The Sahifa as-Sadiqa of Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁

The document written under one roof

After the Prophet ﷺ gave Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁ permission to write down everything he heard from his mouth, something changed in the quiet economy of the first community. What was told in the previous article was not about a casual gesture. It was about a principle. The Prophet ﷺ had permitted the writing of hadith to this one young man explicitly, orally, and without reservation. “Write,” he had said, pointing with his finger to his own mouth, “for by Him in whose hand my soul lies, nothing comes out of this mouth but truth.” With that, a document became possible that the umma has known ever since under a name of its own: as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa, the truthful writing.

This article follows that document. How it came into being, who wrote it, what it contained, how it was passed down through the centuries, and why the presence of this one parchment undermines a whole school of orientalist speculation about two centuries of oral transmission of the hadith. For as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa was no posthumous reconstruction. It was written within the Prophetic life itself, by a Companion personally authorised by the Prophet ﷺ, and it was carried by three generations of one family until its contents were incorporated in their entirety into the canonical collections.

The claim is simple and large at once. A great part of what stands today in al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ and in the Musnad of Ahmad ﵀, and a considerable part of the hadith transmitted through the chain Amr ibn Shu’ayb from his father from his grandfather, goes back to this sahifa. Not to an oral chain that would have had to float unwritten through time for a hundred years or more. To a text. Written under the roof of the Prophet ﷺ.

The young man who was older than his father in Islam

Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ was born into a family that had helped shape the history of Mecca. His father was Amr ibn al-As ﵁, one of the most astute staff officers and strategists of the Quraish, who during the Meccan decade stood fiercely against the Prophet ﷺ. The father converted only late, after the exchange of prisoners around Hudaybiyya, and would later become governor of Egypt under Umar ﵁ and Uthman ﵁. But his son was ahead of him.

Abdullah ﵁ embraced Islam before his father. The detail sounds small, but it is precisely the kind of detail that determines the structure of a life. When a young man within a household is the first to choose the other side, it costs him everything a family gives to a young life: approval, self-evidence, a hand on the shoulder. Abdullah ﵁ chose it anyway. He made the Hijra to Medina after the seventh year of the Hijra, at an age when other young men of his class were still operating in the shadow of their fathers’ politics.

What set him apart was not only the earliness of his choice. It was his intellectual hunger. The sources, notably Ibn Sa’d ﵀ in his Tabaqat and adh-Dhahabi ﵀ in his Siyar A’lam an-Nubala, describe Abdullah ﵁ as someone who fell outside the standard circle of erudition. He commanded the skill of Arabic writing at a time when literacy within the Quraish was still a minority ability. But it did not stop there. He knew other languages too. According to traditions summarised by al-Azami ﵀ in Studies in Early Hadith Literature, Abdullah ﵁ also commanded Hebrew, sufficiently to read the scriptures of the people of the Book, Ahl al-Kitab, in their own language.

After the battle of Yarmuk, years later, he found among the spoils a collection of books from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. He read them. He even sat down with them under a teacher, a certain Sarij al-Yarmuki, to study those texts with guidance. This says something about the man. He was no passive recipient of transmission. He was someone who of his own accord pushed against the horizon of his own knowledge. It is precisely this profile, a literate, talent-gathering, intellectually restless young man, that explains why he asked for something that until then had happened only in loose fragments. He asked for systematic written recording.

And the Prophet ﷺ permitted him.

The name as-Sadiqa

The young Abdullah ﵁ named his document himself. As-Sahifa as-Sadiqa. The truthful scroll, the sheet of truth, the writing that carries no lie. A name with a meaningful resonance within the early Islamic vocabulary. Sadiq and Siddiq belong to the same root as the byname of Abu Bakr ﵁, the Siddiq, he who testifies to the truth. By calling his scroll as-Sadiqa, Abdullah ﵁ placed it within a moral category. This was no loose notebook. This was a testimony, with the same weight as a word spoken in judgment.

The picture called up by the testimonies is consistent. An extensive collection. Not a text written in an afternoon, and not a text dictated in a single episode. As-Sadiqa grew year upon year, through patient additions each time Abdullah ﵁ heard something from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ that he wished to preserve.

The writing process was simple and consistent. When the Prophet ﷺ spoke in the mosque or in a private gathering, Abdullah ﵁ sat with his writing materials at hand. He wrote what he heard. Often not immediately in the definitive wording, for in a living delivery that is impossible, but as fast as his hand could follow, and afterwards he read it back to verify that he had caught the words correctly.

At certain moments it came up that Abdullah ﵁ wrote down even what the Prophet ﷺ had not uttered in a formal teaching tone. A passing remark, a private conversation, an answer to a question from a new convert, a saying during a journey on camelback. Some Companions ﵃ found this going too far. Not everything the Prophet ﷺ said, they reasoned, was meant as a legislative pronouncement. Sometimes he spoke from irritation, from irony, from pain. Did Abdullah ﵁ want to write all that down as if it were a fixed judgment?

Abdullah ﵁ refrained from answering that criticism on his own authority. He went to the source. He directed his question, on a day described exactly in the sources, straight to the Prophet ﷺ himself.

With that, the matter was settled. Not only was Abdullah ﵁ allowed to write, he was allowed to write everything. Contentment, anger, passing remark, formal pronouncement. The Prophetic word, in all its registers, fell under the guarantee of truthfulness. What counts in other traditions as a general reservation, namely that hadith should become second nature orally, did not apply here. For this one young man the exception held, with explicit consent, personally granted.

This detail is of enormous weight for the science of hadith. For the apparent contradiction between the prohibition on writing down hadith, found in other traditions, and the permission granted to Abdullah ﵁ is resolved by this formulation. The prohibition concerned the mingling of Quranic and non-Quranic text on the same sheet, and possibly also the earlier phase in which the community was still learning what was revelation and what was not. The permission to Abdullah ﵁ concerned writing carried out within the proper physical and intellectual separation. The two positions do not exclude each other. They describe different phases and different needs.

A rivalry with Abu Hurayra ﵁

Among the Companions ﵃ who transmitted the hadith with the greatest discipline, one name stood undisputed at the top: Abu Hurayra ﵁. The Yemenite convert, who spent only the last three years of the Prophetic life at his side, managed in that short time to build a memory that astonished admirers and later scholars alike. The canonical collections carry an exceptionally large number of hadith in his name, far more than any other Sahabi.

Yet Abu Hurayra ﵁ himself says, in a statement recorded by al-Bukhari ﵀, something remarkable. He asserts that he was not the Companion who possessed the most hadith. Someone else had more than he. “There is no one among the Companions of the Messenger ﷺ who has transmitted more hadith from him than I,” says Abu Hurayra ﵁ in one formulation, “except Abdullah ibn Amr, for he wrote and I did not write.”

Stop at this sentence. It is the shortest and purest proof that the hadith tradition itself recognised written recording as a higher degree of reliability and scope. Not as a by-product, not as a later invention, but as a distinguishing skill of one particular Companion within the Prophetic life itself. Whoever wrote, possessed more. Whoever relied on memory possessed less, however great that memory might be.

It is a statement that also says something about Abu Hurayra ﵁ himself. He was honest enough to acknowledge the seemingly higher standing of another. In a culture in which the prestige of transmission was a social value, he admitted that he was surpassed in volume. And he explained exactly why. Not by the other’s superior memory, not by longer companionship, not by privileged position. By the simple technical decision to write or not to write.

At the same time this passage throws an unintended diagnostic light on the whole arithmetical discussion of who transmitted the most hadith. The real number of hadith Abdullah ﵁ knew was greater than his own transmitted list suggests. He died in 63 AH in Egypt, and the part of his sahifa that passed to his direct students was substantial but not exhaustive. His son Muhammad passed it on to his own son Shu’ayb ﵀, the grandson of Abdullah ﵁, and thereafter the transmission came into the possession of Abdullah’s ﵁ great-grandson Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀, and after that of the generation of Ibn Jurayj and al-Awza’i ﵀.

That the canonical collections today count so many more hadith from Abu Hurayra ﵁ than from Abdullah ﵁ is not because the former knew more, but because the former had more students who re-transmitted his lectures in their own words. Abdullah’s ﵁ text remained within a narrower family line, and its strength lies not in the number but in the direct written recording that predates the first day after the Prophetic death. What comes back in al-Bukhari ﵀ or Muslim ﵀ through the chain Amr ibn Shu’ayb 'an abihi 'an jaddihi brings us not merely to the Sahabi, it brings us to the stroke of ink on the parchment written under the eye of the Prophet ﷺ.

The chain of preservation

Here the history of the sahifa becomes a family history.

Abdullah ﵁ lost the Prophet ﷺ in 11 AH. He later moved to Egypt, where his father became governor, and where he himself would die in 63 AH. In the intervening decades he kept carrying his parchment leaves with him. He taught from the sahifa, not as a formal chair-holder but as an elder Sahabi sought out by visitors. Salim, his servant, wrote for him. Abu Sabrah ﵀ came to sit and receive dictation. Abdullah ibn Rabah al-Ansari ﵀ and Abd al-Rahman ibn Salama al-Jumahi ﵀ likewise gathered written fragments from his hands.

But the main line of preservation ran through his own household. Through his son Muhammad the sahifa passed to his grandson Shu’ayb ﵀, who inherited not only the material but also the oral accompanying tradition needed to read the text correctly. For an early Arabic text without vowel signs and without consistent diacritical dots requires an oral key to be pronounced without error, and Shu’ayb ﵀ learned that key within the family. What the grandson received, then, was not merely paper or leather with strokes of ink. He received a tradition of reading and pronouncing that went hand in hand with the written form.

Shu’ayb ﵀ belonged to the generation of the Tabi’in, the Successors, the first generation after the Companions ﵃. He was a reliable transmitter, no prolific writer, no polemicist. He fulfilled the quiet role that preservation demanded. He read the sahifa of his grandfather, dictated it to his own children, passed it on as an inherited capital that must not be alienated. At his death the sahifa passed to his son, Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀, the great-grandson of Abdullah ﵁.

Here the name announces itself that would stamp the science of hadith forever.

Amr ibn Shu’ayb 'an abihi 'an jaddihi.

Translation: Amr ibn Shu’ayb, on the authority of his father, on the authority of his grandfather. The jadd, the grandfather in this formula, is Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ himself, the forefather whose sahifa was passed down the line; Amr is in reality his great-grandson, and the classical scholars read jaddihi as a reference to this eponymous ancestor. This chain of three named links is one of the most frequently cited formulas in the whole of classical hadith literature. Type it into the search function of the databases of Sunan Abi Dawud, at-Tirmidhi, an-Nasa’i, Ibn Majah, and the Musnad of Ahmad ﵀, and this isnad appears in numerous places. In the fields of family matters, inheritance law, etiquette, dealings with children, treatment of servants, and countless ethical-legal details, this chain forms the nerve path of the transmission.

What the scholars have debated about this chain is exceptionally instructive. Some early critics, among them Yahya ibn Ma’in ﵀ and Imam Ahmad ﵀ himself at certain moments, initially treated the chain with some reserve. The question was: did Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀ know these hadith from oral transmission from his grandfather, or did he in fact lean on the book? The concern was not that he took the contents from a book, which was in fact judged positively, but that he suggested to the outside world the appearance of direct hearing while in fact he was reading. A technical, not a moral concern.

But later scholars, increasingly from the second and third centuries of the Hijra onward, restored the chain to honour. Al-Bukhari ﵀ himself says of Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀: “I have seen Ali ibn al-Madini ﵀, Ahmad ﵀, al-Humaydi ﵀, and Ishaq ﵀ all drawing comparisons with the transmissions of Amr ibn Shu’ayb. Who am I to abandon them?” Ibn Hajar ﵀ adopts this position with approval in his Tahdhib at-Tahdhib. The majority of the later critical schools accepted the chain as strong enough to serve as a legislative point of departure, and the content that comes through this chain is a fundamental source in hadith jurisprudence.

What is in fact acknowledged here, and what is seldom named explicitly, is this: the chain Amr ibn Shu’ayb 'an abihi 'an jaddihi is in many cases not only an oral chain but at the same time a textual genealogy. The forefather Abdullah ﵁ had written it down with explicit Prophetic consent. His descendants preserved the document from generation to generation. Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀ read it and passed it on. We see here, embedded in the oldest classical isnad practice, a written transmission that clothes itself in the oral conventions of the science because the science itself had not yet developed a separate vocabulary for written transmission.

In other words, a great part of what the hadith literature transmits as heard was in reality read from a document as old as the speaker of the hadith himself. And in the case of as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa that speaker was no later family elder. It was the Prophet ﷺ.

What the canonical collections received

The yield of this one sahifa for the canonical literature is difficult to overstate.

Imam Ahmad ﵀ includes in his Musnad, one of the broadest and oldest compilations of the Prophetic transmission, a large number of hadith from Abdullah ﵁, much of it through Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀. Sunan Abi Dawud has a chapter on family law in which a considerable part of the pronouncements runs through this chain. Sunan at-Tirmidhi and Sunan an-Nasa’i contain many of its fragments. Ibn Majah likewise. Even Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, which select more strictly for direct transmission chains and at some moments stand more critically toward the specific form of the Amr isnad, still use in their material, in substance, the sayings that stem from the sahifa, through parallel chains or through other Sahabi transmitters who had confirmed from their own memory what also stood in Abdullah’s ﵁ document.

A few examples of what the sahifa contained, and what resounds in the canon to this day:

On the authority of the Sunnah beside the Quran: a saying that Abdullah ﵁ once dictated to a student, and that is cited in countless later discussions, “Verily, I was given the Book and with it something that resembles it.” A Prophetic acknowledgement that the normative material did not consist solely of the written revelation, but also of the living instruction that the Prophet ﷺ had his Companions ﵃ put into practice.

On children and their rights: “Have mercy on our little ones and respect for our elders.” A short, much-quoted saying that in this specific wording comes through above all via the chain of Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀. Whoever hears this winged phrase today in a Friday sermon probably hears the echo of a stroke of ink on a piece of parchment carried through Medina in the arms of a growing daughter or son of Abdullah ﵁.

On prayer and its details: a large number of the specific prescriptions on the times of the salah, the way children are to be taught it, and the handling of missed prayers. Many of those rules were recorded by Abdullah ﵁ in his sahifa, and they subsequently appear in the fiqh literature as legal foundations.

On inheritance law: a series of precise pronouncements on divisions between children and grandchildren, on the position of a grandfather beside a father, on the shares due to female descendants. The Hanbali school and the Shafi’i school rest on many of these fragments through the same chain.

On the treatment of animals, of neighbours, of servants, of trading partners: as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa is, in its preserved remainder, an ethical microcosm of the Prophetic pedagogy. It is no wonder, then, that the scholars of the second and third centuries of the Hijra cite Amr ibn Shu’ayb ﵀ as a source in so many applications.

But for our present series it is not the specific content that is the crucial point, however much value each individual rule holds. The crucial point is the physical continuity. What appears in al-Bukhari ﵀ was not conjured out of thin air by a second-century compiler. It had a physical history. A man had written it down during the Prophetic life. His descendants had preserved and passed it on. The ink on the parchment was the direct ancestor of the ink on the canonical page.

What the sahifa refutes

Here we come to the point of contention for which this whole series exists.

From the second half of the nineteenth century onward, a thesis became popular in European orientalism that was proclaimed with great self-assurance and repeated with considerable eagerness. The thesis ran, in its simplest form: the hadith literature is largely an invention of the second and third centuries of the Hijra. In the first two centuries after the Prophet ﷺ the transmission would have been exclusively oral, and the written phase began only with the official collections under the Umayyads and Abbasids.

Ignaz Goldziher, in his influential Muhammedanische Studien of 1889 and 1890, was the most learned and, in rhetorical terms, also the most sympathetic exponent of this position. He claimed that the hadith was above all a mirror of the political-theological conflicts of the second century, not of the Prophetic life itself. Aloys Sprenger, half a century earlier, had laid the groundwork by suggesting, without much courtesy, that an oral culture from a nomadic population could not possibly transmit an accurate corpus of text across two centuries. Joseph Schacht, in the nineteen-fifties, completed the construction in his Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence: early hadith would have to be seen as systematically back-projected, and whoever took the trouble to look would find that the chains were in fact short and only worked their way upward as the need for older authority grew.

The thesis sounds impressive at first. Two centuries of oral transmission would indeed be a fragile medium. Such transmission is, in other religious traditions, a genuine source of loss and mutilation. Who could believe that the complexity of the hadith literature could crawl unscathed through so long an oral tunnel?

But the thesis collapses the moment it meets the facts of the early writing culture. And one of those facts, the sharpest and hardest to reason away, is as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa.

For here we have a document whose name, author, express Prophetic authorisation, considerable size, chain of preservation through successive generations of one family, and eventual incorporation into the canonical collections through a uniquely marked isnad are described in full in the oldest sources. No cautious surmise. No reconstruction. No later projection. A fact confirmed in the old tabaqat literature, in the works of Ibn Sa’d ﵀, in adh-Dhahabi ﵀, in Ibn Hajar ﵀, and in dozens of other classical sources, with names and dates and witnesses.

The orientalist thesis requires, to remain tenable, that as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa did not exist. Or that it existed but was not transmitted. Or that it was transmitted but not used. Or that the Amr ibn Shu’ayb chain was a retrospective construction that in fact had no root in a written document from the Prophetic life.

None of these positions holds. The existence of the sahifa is mentioned by the Companions ﵃ themselves, notably by Abu Hurayra ﵁ in his comparison with his own memory. The transmission through three generations is confirmed by contemporaries and direct students, not by late biographers. The use of its contents in the canonical collections can be pointed out in numerous places. And the chain itself was analysed cautiously rather than accepted uncritically by the oldest critics, such as al-Bukhari ﵀, Ahmad ﵀, and Ali ibn al-Madini ﵀, which is the opposite of what a constructed chain would be made to undergo.

Add to this that as-Sadiqa does not stand alone. The early hadith tradition knows more such documents from the Prophetic period. Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀, student of Abu Hurayra ﵁, wrote a sahifa of hadith he took down directly from the mouth of his teacher, and this sahifa has been preserved in manuscripts from a later century and published in full in modern scholarly research, in the edition of Muhammad Hamidullah to which al-Azami refers. Anas ibn Malik ﵁ had a written collection of his own. So did Samura ibn Jundub ﵁. Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁ wrote a treatise on the hajj. Abu Bakr ibn Hazm al-Ansari ﵀, at the request of caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, codified the hadith of Medina while there were still Tabi’in alive who had worked directly with Sahaba.

The thesis that there was no written phase before the second or third century is thereby not merely weak, it is untenable. There was a written phase from the first decade after the revelation. It ran parallel with the oral transmission, sometimes leaning more heavily on the one, sometimes on the other. It was not practised by all Companions ﵃ in the same way, which is historically realistic, for no intellectual practice is followed uniformly by an entire generation. But it existed, it was widespread enough to be commented on by contemporaries, and in the case of as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa it was directly authorised by the Prophet ﷺ himself.

What then remains of the orientalist thesis, after contact with these concrete documents, is an interpretative attitude without an evidentiary basis. Goldziher, Sprenger and Schacht were undoubtedly learned men. But they worked with a methodological prejudice, namely the conviction that a religious text emerging from a supposedly nomadic culture must by definition be of late origin. That prejudice coloured their reading of the sources, made them reason away early testimonies, and gave them the tendency to treat late polemical reports as historically representative.

Correcting that attitude is not only an Islamic project. Western hadith researchers of later calibre, such as Harald Motzki and Jonathan Brown, have in recent decades revised the older orientalism on precisely this point. Through isnad-cum-matn analysis and through careful study of the early manuscript tradition, they have come to the conclusion that a considerable part of the canonical hadith can be traced back to transmissions from the first century of the Hijra, and in some cases directly to the Prophetic life. What Goldziher found pretended, Motzki and Brown find methodically grounded.

As-Sahifa as-Sadiqa is, in this whole debate, the shortest and sharpest counterexample. Not because it resolves all questions. But because it overturns, with a single documentarily attested case, the one point that the orientalist thesis structurally requires, namely the absence of early written recording. One real sahifa, with name and author and size and transmission history, weighs more than a hundred theoretical assertions about what a nomadic culture could or could not do.

A methodical principle

Before we turn our gaze to the next episode, one observation that flows from this whole story and that matters for the rest of the series.

The science of hadith has never, since its earliest phase, relied only on memory. The fiction that it did is an extra-Islamic projection, not an Islamic self-description. What the classical scholars did, from the second and third centuries of the Hijra onward, was to codify consciously a double channel of transmission. Memory and writing, oral delivery and written document, immediate hearing and verifiable reading. The two channels supported each other, checked each other, and compensated for each other’s fallibilities.

When a student received a hadith from his teacher, the standard procedure was that he heard it orally, wrote it down in his own notes, and then read it back to the teacher for verification. This threefold step, sama’ wa kitaba wa 'ard, was no later invention but the natural extension of what was already being practised in the time of Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁. The Prophet ﷺ himself had Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ read the Quranic verses back for checking, and the Companions ﵃ applied the same principle to the hadith. They heard, wrote, and read back.

That the science of hadith described this procedure explicitly only later does not mean that it began only later. It began with as-Sahifa as-Sadiqa. It was an ingrained practice from the moment the Prophet ﷺ personally permitted his youngest Quraishite scribe to write everything down.

What Abdullah ﵁ did under his own roof in Medina, many other Companions ﵃ did later in silence, on a smaller scale, sometimes in loose notes, sometimes in suhuf of their own. The next generation of Tabi’in extended the practice. The Tabi’-Tabi’in systematised it. And by the time of Imam Malik ﵀ in Medina and Imam Abu Hanifa ﵀ in Kufa, the written recording of the hadith was a full discipline with a technical literature of its own. But the seed had been sown during the Prophetic life itself, on a piece of parchment that a young Companion began to fill with strokes of ink.

Toward the next article

We have followed in this instalment one man and one document. But Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ was not the only Sahabi who wrote. He was only the first about whom we can speak with this precision, because his document had a name of its own and because his family line transmitted its contents for generations through identifiable chains.

There was, in the same Medinan period, another Sahabi who also wrote. On a different surface. In a different context. His name was Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ, and his document was no extensive sahifa on pieces of parchment in a house. It was something much smaller and in a much more unexpected place. A handful of sayings, on a sheet of paper or soft leather, fastened to the sheath of his sword.

When the scholars came to Ali ﵁ to question him on fiqh or inheritance law or blood money, he did not answer from memory alone. He drew his sword, loosened the sheet, and read aloud what the Prophet ﷺ had dictated to him personally. In that place the hadith was no loose recollection he had to reconstruct for the occasion. It was a text he carried daily, on the weapon with which he fought for the community that had sprung from that same text.

In the next article we go to that sword, to that sheet, and to what it tells, in an entirely different context, about the written hadith in the Prophetic life.