadiths that also occur in al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, precisely that third independent measurement.

To that density of verification Azami gives one concrete and measurable example. In his discussion of the enormous numbers of chains that the hadith literature brought forth, he points out that Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ adduces for one single hadith, about an act of Aisha ﵂ in cleaning the cloth, about thirty different isnads, all in one chapter. Thirty chains for one transmission is no rhetorical exaggeration; it is the deposit of a scholar who followed the same text upward along as many independent lines as he could find, and who documented the multitude itself. Where the sceptical reading of the hadith supposes a scarce and manipulable body of evidence, one such chapter shows the opposite: an abundance of parallel transmission, which precisely through its abundance is difficult to fabricate.

In the classical ranking of the hadith collections the cumulative relationship is acknowledged. The scholars of the fifth century and after, among them al-Hakim ﵀, al-Bayhaqi ﵀ and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀, placed Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ Sahih in the third place of the authentic works, immediately after the two canonical Sahihs and above the four Sunan. Adh-Dhahabi ﵀ repeats that judgement in his Siyar. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani ﵀ confirms it again in his methodological writings. None of these masters had a polemical reason to elevate or lower Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀; they judged on the basis of the work itself and of what the apparatus of Jarh wa-Ta’dil showed them.

The Surviving Folio

What Azami reproduces is not the whole Sahih of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀; it is a single folio from a manuscript of the work, a photographic plate with a sober caption and nothing more. Precisely that soberness makes the image important. Azami adds no argument to it, does not date the hand and does not describe the script; he lays the photograph beside the other manuscript photographs in his book and lets the document speak for itself. What follows is therefore not his interpretation but ours: what does it mean that such a page exists?

A manuscript folio of a work like this follows the familiar structural pattern of the classical hadith manuscript. One expects at the top the isnad heading, the chain of transmission with which the owner of the copy traces his transcript back to the author; in the case of this Sahih that line runs through the son of the author, Abu Tahir Muhammad ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, who passed his father’s work on to his pupils, and then through the series of copyists and transmitters who had each received the manuscript in a formal sama’ session or qira’a session. Below the heading follow the hadiths themselves, each beginning with haddathana or akhbarana, the name of the direct teacher, the chain upward to the Prophet ﷺ or a Companion ﵁, the hadith text, and where present a short remark of the author. On such folios there stand moreover often in the margin the muqabala marks and corrections that were applied when the owner collated his copy against another copy. That is the physical fingerprint of the cross-referencing process that was described as a core principle in the science of narrator criticism.

The point is not the precise palaeography of this one page, which we do not here ascribe to Azami and for which we invoke no dating by experts. The point is that there exists at all a physical, written copy of a post-canonical Sahih, and that Azami has recorded it as an image. Where a text in the sceptical theory acquires the character of a supposed, possibly invented transmission, here lies a tangible object: parchment or paper, ink, a hand, a chain of names that can be found back in the biographical dictionaries. The names that belong to such transmission can be checked chronologically and geographically: their dates are known, their places of residence documented, the possibility of a meeting between teacher and pupil verifiable. Whoever would wish to maintain that such a document is a late fabrication must explain why the forger chose for every link in his chain a biographically consistent character, and how he also made those characters appear correspondingly in other, independent sources.

Here one thing deserves emphasis, because it is easily overdrawn. The folio that Azami depicts is one document. It does not by itself carry the burden of a conclusive proof, and it is not the case that Azami presents this one image as a targeted refutation of this or that scholar; he simply places it in the series of manuscript photographs that his research yielded. The strength lies not in the loose leaf but in the cumulation. A single document can, with some imagination, be waved away. Several independent documents, from different centuries and different cities, each fitting neatly into the broader biographical network recorded in Tahdhib at-Tahdhib, in Tarikh Baghdad and in Siyar A’lam an-Nubala’, together presuppose a coordinating intelligence that would have worked across generations. The hypothesis of such coordination is, for whoever seriously tries to formulate it, less credible than the simple explanation it wished to replace: that the transmission was real.

Passed On to Ibn Hibban ﵀ and Ibn al-Mundhir ﵀

A scholar of the calibre of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ does not exist in isolation. He emerges from a college of teachers, and he passes on in his turn to a college of pupils. The continued working of his work in the generation after him is, for the history of the hadith science, at least as important as his own Sahih.

Two of his pupils are central for the later science. The first is Muhammad ibn Hibban al-Busti ﵀, born in Bust in present-day southeastern Afghanistan around 270 AH and died in 354 AH. Ibn Hibban ﵀ studied extensively with Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ in Nishapur and took the methodological strictness of his master with him into his own work. He wrote two standard biographical works that we already mentioned in the article on narrator criticism, Kitab ath-Thiqat and Kitab al-Majruhin, and, more important for the story of this map, he wrote a hadith collection of his own devising called al-Musnad as-Sahih ‘ala at-Taqasim wa-l-Anwa’, usually called Sahih Ibn Hibban. The work counts several thousands of hadiths in a unique thematic arrangement and is placed by the classical criticism just after the Sahih of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, in the fourth place in the hierarchy of the authentic works.

What Ibn Hibban ﵀ took over from his master was not only the name, but the apparatus. When one lays the methodological introductions of Sahih Ibn Hibban and Sahih Ibn Khuzaymah side by side, one sees the same categories, the same threshold conditions, the same treatment of doubtful cases. Ibn Hibban ﵀ was somewhat more generous than his master in judging transmitters as thiqa, a trait for which later criticism has gently reproved him, but the structure of his work unmistakably follows the structure that Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ had handed down in Nishapur.

The second pupil is Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Ibn al-Mundhir an-Nisaburi ﵀, born in Nishapur around 242 AH and died in Mecca in 318 AH. Ibn al-Mundhir ﵀ was in age scarcely younger than Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, but he acknowledged his fellow townsman as teacher and sat in his lecture circle. He developed into one of the greatest legal comparatists of his time; his works al-Awsat and al-Ishraf 'ala Madhahib al-‘Ulama’ are comparative fiqh treatises that lay the positions of the Companions ﵃, the Tabi’un and the schools of law side by side on hundreds of legal points, each time with the hadith proofs attached. For every hadith he adduces, he is methodically convinced by the apparatus of Jarh wa-Ta’dil that Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ also handled.

The continued working goes further than these two. Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ son Abu Tahir Muhammad ﵀ and his descendants themselves became chair-holders in Nishapur and passed the work on to al-Hakim an-Naysaburi ﵀, the author of the Mustadrak whom we already mentioned above. Al-Hakim ﵀ names Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ in his methodological work Ma’rifat 'Ulum al-Hadith as one of his most cited authorities and treats him as the man whose judgement of authenticity he weighs the heaviest, after al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀.

We follow this chain half a century further. Al-Hakim ﵀ passed on to al-Bayhaqi ﵀, died in 458 AH, whose monumental as-Sunan al-Kubra in ten parts confirms the continued working of the Khurasani apparatus in the legal literature of the fifth century. Al-Bayhaqi ﵀ passed on to al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀, died in 463 AH, who in his Tarikh Baghdad and in his methodological works made the whole system of sama’ and ijaza into a handbook for the student. From al-Khatib ﵀ the line runs on to Ibn al-Salah ash-Shahrazuri ﵀ in the seventh century, and from him to the masters we already named in the article on narrator criticism: al-Mizzi ﵀, adh-Dhahabi ﵀, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani ﵀.

The chain that climbs upward from Ibn Khuzaymah’s ﵀ study in Nishapur thus does not end in his own century. It runs on, generation after generation, with at every threshold a scholar whose name, dates, memory and credibility are recorded in the biographical dictionaries. The folio that Azami reproduces is, viewed in this connection, no isolated thing. It is the physical deposit of one hinge moment in a chain that worked generation after generation without real interruption.

What This Means

Here we must pause and set out the harvest of the article. For the figure of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ and the folio from his Sahih are not merely biographical curiosities. They touch a specific twentieth-century presentation of the hadith science, the same presentation that would come up for discussion in the hall of Cambridge in 1966.

That presentation, in its sharpest formulation, runs as follows. The canonical six hadith compilations, composed between roughly 250 AH and 280 AH, would have been the first and only layer of critically verified hadith in the Islamic civilisation. What came after would have been reproduction without independent testing. The compilations from after the canon counted in this reading either as duplicate work that rechewed the canon, or as uncredible collections that took in everything that presented itself. A second, post-canonical critical layer did not, in this presentation, exist or scarcely so; the community would, after the generation of al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, have handed over its critical faculty of judgement to pious repetition.

On a foundation like this, Ignaz Goldziher in 1890 and Joseph Schacht in 1950 built their influential systems. If after the third century AH there was no substantial critical layer any more, one could doubt the canonical compilations without a later, independent verification having to defuse that doubt. The apparatus would have closed down in its own time; later scholars were then regarded not as critical instances but as transcribers of an older criticism.

What this article has shown is that this presentation is factually hard to maintain. Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ wrote his Sahih half a century after al-Bukhari ﵀ and delivered in it an independent verification of the canonical project. Ibn Hibban ﵀ did it again a generation later. Al-Hakim ﵀ did it in the generation after that. Al-Bayhaqi ﵀ did it in the fifth century. Every generation until at least the sixth century AH brought forth at least one scholar who, with the same apparatus, with independent rihla, own teachers and own biographical dossiers, tested the canon independently. Sometimes the testing confirmed the canon. Sometimes it added hadiths that the canon had not included. Sometimes it pointed out subtle defects in hadiths that the canon had included. The apparatus had not fallen still. It kept working.

And it did not work on the ground of piety alone. It worked on the ground of a physical stream of documents that was recorded, generation after generation, in folios, in nuskhah manuscripts and in formal sama’ certificates. The folio that Azami depicts is one tangible trace of it. It shows, entirely in agreement with what the classical transmission has always asserted, that a hadith which was independently verified as authentic by a scholar from the beginning of the fourth century AH has also been physically left behind in a written copy, in a line of transmission that the biographical dictionaries confirm. The denial of that requires not only a hypothesis of forgery of the transmission, but also a hypothesis about the written material itself and about the many hands that have touched it.

Moreover, the work shows that the editor, in this case Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ himself and after him his son and his pupils, stood in direct dialogue with the canon. He mentions where he deviates from al-Bukhari ﵀ and why. He cites considerations that were not included in the canonical two. He adds proofs. He points out defects. It is precisely the behaviour to be expected in a living, critical science and that would be lacking in a congealed corpus of pious reproduction. Whoever reads Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ reads a scholar who is in conversation with the canon, not a copyist who sings it back.

It is important in this context to say something about what the hadith science itself has never concealed. Forgeries existed in the second and third centuries AH. Political factions, sectarian groups and pious zealots all tried to supply their positions with the authority of a hadith. The community has not denied these forgeries; it has catalogued them in works such as Ibn al-Jawzi’s ﵀ Kitab al-Mawdu’at and al-Suyuti’s ﵀ al-La’ali al-Masnu’a. Whoever lays these forgery books beside the canonical and post-canonical compilations sees a pattern immediately. The forgeries strike above all material outside the canon and outside the post-canonical critical works. The Sahih of al-Bukhari ﵀, the Sahih of Muslim ﵀, the Sahih of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ and the Sahih of Ibn Hibban ﵀ do not stand, for the overwhelming part of their content, in these forgery catalogues. The apparatus worked. It separated what it claimed to separate.

The Bridge to 1966

Mohammad Mustafa Azami led, as the young scholar he was in the fifties and sixties, a working life in archives. His doctoral study at Cambridge, completed in 1966, was not the fruit of library research alone. It was the fruit of physical journeys to manuscript repositories in various cities, where he examined with his own eyes the folios and nuskhah manuscripts that Western orientalism until then knew mainly from secondary mentions. He photographed, described and published what he found. At the back of his book he included a series of appendices, and the last of these contains the photographic plate of the Ibn Khuzaymah folio around which this article turns.

That plate does not stand there alone. In the same series of appendices Azami treats, among other things, the question of the enormous numbers of chains that the hadith literature brought forth, and it is in that discussion that the roughly thirty isnads of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ for the one hadith of Aisha ﵂ come up, with a footnote that refers to precisely this folio plate. The textual argument and the physical image thus stand side by side in the same book: the one shows the density of the transmission in numbers, the other shows a written page that emerged from that transmission. More than this Azami does not record about this one folio; the broader inferences that this article attaches to it are ours.

What Azami laid before his jury in the hall of Cambridge in 1966 was therefore not an abstract argument alone, but a dossier of photographs, transcriptions and comparative tables, carried by the manuscripts he had himself examined. The work came about in the Cambridge environment of the respected British Arabist Arthur John Arberry, the translator of the Quran into contemporary English, who reportedly showed himself involved with the dissertation. That the work was judged in that academic environment as a serious scholarly contribution is one of the reasons that Studies in Early Hadith Literature received its place in the field. The precise division of roles of supervisors and examiners we discuss further in the closing article.

The bridge that was built in 1966 thus ran precisely over the physical documents of which this article has discussed one. Between an early hadith manuscript and the Cambridge lecture hall of 1966 CE lie many centuries of transmission. Every step in that transmission has been recorded, by someone, in a biographical register, in a sama’ certificate or on a manuscript margin. It is no confession of faith. It is a paper trail. Whoever wishes to deny it must refute not only the paper but also the people who have touched it.

The Ibn Khuzaymah folio is in this light more than a biographical curiosity. It is a physical footnote to a science that never let go of itself. It is a reminder of a Nishapuri imam whose acuity left behind an instrument with which, centuries later, a scholar in a British university could set an academic discussion on a new footing.

Closing

The Muwatta’ of Imam Malik ﵀, the first publicly published hadith book, was the first public chapel of the hadith science. The folio of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, around which this article turned, is one of the last physical stones of the late-canonical building that followed upon that chapel. Between these two moments lies a century and a half of organised, documented, biographically verifiable scholarly labour in which hundreds of scholars in dozens of cities took part, with at every threshold a name, a date, a chain, a manuscript.

We have seen in this article who Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ was, how he grew up in the Nishapuri ecosystem of the third and fourth centuries AH, what methodological work he performed, what transparency he offered in his Sahih about his own doubts, how the surviving folio that Azami reproduces forms a tangible trace of that work, and which pupils, Ibn Hibban ﵀ and Ibn al-Mundhir ﵀ in the front row, passed the apparatus on to the generation after. We have also seen why all this factually weakens the presentation of a closed canonical layer. The apparatus kept working, generation after generation, with physical deposits that we can still touch today.

What remains is the direct bridge to the next article. In the closing article we enter the hall of Cambridge, on a day in October 1966. A scholar defends there a dissertation that rests on his own archival work, with among the exhibits the folio that this article has discussed. He stands opposite an academic tradition that since Goldziher’s Muhammedanische Studien of 1890 had had great influence, and in his hand he holds the tools of Shu’ba ﵀, Yahya ibn Ma’in ﵀, Ahmad ﵀ and Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀. What happens in that hall, and how a science that was refined in a Nishapuri study in 311 AH still proved, centuries later in an English university building, to be what it had always been, is the subject of the closing article of this map.