Ibn Sirin ﵀ and the birth of the isnad requirement

Where the isnad requirement comes from

In the previous article we held in our hands the Sahifa of Hammam ﵀, the smallest preserved manuscript that goes back via a student to Abu Hurayra ﵁ in Sanaa. We saw how a written schoolbook, passed on from master to student, made the transmission of the Prophet ﷺ traceable into the later collections. But a written sheet is not yet a science. What gives the sheet its authority is not the paper on which it stands, but the chain of names that connects it to the Prophet ﷺ. And that chain, the isnad, had itself to be raised to a requirement before it could become the weighing instrument of the whole discipline.

That requirement was not formulated in Sanaa, and not in Medina where Hammam ﵀ had heard his master. The question of where the isnad requirement comes from leads us away from the Hijaz and towards the marshy delta of the Euphrates. It leads us to a city that did not yet exist in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, a city raised out of nothing from the sand during the reign of Umar ﵁, and which within one generation had grown into one of the most important intellectual centres of the Umma. It leads us to Basra.

And in Basra it leads us to one man.

His name was Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀, and without him the science of hadith as al-Zuhri ﵀ practised it, and as it is still practised today, would not exist. For it is in Basra, in the mouth of Ibn Sirin ﵀, that one single statement fell which set the whole discipline upon its foundation. A statement of four short sentences, recorded by Imam Muslim ﵀ in the introduction of his Sahih, which the scholars of the fourteen centuries after him would cite whenever they had to explain why hadith is weighed with a chain, why the names of the transmitters matter more than the pen of a fine-writing copyist, and why a story without an isnad has no right in Islam to be heard.

This article follows that one statement. We follow it to its source in Ibn Sirin’s ﵀ mouth, to its cause in the fitna of Uthman ﵁, and to its consequence in the science of jarh wa-ta’dil. And we follow it also into the hall of the orientalist Joseph Schacht, who claimed in the twentieth century that the isnad was a literary fiction, invented out of nothing in the second century AH, and we see how M.M. al-Azami ﵀ in his Studies in Early Hadith Literature reduced this claim to dust with this one statement of Ibn Sirin ﵀.

A city that rose out of nothing

Basra was founded in 14 AH, on the order of Umar ﵁, as a garrison city for the armies that would enter Persia. The site was chosen for its strategic position between the desert and the water. Here the tribe of Tamim arrived with its tents, here the Azd settled, here Bakr and Abdul-Qays set down their houses. Within one generation Basra had become a great city, with its own mosque, its own markets, its own scholars and its own reputation.

What distinguished Basra was its mixture. Unlike Medina, which derived its character from the Prophet ﷺ and the Companions ﵃ who had lived there, and unlike Mecca, which drew its weight from the Ka’bah and the duty of the Hajj, Basra was a city without a hereditary sacred past. It had risen out of nothing, for one purpose, and that purpose was military. But people who are brought together somewhere for a purpose rarely remain occupied with that purpose alone. Beside the barracks came the mosques. Beside the mosques came the scholarly circles. And in those circles the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ was soon being discussed, passed on and taught.

The city received the visit of Companions ﵃ who settled there for good. Anas ibn Malik ﵁, the young servant of the Prophet ﷺ, came to Basra and lived there until his death. Abu Musa al-Ash’ari ﵁ governed the city in the early years. Imran ibn Husayn ﵁ lived there and gave instruction there. Abu Bakra ﵁, the Companion ﵁ who had come over to the Prophet ﷺ from the wall of Ta’if, settled there with his descendants. Through their presence, Basra became from one year to the next a legitimate centre of hadith instruction. What the young generation asked of them, they carried on to students who in their turn would form the generation of the Tabi’in.

In that generation grew up a boy who did not yet know history, but whom history would later come to know well. His father was called Sirin, and Sirin had not been of Quraish. Sirin was a Persian, taken captive during the conquests and having ended up in the household of Anas ibn Malik ﵁ as a slave. He was ransomed, he married a woman named Safiyya who was herself a freedwoman of Abu Bakr ﵁, and in the year 33 AH, two years before the fitna of Uthman ﵁ broke out, he had a son. That son was given the name Muhammad. He grew up in a house where the Companions ﵃ walked in and out, where the hadith was heard daily, where the prayers of the Prophet ﷺ were imitated as Anas ﵁ had seen them from him.

Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀ inherited two things from his parents at once. He inherited the nearness to the Companions ﵃, which his father had gained through his master and his mother had gained through her master. And he inherited an undamaged sobriety that he needed to learn from neither of them, but which was in him as a glass of water carries within it the light that falls upon it. He was, in the judgment of every source that reports on him, a man of deep piety and of clarity of mind. He fasted often, he slept little, he rarely spoke unnecessarily, and when he spoke he weighed his words as if they were gold he was sliding across a counter.

But his life fell in a time that was not quiet.

The fitna that changed everything

To understand what Ibn Sirin ﵀ would later say, we must go back briefly in time, to an event that took place when he was still a child, an event whose shadow would hang over the rest of his century.

In the year 35 AH, in the city of Medina, in his own house, the Caliph Uthman ibn Affan ﵁ was murdered. He was the son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ, the man who had had the Mus’haf compiled, the man who had extended the realm to Khorasan in the east and Tripolitania in the west. He fell under the daggers of rebels who had come to Medina from Egypt, Kufa and Basra with grievances real or invented. Beside his body lay the Quran he had had copied, and onto the pages of that Quran dripped his blood.

What happened in the years that followed has become known in history as al-Fitna al-Kubra, the Great Trial. Ali ibn Abi Talib ﵁ was proclaimed Caliph in Medina. Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, governor of Syria and kinsman of Uthman ﵁ from the same clan, refused the oath of allegiance unless the murderers of his kinsman were first handed over. Between Ali ﵁ and Mu’awiya ﵁ arose a war that reached its climax in the camp of Siffin in 37 AH. On the Market of Basra, in 36 AH, the Battle of the Camel was fought between Ali ﵁ and a group of Companions ﵃ that had gathered around Aisha ﵂, Talha ﵁ and Az-Zubayr ﵁. Muslims killed Muslims. Companions ﵃ killed Companions ﵃. It was, without exaggeration, the heaviest inner wound the Umma had suffered in its young history.

When Ali ﵁ was himself murdered in 40 AH by a Khariji in the mosque of Kufa, the fitna was technically at an end, but its consequences had only just begun. The Umma was politically split, and that political split translated into something far more dangerous, namely a sectarian split. On the one side arose the first extreme Shi’a currents, who held that Ali ﵁ and his descendants had possessed a divine right that had been taken from them, and who in their zeal were prepared to underpin this divine right with fabricated hadith. On the other side arose the Khawarij, who declared both Ali ﵁ and Mu’awiya ﵁ unbelievers and who likewise tried to legitimise their own demands upon the Caliph with fabricated hadith. And between those two extremes arose Murji’a, Qadariyya, Jahmiyya and still other currents, each with its own reading of history and its own need to prove that reading.

The fabrication of hadith became, in these years, a political weapon. Al-Azami points out that the first forgery of transmissions began in the political sphere, to credit one’s own party and discredit the opposing party. A group that wished to demonstrate that its leader was the rightful successor of the Prophet ﷺ wrote a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ designated this leader by name. A group that wished to demonstrate that its opponent had been cursed by the Prophet ﷺ wrote a hadith in which that curse was pronounced word for word. Al-Azami cites the count of the later scholar ash-Shawkani ﵀, who lists forty-two fabricated transmissions about the Prophet ﷺ, thirty-eight about the first three caliphs, ninety-six about Ali ﵁ and Fatima ﵂, and fourteen about Mu’awiya ﵁. Whoever had the power to bring people to his side by adducing a word of the Prophet ﷺ, and who at the same time had the shamelessness to invent that word himself, could reap political profit with ink and parchment.

For the true scholars of the Umma, for the generation that had still personally met the Companions ﵃, this development was a shock. They had received the hadith in an atmosphere of trust. A Companion ﵁ said “I heard the Prophet ﷺ say”, and whoever heard him heard a man whose whole life had proven that he would not lie about the Prophet ﷺ. Suddenly, in the years after the murder of Uthman ﵁, that atmosphere had changed. There were now speakers who brought in new hadith, hadith no one had heard before, hadith that happened to fit exactly into the political or theological agenda of the speaker. The old trust was no longer sufficient. Weighing had to be done.

And weighing requires a scale.

The ordinary practice before the fitna

To understand the revolution that Ibn Sirin ﵀ marked, we must first briefly describe how things went before the fitna. How was hadith passed on in the years of Abu Bakr ﵁, Umar ﵁ and Uthman ﵁, before the weapon of forgery had been invented.

In those years the Umma was still surveyable. The Companions ﵃ knew one another by name. Whoever heard a hadith in Medina heard it from the mouth of someone he had known his whole life, who had prayed with him in the same row behind the Prophet ﷺ, who had been with him on the same campaign. The chain between the source and the hearer was short, often one or two links, and every link was a face the hearer knew. Asking for a chain was as superfluous as asking your brother how he knows what their mother had cooked that morning. He knew it because he knew it, and you knew that he knew it because you had grown up together.

The Tabi’in, the generation that met the Companions ﵃, still lived in a comparable world. A young man in Medina, born around 20 or 25 AH, saw Anas ﵁ daily on his way to the mosque. He could walk up to him, greet him, ask him a question, and he could accept the answer because the man who spoke it had seen with his own eyes what the Prophet ﷺ did. Here too the chain was direct, the face recognisable, and the trust self-evident.

Al-Azami describes this atmosphere in the sixth chapter of his Studies in Early Hadith Literature in sober terms. He points out that the absence of a formal isnad requirement in the first decades does not mean that people were indifferent to the source of a hadith. It means that the source was so obvious that no one needed to pronounce it. Whoever told his neighbour what he had eaten yesterday did not say “I tell you this on the authority of my eyes, my mouth and my stomach”. He simply told what he had eaten. Only when doubt entered, only when someone doubted whether he had really eaten what he claimed, would he be forced to name the chain of his perception explicitly.

For the Companions ﵃ and the first Tabi’in among themselves, that doubt did not exist. For Ibn Sirin ﵀ and his generation it began suddenly, and fiercely.

Ibn Sirin ﵀ in Basra

We return to the boy Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀, born in 33 AH, two years before the murder of Uthman ﵁. He was eight years old when Ali ﵁ was killed in Kufa. He was eleven when Mu’awiya ﵁ brought the whole Umma under his authority. He was fifteen when Mu’awiya ﵁ stabilised his authority in Damascus and the first organised sectarian movements in Iraq began to raise their voices. His whole youth, his whole early adulthood, fell in the shadow of the fitna and its aftermath. He did not grow up in a quiet Islam. He grew up in an Islam that had just discovered that believers too could become each other’s enemies.

He studied with Anas ﵁, his father’s old master, who by then was already a venerable Companion ﵁ of advanced age. He studied with Abu Hurayra ﵁, who travelled regularly to Basra. He studied with Imran ibn Husayn ﵁, and with the Tabi’in of the first layer who preceded him. He was, by the testimony of all later biographers, one of the most reliable transmitters of his generation. Yahya ibn Ma’in ﵀, the great critic of the hadith transmitters in the third century AH, would later call him “thiqa thabt”, “reliable and steadfast”, the highest mark of quality the science knew.

But his reliability was not merely a matter of his memory. It was a matter of his character. He refused to pass on a hadith if he had even the smallest doubt about the chain through which he had received it. He refused to give an opinion about a man he had not met himself or whom he did not know through a reliable chain. He went so far as to refuse to listen to a view if he did not trust the speaker, and when someone tried to catch his attention with an unverified transmission, he literally closed his ears with his fingers, so that even the sound would not reach him.

Opposite this attitude stood, in the same city, a second great figure. Al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ was born in 21 AH, twelve years before Ibn Sirin ﵀, and he had grown into the moral and spiritual authority of Basra. He preached in a manner that moved people to tears. He gave answers to questions no one else dared approach. He formed a circle of students that would bring forth generations of scholars. Between al-Hasan ﵀ and Ibn Sirin ﵀ there existed mutual respect, but also a certain difference. Al-Hasan ﵀ stood more broadly in the transmission and sometimes also accepted hadith that had come to him through less strict chains. Ibn Sirin ﵀ was stricter, more austere, more suspicious. He always asked further.

In that asking further lies the seed of what was to come.

The statement

When and in what connection Ibn Sirin ﵀ made the statement we are about to cite, we do not know exactly. We know only that it was recorded by his direct students and passed on to later generations, and that it eventually found its place in the introduction of the Sahih of Imam Muslim ﵀, the work that together with that of al-Bukhari ﵀ is regarded as the highest authority after the Quran. Imam Muslim ﵀ did not place this statement somewhere in an appendix or a footnote. He placed it in the introduction itself, in the passage in which he explains why the isnad is necessary and why a hadith without a verified chain cannot be accepted as proof.

In Arabic the core of the transmission runs thus:

لَمْ يَكُونُوا يَسْأَلُونَ عَنِ الْإِسْنَادِ، فَلَمَّا وَقَعَتِ الْفِتْنَةُ قَالُوا: سَمُّوا لَنَا رِجَالَكُمْ. فَيُنْظَرُ إِلَى أَهْلِ السُّنَّةِ فَيُؤْخَذُ حَدِيثُهُمْ، وَيُنْظَرُ إِلَى أَهْلِ الْبِدَعِ فَلَا يُؤْخَذُ حَدِيثُهُمْ.

"They did not ask about the isnad. But when the fitna broke out, they said: name us your men. Then one looked to the Ahl as-Sunna and their hadith was taken, and one looked to the Ahl al-Bid'a and their hadith was rejected."

Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀, cited in the introduction of Sahih Muslim

Four short sentences. A marker of time, a consequence, a procedure, an outcome. In the technique of Arabic it is a masterpiece of concision. In the technique of the science of history it is something far greater. It is an eyewitness account of the emergence of a method, given by a man who himself stood in the first generation of that method, passed on with name and date, and preserved in the most reliable hadith collection of Islam.

Let us weigh the four sentences one by one.

“They did not ask about the isnad”. The subject is “they”, and “they” are the Companions ﵃ and the oldest Tabi’in, the generation before the fitna. For them, as Ibn Sirin ﵀ testifies, the chain was not a question. It was, as we saw earlier, a matter of course. A hadith was passed on in a community that knew one another, and whoever passed it on was himself the verification.

“But when the fitna broke out”. This is the tipping point. The fitna in this sentence does not refer vaguely to “difficult times”. It refers, in the judgment of al-Azami and the prevailing tradition, to the specific political and sectarian crisis that began with the murder of Uthman ﵁ in 35 AH and continued through the years that followed. It is a date that Ibn Sirin ﵀ does not need to name, because every one of his listeners knows which fitna he means. It is the wound around which they all live.

“They said: name us your men”. This is the procedure. The Arabic expression is “sammu lana rijalakum”, “give us the names of your men”. Not the names of your books. Not the titles of your treatises. The names of your men. The chain of people who have passed this hadith on from mouth to mouth. With that one expression a whole science was born in Islamic intellectual history. From now on hadith is not accepted unless the transmitter is prepared to declare his chain, and that chain is not accepted unless it can be checked by others.

“Then one looked to the Ahl as-Sunna and their hadith was taken, and one looked to the Ahl al-Bid’a and their hadith was rejected”. This is the outcome. The community learned to distinguish between transmitters who were known in its midst for their fidelity to the original Islam and to the Sunna of the Prophet ﷺ, and transmitters who through their association with sectarian movements were suspect. The former were believed. The latter were not believed. Not because an individual Ahl al-Bid’a transmitter by definition lied about every hadith, but because his loyalty to a sectarian cause had undermined his reliability as a matter of principle. Whoever was prepared to bend his hadith for his faction had lost his reliability.

In four sentences Ibn Sirin ﵀ has given us: the moment at which the isnad requirement arose, the direct cause of its arising, the question it asked, and the testing it required. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most important single statements in the history of the Islamic sciences.

What this was not

Before we go on to what came after, we must make clear what this statement does not say. An attentive reader can misunderstand it, and later orientalists have indeed misunderstood it, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes out of polemical intent.

Ibn Sirin ﵀ does not say that before the fitna the Companions ﵃ handled hadith carelessly. He says that they did not explicitly ask about the isnad, because the isnad in their immediate community was not a question. Whoever stood beside the Prophet ﷺ heard what the Prophet ﷺ said. Whoever stood beside the Companion ﵁ who had heard it from the Prophet ﷺ heard it from that Companion ﵁. The chain was there, it was only short, personal and visible.

Nor does he say that the isnad was only invented as a concept in his time. He says that the explicit demand for declaring the chain, as a systematic condition for accepting a hadith, arose only after the fitna. The difference is crucial. The chain always existed, because all knowledge has a chain. What changed was that the chain was now pulled into the sunlight, made explicit and formulated as a requirement.

He further does not say that the fabrication of hadith was a quantitative phenomenon of which the whole Umma became aware. He says that there were sectarian groups whose transmissions became suspect, and that the community learned to look at the loyalty of the speaker before it listened to his word. It is a sober, targeted procedure against a specific kind of forgery, not a panic reaction against the hadith as such.

And finally he does not say that this procedure was a novelty in the sense of an arbitrary invention. It was, and this is perhaps the deepest layer of the statement, a return to the old trust under changed circumstances. What had formerly been self-evident through the short chain and the personal face now had to be established explicitly by means of the name, the date and the testable biography. The spirit of the procedure was old. Its form was new.

From statement to science

What Ibn Sirin ﵀ had formulated in four sentences, his students and the generation after them took to heart. But they did not take it to heart as a vague adage; they took it to heart as a programme of work. And they began, in the second half of the first century AH and in the first decades of the second century AH, to build that programme of work out into a separate branch of Islamic science.

The first names that fall in this development are the names of his immediate surroundings. Ayyub as-Sakhtiyani ﵀, a student of Ibn Sirin ﵀, carried his master’s strictness over to his own students. Shu’ba ibn al-Hajjaj ﵀, a generation younger, became in Basra the man who like no other gave his life to the investigation of transmitters. He travelled, he questioned, he compared, he drew up lists of men he trusted and of men he did not trust. The story goes, in the classical rijal literature, that he once undertook an entire journey to meet one single transmitter, not to hear hadith from him, but to observe his conduct, for he wanted to know whether the man praised in the corridors was also reliable in his daily life. When he saw the man lie to his own donkey, namely luring the donkey towards him with a gesture as if there were fodder while there was no fodder, Shu’ba ﵀ turned around and never again accepted anything from his mouth. Whoever deceived his donkey about fodder could also deceive about a hadith.

Beside Shu’ba ﵀ came Sufyan ath-Thawri ﵀, the great Kufan scholar, who established the same strictness in the east of Iraq. Beside him came Sufyan ibn Uyayna ﵀, who carried the discipline to Mecca. In the Hijaz Imam Malik ﵀ established it in Medina, in Syria al-Awza’i ﵀, in Egypt al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀. In one generation, or at most a generation and a half, the procedure Ibn Sirin ﵀ had formulated had grown into a network of scholars across the whole caliphate, and in each of those centres the work of weighing transmitters was being done.

A century after Ibn Sirin ﵀ came the generation that would turn this procedure into a formal science. Yahya ibn Ma’in ﵀ in Baghdad, Ali ibn al-Madini ﵀, Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, and their contemporaries developed the discipline of jarh wa-ta’dil, the critiquing and accrediting of transmitters. They drew up extensive biographical works in which every transmitter was described by his year of birth, his teachers, his students, his character, his reliability and his faults. On the choice of a single expression, “thiqa”, “saduq”, “la ba’s bih”, “da’if”, “matruk”, “kadhdhab”, hung the credibility of thousands of chains. A separate language was created for judging men, and that language became so precise that the modern historian can still use it as an instrument.

Above all this came finally the generation of al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, who applied this science in its full maturity to the assembling of a reliable hadith corpus. Imam al-Bukhari ﵀ reportedly examined six hundred thousand hadith and accepted about seven thousand of them, including numerous repetitions, for his Sahih. These figures are transmitted in the introduction of Imam Muslim ﵀ and in the classical handbooks of the science of hadith. Imam Muslim ﵀ applied a comparable standard. What they accepted, they accepted because the chain of transmitters had been certified by the science in every one of its links, and that science rested, in the last instance, on the procedure that Ibn Sirin ﵀ had formulated in Basra in four sentences.

We do not exaggerate when we say that the whole science of hadith, from Shu’ba ﵀ to al-Bukhari ﵀ to Ibn Hajar ﵀ in the ninth century AH, is an elaboration of that one statement. What had arisen as an emergency in 35 AH in the fitna of Uthman ﵁ was two hundred years later an institutionalised field of study, and a thousand years later still the most important filtering instrument between the believer and the text.

Schacht and his thesis

We now come, in this article, to the point at which the work of Ibn Sirin ﵀ is not only historical, but also polemical. For in the twentieth century there was a European scholar who described this whole development, this whole building of a science around the isnad, as a literary construction without historical reality. His name was Joseph Schacht, and his thesis was that the isnad as a systematic instrument was no older than the beginning of the second century AH, and that it only reached its perfected form in the classical collections of the third century AH, constructed, in retrospect, by jurists who wished to ascribe their own opinions to the Prophet ﷺ to give them more authority.

Schacht built on the work of Ignaz Goldziher, who in the late nineteenth century had likewise declared large parts of the hadith corpus unreliable, but Schacht went further. In his work on the origins of Islamic law from 1950 he claimed that the regular use of the isnad was no older than the beginning of the second century AH. He read the fitna of which Ibn Sirin ﵀ spoke not as the civil war around Uthman ﵁, but reinterpreted it as a much later crisis, namely the civil war that began with the murder of the Umayyad caliph al-Walid ibn Yazid in 126 AH. In this way he shifted the entire emergence of the isnad requirement forward by almost a century. The perfection of the system he placed even later, in the second half of the third century AH, in the classical collections. The more complete and the further back the chain was traced, the more suspect, in his theory, its late construction.

The thesis sounded, in the ears of a scholarly world that had just learned from Christian biblical criticism to look at old texts with scepticism, plausible and even refined. Schacht was elevated to an authority in Western circles, and his theories were absorbed by generations of students of Islamic studies as the prevailing reading. The whole Islamic science of hadith, with its centuries-old jarh wa-ta’dil and its millions of pages of biographical works, was treated by the Western academy as a pious self-deception possessing no historical credibility. What the Muslims saw as science, the orientalists saw as folklore.

Under this pressure there grew up in the second half of the twentieth century a new generation of Muslim scholars who commanded the Western academic language and who were prepared to answer Schacht on his own ground. One of the most thorough of these scholars was Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami, an Indian-Saudi hadith scholar who took his doctorate in Cambridge and who devoted his dissertation to precisely the question Schacht had raised, namely how old is the Islamic hadith literature really and how old is the isnad procedure. The result was his book Studies in Early Hadith Literature, which appeared in 1968 and in the decades that followed became a work of reference for anyone wishing to refute the Schacht thesis with empirical material.

In the sixth chapter of that book, entitled “The Beginning of Isnad”, “Orientalists and Isnad” and “Professor Schacht and Isnad”, al-Azami addresses the Western thesis directly. And it is there that he brings forward the statement of Ibn Sirin ﵀, cited above, as his first and weightiest piece of evidence.

The refutation

Al-Azami’s argument is, formulated at its simplest, this. Schacht claims that the isnad did not exist as a systematic requirement in the first century AH. But we have an eyewitness account from a scholar of the first century AH, namely Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀, who tells us when and why the isnad requirement was formulated, and who gives a name to its cause, namely the fitna of Uthman ﵁ in 35 AH. This statement has been passed on through a verifiable chain, included in the Sahih of Imam Muslim ﵀, and confirmed by countless parallel reports from other early scholars. Schacht did not ignore this statement, but he redated it arbitrarily. He reinterpreted the word fitna as the civil war of 126 AH instead of the crisis around Uthman ﵁, without giving any historical justification for it. Al-Azami calls this reinterpretation logically absurd, for the words of Ibn Sirin ﵀ themselves point to a practice older than his own time. The statement stands, and it dates the emergence of the isnad requirement in the first century AH, well over a century before the moment at which Schacht wishes to place it.

To this comes, al-Azami continues, that the statement of Ibn Sirin ﵀ does not stand alone. It is supported by a whole series of parallel reports from his contemporaries and from the generation after him, reports preserved in the classical handbooks of the science of hadith, including the introduction of Imam Muslim ﵀. Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak ﵀, the great teacher from Khorasan, compared whoever told hadith without a chain to someone who wished to climb onto a roof without a ladder. Sufyan ath-Thawri ﵀ called the isnad “the weapon of the believer”. And the same Ibn al-Mubarak ﵀ said in a statement cited in every handbook: “the isnad is a part of the religion; were it not for the isnad, anyone could say whatever he wished”. These statements do not come from one source; they come from Kufa, from Basra, from Khorasan, from different decades, and they all tell the same story, namely that the isnad in the second half of the first century AH and the beginning of the second was already an established requirement applied in every serious scholarly circle.

To this comes next, al-Azami goes still further, that the mechanism that gave rise to the isnad requirement fits logically with what we know of that period, and that the opposite theory does not. Schacht would have us believe that jurists in the second century AH, to give their opinions authority, invented a complicated system in which they pasted names onto chains, pasted chains onto hadith and pasted hadith onto the Prophet ﷺ. For that they would have had to fabricate hundreds of thousands of chains, keep them mutually consistent across thousands of scholars, and all without a single one of their contemporaries ever raising the alarm about the fabrication. A theory of such general application, says al-Azami, is unacceptable on such meagre evidence. It is not how scholarly communities work, it is not how forgery tends to behave, and it is not what the sources themselves show.

What the sources do show is an organic development, driven by a real crisis, addressed by real people in a recognisable way. Before the fitna there was no need for an explicit isnad. After the fitna that need was suddenly there, and it was articulated in the mouth of a man who himself stood in the generation of the transition, namely Ibn Sirin ﵀. The science that grew from it expanded along a path that is traceable generation by generation, with names and dates and places. This is no literary fiction. This is history.

Schacht’s thesis, al-Azami concludes, survives only when it deals selectively with the source material. Al-Azami points out that Schacht picks out the faulty cases to build a theory upon, and that when there are cases which cover ninety-nine percent of the subject and refute his theory, he uses the word “occasionally”, now and then, to minimise their weight. This double standard, al-Azami argues, undermines the conclusions of his entire research. Whoever reads the sources as they present themselves, with the whole richness of their parallel testimonies, does not see a retrospective fabrication in the second century AH. He sees a defensive methodological reaction in the first century AH, given by scholars who had no luxury to theorise in the study, but who had to respond immediately to the fact that sectarian groups around them had begun fabricating hadith. The isnad was not invented to create authority. It was invented to stop forgery.

The deeper meaning

We come to the end of this article, and we pause over what all this means.

A religious community that derives its authority from a person of God, however this is expressed, always faces a fundamental difficulty. It must pass on the words of that person, generation upon generation, across centuries, in languages it does not all speak, to lands it has not yet visited, to hearts not yet born. Without a method to secure those words, they suffer damage in every act of passing on. With the years the details wear away. With the centuries the emphases shift. With the millennia the meanings tip over. It is the same law we see in every game of telephone: what is whispered at the beginning of the row is garbled at the end of the row into something unrecognisable.

Islam faced this difficulty at the sharpest point of its challenge in the years between 35 AH and 100 AH. The Prophet ﷺ was no longer alive to correct himself what was passed on wrongly. The Companions ﵃ who had known him personally were dying out one by one. The Umma had expanded into lands where Arabic was a foreign language. And in these circumstances there arose, from within the community itself, a group of people who would fabricate hadith for political or theological reasons. It was, in every respect, the moment of crisis at which the community could let itself drift or at which it could gather itself.

What Ibn Sirin ﵀ did, in four sentences, was to hand the community a procedure for gathering itself. Not through power. Not through coercion. Not through an institution of inquisition. But through one simple rule: name us your men. Whoever speaks, let him tell us from whom he has it. Whoever speaks from another, let him tell us from whose other he has it. And so on, link after link, until we arrive at a face that saw the Prophet ﷺ himself. Give us that row of faces, and we will weigh them one by one, and we will accept what runs through reliable faces and reject what runs through unreliable faces.

It is, when you think about it, an incredibly democratic procedure. It requires no authority from above. It requires only that a community knows its members, that it observes their conduct, that it sees their attachment or non-attachment to the Sunna, and that it takes all this into its judgment when a statement comes up for assessment. It is a procedure that can be applied in every generation, to every new transmitter, in every new city. It does not depend on a pope, not on a council of cardinals, not on an emperor who convenes a council. It depends on the community itself and on its willingness to look.

And it has, for that reason, worked. The Islamic science of hadith has, despite all the political upheavals the Umma has undergone in fourteen centuries, seen no rival canon arise. Sunni and Shi’a do not differ over the question whether a chain must be checked; they differ over which links in which chains count as reliable, and that discussion is conducted on both sides in the same language of jarh wa-ta’dil. Scholars from Cordoba to Samarkand, from Khartoum to Delhi, have for fourteen centuries wielded the same instrument to weigh hadith. What a muhaddith from Basra had formulated in four sentences had become the toolbox of a world community.

Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀ died in Basra in the year 110 AH, at the age of seventy-seven. He left behind no written treatise in which his method was described at length. He left behind students who carried his method within them and passed it on to their own students, and so on, until it permeated the whole Umma. His grave in Basra has in later centuries been a place of pilgrimage for those who wished to show reverence to a man whose humility was so great that he never wished to see his own name in a book title, and whose work was so great that his name is mentioned in every biographical source of Islam.

But his work was not yet finished. The isnad requirement was now established, names were now recited, chains were now weighed. But one question remained. Who would take the weighing instrument that Ibn Sirin ﵀ had formulated in Basra and absorb it into a systematic compilation that ordered the whole transmission by name, date and place. The isnad requirement could ask for names, but someone had to collect those names, write them down and pass them on to hundreds of students at once. Someone had to translate the oral discipline of Basra into a written corpus that could be looked up and compared in five capitals at the same time.

In the next article we meet that scholar. We return to the Hijaz, to Medina and later to Damascus, and follow Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀, the first systematic compiler of the hadith. We see how he, at the hinge between the generation of the Companions ﵃ and the canonical phase, built the procedure Ibn Sirin ﵀ had tested in Basra out into an ordered and multiply recorded corpus in Medina. What Ibn Sirin ﵀ had formulated as a criterion, al-Zuhri ﵀ gave a body as a method, and it is in the tension between those two functions that the science would find its full form.