al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀: the Cairo School

Twelve Hundred Kilometres from Medina

In the previous article we followed Muhammad ibn Ishaq ﵀, the Medinan scholar whose Sirah, along a travel route from Medina through Kufa to Baghdad and in the redaction of his pupils, grew into the standard biographical work on the Prophet ﷺ. We showed in that article how a mid-second-century Tabi’i master was not bound to a single city, and how his circle of pupils stretched from the old capital of the ummah to the new capital of the Abbasid caliphate. What became visible in Ibn Ishaq ﵀'s biography was that the hadith science and the Sirah science were, already in his generation, no longer an internal Hijazi affair. They had become a discipline of the whole realm, with centres in Iraq, Khurasan, Yemen and every region in which a great Tabi’i scholar taught.

In this article we travel further. We travel south, along the desert route from Medina through the Sinai, along the old caravan roads that the Prophet ﷺ had travelled in his youth toward Sham, and we arrive on the bank of the Nile. In a city then called Fustat, which would later, in the Fatimid era, be expanded into Cairo, there worked in the second half of the second century AH a scholar whose name carries in the Egyptian hadith tradition the status of founder of a school. His name was Abu al-Harith al-Layth ibn Sa’d ibn Abd ar-Rahman al-Fahmi ﵀, born in Qarqashanda in the Egyptian delta in 94 AH and deceased in Fustat in 175 AH. He was a contemporary of Imam Malik ﵀ in Medina, a correspondent of Malik ﵀ as an equal peer, and the master at whose feet an entire generation of Egyptian muhaddithun was formed.

The orientalist literature that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries placed the hadith science under a distrustful lens has, as a rule, been silent about al-Layth ﵀. That silence is no accident. When Goldziher in Muhammedanische Studien and Schacht in The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence constructed their picture of the early hadith science, they needed a geographically small stage on which a centralised process of fabrication would be conceivable. Medina and Mecca, with around them some Damascus and some Baghdad, formed in their presentation the entire edifice. The Egyptian, Yemeni and Khurasani schools either vanished from view altogether, or were treated as late derivatives tapped in the third century AH from a Hijazi source. The existence of a fully formed Tabi’i school in Fustat, with its own Tabi’i teachers, its own network of pupils, its own fiqh corpus and its own transmission, makes this picture untenable. A fabrication process that would have been organised in Medina cannot possibly have been repeated in the same decades in Fustat, with the same isnad criteria, the same methodological requirements and the same control by the circle of pupils. The geographical breadth of the second-century hadith science is in itself a refutation.

Mustafa al-Azami ﵀ mentions al-Layth ﵀ in Studies in Early Hadith Literature only in passing references, scattered through the biographies of other scholars. Al-Layth has no entry of his own in that work. He surfaces as the employer of a scribe, Abu Salih Abd al-Ghaffar ﵀; as one of the transmitters through whom Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ later passed on Egyptian material; as someone who wrote down many of the ahadith of al-Zuhri ﵀, and as someone who wrote transmission from Nafi’, the mawla of Ibn Umar ﵁. The portrait we draw of him in this article is therefore not something Azami himself draws out. It is a synthesis that this article makes from those scattered references, supplemented with the classical biographical tradition. What that synthesis shows is that al-Layth ﵀ was no provincial satellite. He was a voice in his own right in the second-century hadith science, and the geographical distance between his study in Fustat and the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ in Medina was so great, about twelve hundred kilometres as the crow flies and many weeks in caravan time, that his working relationship with Malik ﵀ could come about only through letters, messengers and pilgrims.

This article follows his life, his method, his school and his correspondence with Malik ﵀, and it closes with a look ahead to the next article, in which we visit Malik ﵀ himself in Medina and will consider the relationship between the two men from the Medinan side.

Who Was al-Layth ﵀

Al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀ was born in 94 AH in Qarqashanda, a village in the eastern delta of the Nile, at a time when Egypt had been under Islamic rule for about sixty years. Amr ibn al-As ﵁ had conquered the country in 19 AH, and the generations of Sahaba ﵃ who had settled in Fustat with him or after him had left behind, in the second half of the first century AH, a lively tradition of learning. Toward the end of the first century AH the last Sahaba ﵃ in Egypt died out, such as Abdullah ibn al-Harith ibn Jaz’i az-Zubaydi ﵁, who passed away in 86 AH and counts as the last Sahabi of Egyptian soil. When al-Layth ﵀ began his student life, he had just missed the Sahaba generation, but the first Tabi’i generation was still fully present.

His family was of Persian descent, mawla of the Arab Banu Fahm clan, and it belonged to the ordinary Egyptian middle class. His father Sa’d appears not to have been a scholar; the sources give no biographical details about him. What distinguishes his son is precisely that he came from a house in which a tradition of learning was not hereditary, and that he made his way to the circles of the Egyptian muhaddithun on his own initiative and with his own means.

The first teacher the sources name for him is Yazid ibn Abi Habib ﵀, deceased in 128 AH, the most respected Egyptian muhaddith of his generation and in effect the mufti of Egypt for decades. Yazid ﵀ was himself a Tabi’i descended from Nubian families, and he had sat at the feet of a number of Egyptian Tabi’in of the first generation. From him al-Layth ﵀ derived not only a corpus of hadith but also a method of fiqh reasoning that showed parallels with the Medinan method but had its own turns in detail. Al-Layth ﵀ possessed a Nuskhah, a written collection of transmission, of Yazid ﵀, which was then passed on further by Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ and a few other transmitters. When Yazid ﵀ passed away in 128 AH, al-Layth ﵀ was about thirty-four years old and stood on the point of beginning his own teaching in Fustat.

But before he did so, he travelled. The rihla, the journey of learning that we have discussed as a fixed practice of the second-century muhaddithun, was for al-Layth ﵀ not an option but a necessity. He did not want to possess only Egyptian transmission. He wanted to hear the transmission from the mouths of the Hijazi masters, to compare, to test and to fix it in his own memory. The sources tell that he travelled to Mecca several times, above all in the hajj season, and that in Mecca he had the opportunity to sit at the feet of a number of great Tabi’i. Among them were Ibn Abi Mulayka ﵀, the qadi of Mecca who carried within him the hadith heritage of Aisha ﵂ through his direct contact with her, and Abu az-Zubayr Muhammad ibn Muslim al-Makki ﵀, one of the chief transmitters of Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁'s transmission.

More important still was the meeting in Mecca with al-Zuhri ﵀, the systematic compiler whom we have treated in detail. Al-Zuhri ﵀ came regularly to Mecca in the hajj season, and in one of those seasons the young al-Layth ﵀ sat in his circle. The meeting was important in its aftermath; Azami notes that al-Layth ﵀ wrote down a large number of ahadith of al-Zuhri ﵀, and he mentions him expressly among those who fixed al-Zuhri’s transmission in writing. These hadith had a fixed place in his later teaching in Fustat. From the same Medinan world al-Layth ﵀ also derived a corpus going back to Nafi’, the mawla of Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁; Azami counts him among those who wrote ahadith from Nafi’. This Ibn Umar material occupied a central place in the Egyptian school.

When al-Layth ﵀ returned definitively to Fustat around 130 AH, he was equipped with a double education: Egyptian fiqh traditions from Yazid ﵀ and the Egyptian Tabi’in, plus Hijazi hadith from al-Zuhri ﵀, Nafi’ ﵀, Ibn Abi Mulayka ﵀ and Abu az-Zubayr ﵀. This double foundation would determine the distinct character of his later teaching. He was not a Hijazi teacher repeating the Medinan instruction in Egypt, and he was not a pure Egyptian passing on his local tradition without external control. He was the first in Egyptian history to bring the two traditions together at a scholarly level and to offer them in a synthesis of his own.

The Cairo School

Fustat was, in the second century AH, a city in full growth. Through the Arab conquest it had been founded in 21 AH as an army camp on the east side of the Nile, opposite ancient Memphis, on ground that in pre-Islamic times had been dominated by a Byzantine fort. The mosque of Amr ibn al-As ﵁, built in that same year of conquest, formed the beating heart of the city. Around it, in the course of the first century AH, quarters, markets and the government buildings of the Egyptian governor had arisen. By 130 AH, when al-Layth ﵀ began his lessons in Fustat, the city was one of the great economic centres of the Umayyad caliphate, with trade connections to Sham, to Yemen, to Ifriqiya and to Byzantine Constantinople.

In this city al-Layth ﵀ taught for fifty years, from about 130 AH until his death in 175 AH. His principal teaching place was the Mosque of Amr ﵁, where every day after the morning prayer he formed a halaqah circle that in its heyday drew a great attendance. In addition he had in his own house a second, smaller circle for pupils who were more advanced and who wished to go through specific subjects with him. In this teaching practice his transmission also had a written deposit; Azami notes that Abu Salih Abd al-Ghaffar ﵀ was the scribe of al-Layth ﵀.

The existence of a permanent scribe is telling for the history of the Egyptian school. What the sources give us about Abu Salih ﵀ with certainty is that he was the scribe of al-Layth ﵀; Azami names him expressly as such, in a series of anecdotes about copyists and the risks of copying other people’s books. We may not infer from this more than what stands there: no chancellery, no archive of correspondence, only a scholar with a permanent writer at his side. But that datum in itself places the Egyptian school in the company of the other great centres of the second century. Around al-Awza’i ﵀ in Sham too, around Sufyan ath-Thauri ﵀ in Kufa and around Malik ﵀ in Medina, writing pupils were active who preserved the spoken teaching in written form. That al-Layth ﵀ in Fustat had the same written practice at his disposal is an indication that the Egyptian school worked with the same means as the schools in the other capitals.

What distinguished the Cairo school in substance was its fiqh method. Al-Layth ﵀ did not base his legal answers exclusively on the Medinan practice, as Malik ﵀ would do in the Muwatta, nor did he follow exclusively the qiyas method that was developing in Kufa under Abu Hanifa ﵀. He held an intermediate position: hadith was for him the primary source, and when a sahih hadith settled a point of law unambiguously, the discussion was closed for him. In the absence of an unambiguous hadith he sought not first of all the Medinan practice but the Egyptian practice and, above that, the general Tabi’i consensus so far as he could construct it from his broad network of pupils. On points where this method led to a different conclusion from Malik ﵀ in Medina, he held to his own conclusion and gave its grounds in his lessons.

That he taught in Fustat for fifty years without any interruption means that in this half century he formed a great number of pupils. The later biographical literature, in particular the Tahdhib al-Kamal of al-Mizzi ﵀ and the Siyar A’lam an-Nubala of adh-Dhahabi ﵀, has registered the names of many of his direct pupils, and that list is far from exhaustive. For the Egyptian school this meant that toward the end of the second century AH an entire generation of qadis, muftis and teachers in Fustat, Alexandria, Damietta, Aswan and the Egyptian delta owed its education directly or indirectly to the Cairo school of al-Layth ﵀. When Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ began his own teaching in Fustat in the first decades of the third century AH, and passed on transmission to young pupils, among them the young Bukhari ﵀ during his Egyptian stay, what he passed on was to a very considerable degree the inheritance of al-Layth ﵀. Azami confirms that Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ belonged to the transmitters of al-Layth ﵀'s Egyptian material.

The Letter to Malik ﵀

The most famous document of scholarship transmitted from al-Layth ﵀, and preserved in long extracts in the Medinan and Egyptian sources, is a letter he wrote somewhere in the years around 160 AH to Imam Malik ﵀ in Medina. The direct occasion was a number of fiqh questions on which the two men had remained in disagreement in earlier correspondence. Malik ﵀ had written to al-Layth ﵀ that he was surprised at some positions on which the Egyptian scholar departed from the Medinan consensus, and he had put it to him that Medina, as the city of the Prophet ﷺ and as the city where the first two rightly guided caliphs had ruled, was the natural arbiter of what the original practice had entailed. Al-Layth ﵀'s letter of reply is a textbook example of scholarly disagreement. He acknowledges the special status of Medina, he honours Malik ﵀ as his equal and on a number of points his superior in local Medinan knowledge, and at the same time he refuses to regard the Medinan practice as by definition binding for the whole ummah.

The letter has been preserved in the classical sources in different versions, and not in Studies in Early Hadith Literature. The fullest is recorded in Ibn al-Qayyim ﵀'s I’lam al-Muwaqqi’in, with shorter versions in the Egyptian biographical works. We give here the core passage in a translation and summary that does as much justice as possible to the learned and respectful tone of the original; the wording is a reconstruction of the purport, not a verbatim rendering:

The letter runs on in its full form for many pages, with concrete fiqh examples on which the two scholars differed, and with extensive reasonings in which al-Layth ﵀ adduces his Egyptian sources. The passage we have rendered here is the core of principle. What it shows is that al-Layth ﵀ did not write as a subordinate expecting correction from Malik ﵀, but as a scholar-peer who differed in opinion on an equal footing with an equal partner.

The later tradition has treated this correspondence in two ways. The Medinan branch, which after Malik ﵀ would develop into the Maliki madhhab, gradually let the Egyptian counter-voice fade from memory, because the Maliki school in Egypt itself, paradoxically through the Egyptian pupil Abdullah ibn Wahb ﵀, became the living heritage. The Egyptian branch, which founded no madhhab of its own, preserved the letter as a document of scholarship and cited it repeatedly, in particular through the Egyptian hadith scholars of the third and fourth centuries AH who wished to defend their local identity against the Medinan hegemony. Imam ash-Shafi’i ﵀, who would move to Egypt in 195 AH and write his definitive fiqh synthesis there, made about al-Layth ﵀ the well-known statement that in fiqh capacity he surpassed Malik ﵀, and that it had been due only to his pupils that a Layth madhhab had not survived as an independent school of law. This statement, like the correspondence with Malik ﵀, comes from the classical biographical tradition, among others in Ibn Khallikan and in adh-Dhahabi ﵀'s Siyar.

Pupils and Network

The circle of pupils of al-Layth ﵀ is as important for the structural argument of this article as the circle of pupils of al-Zuhri ﵀ was for his. A scholar who in fifty years of teaching passed on his transmission and his fiqh method to hundreds of pupils, and whose pupils then formed their own circles in Egypt, Sham, Hijaz and Ifriqiya, is by definition no isolated provincial. He is a node in a network.

The foremost pupil, from the viewpoint of the later hadith history, was Abdullah ibn Wahb ﵀, born in 125 AH and deceased in 197 AH. Ibn Wahb ﵀ was Egyptian by birth, and he followed the lessons of al-Layth ﵀ in Fustat for many years. In addition he travelled at least three times to Medina and on each of those journeys spent a number of years in the circle of Malik ﵀, with whom he developed a personal friendship. He has become, in the history of hadith, the bridge-builder between the two schools. What he received from al-Layth ﵀ he carried to Medina and brought to Malik ﵀'s attention. What he received from Malik ﵀ he carried to Egypt and raised in al-Layth ﵀'s lessons. When Malik ﵀ ordered his Muwatta in its definitive redaction, Ibn Wahb ﵀ was one of the Egyptian transmitters who brought this redaction to Egypt and made it one of the most studied texts of the Egyptian madhhab.

But Ibn Wahb ﵀ also mediated in the other direction. The Egyptian fiqh tradition of al-Layth ﵀, which in the third and fourth centuries AH gradually merged into the Maliki madhhab, was worked into Malik ﵀'s own material on many points of detail through Ibn Wahb ﵀. When in later Maliki collections an opinion occurs that did not stand in the original Muwatta, and that agrees with al-Layth ﵀'s position, the transfer has in nearly all cases run through Ibn Wahb ﵀. The Egyptian counter-voice that in the short term was drowned out by the Maliki dominance lived on, in the long term, within the Maliki tradition itself.

A second pupil of the first rank was Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀, born in 154 AH and deceased in 231 AH. Yahya ﵀ was still young when al-Layth ﵀ passed away in 175 AH, but he had by then already sat in his circle for some years and possessed in written form a considerable part of al-Layth ﵀'s transmission. Azami records Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ among the transmitters of the Nuskhah that al-Layth ﵀ possessed of Yazid ibn Abi Habib ﵀. In addition he was also a direct pupil of Malik ﵀, with whom he had studied in Medina during a number of journeys, and he commanded the Muwatta in a version of his own that circulated in the later Egyptian tradition. Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ became in the third century AH the standard Egyptian hadith authority, and it was from him that Bukhari ﵀ received a considerable part of his Egyptian transmission during his journey to Egypt. When in Sahih al-Bukhari a hadith is transmitted via Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ from al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀ from …, we have before us the third-century fruit of the second-century Cairo school.

A third pupil was al-Layth ﵀'s own son, Shu’ayb ibn al-Layth ﵀, who continued his father’s teaching in Fustat after 175 AH and who kept up the father-son continuity of Egyptian learning. In addition al-Layth ﵀ had pupils throughout the Egyptian territory: Asad ibn Musa ﵀ in Alexandria, Hashim ibn al-Qasim Abu an-Nadr ﵀, and Sa’id ibn Abi Maryam ﵀ as a younger pupil who would later found a circle of his own.

Outside Egypt, so we may assume on the ground of the broader patterns of transfer, pupils carried his transmission also to Mecca, to Sham and along the trade connections to Ifriqiya, where it was taken up into the existing circles. This geographical network is, as we shall see in the close of this article, the structural argument against the orientalist caricature.

What This Refutes

We now return to the thesis with which this article opened. The orientalist presentation in the Goldziher-Schacht variant, which Azami treats directly in Studies in Early Hadith Literature, asserts that the hadith science in the second century AH was a Hijazi affair that was passed on systematically to the provinces only in the third century AH. Later sceptical currents would repeat this presentation in still more radical form, but that belongs to a debate that took shape only after Azami’s work of 1966, and it falls outside what Azami himself had in view. According to this presentation, the canonical collections of Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ were composed on the basis of transmission that had been filtered in Medina and Mecca under the authorities of the Hijazi schools, and whatever parallel material existed in the provinces was either a locally derived variant of the Hijazi corpus or an unreliable source that the canonical compilers had rightly excluded.

The existence of the Cairo school of al-Layth ﵀ makes this presentation untenable, and for five reasons.

First, the school was chronologically parallel to the Hijazi schools, not derived from them. Al-Layth ﵀ was born in 94 AH, the same generation as Imam Malik ﵀, who was born in 93 AH. He was no later passer-on of a Medinan product. He was a contemporary peer who in the same decades, with the same teachers’ inheritance from the first Tabi’i generation, went through a parallel development in his own city.

Second, he had his own chain of teachers, partly Egyptian, partly Hijazi, which did not fall under the control of the Medinan scholars. Yazid ibn Abi Habib ﵀ in Egypt was no pupil of a Medinan master. He descended from the Egyptian Tabi’in themselves, who in their turn had sat with the Sahaba ﵃ in Egypt. That al-Layth ﵀ possessed a Nuskhah of Yazid ﵀ and that it was passed on through Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ and others is precisely the kind of distinct Egyptian path of transfer that Azami documents. The Egyptian transmission had an isnad path of its own that was independent of the Medinan one, and it was along this path of its own that a considerable part of the material arrived in the Cairo school.

Third, he had a fiqh method of his own that came into conflict with the Medinan fiqh on a number of points, and he maintained this conflict consistently through fifty years of teaching. A scholar who had stood in complete submission to the Hijazi authorities could not have afforded such a conflict. That al-Layth ﵀ departed from Malik ﵀ in many detailed fatawa, and that this departure was preserved in the Egyptian tradition as the valid Egyptian position, demonstrates that the Hijazi authority held no monopoly on the fiqh formation of the second century.

Fourth, the school produced a written transfer of its own. That al-Layth ﵀ had a permanent scribe, Abu Salih ﵀, at his side is in function and in structure comparable to the written practice that existed in Medina around Malik ﵀. The Egyptian school worked with the same infrastructural means as the Medinan school, and it produced its own corpus of books that in the third and fourth centuries AH was largely absorbed into the broader Maliki and Sittah literature, but that at the time of its origin formed an independent unit.

Fifth, and this is structurally the weightiest argument, the geographical distance between Fustat and Medina was too great to make a centralised production of hadith or fiqh conceivable. A caravan from Medina to Fustat took, in the second century AH, about three to four weeks over the journey. A letter from Malik ﵀ to al-Layth ﵀ could, with the pilgrim caravans that departed in the hajj season, reach its destination in a few months. A centralised fabrication process would have required that al-Layth ﵀ and his predecessors in Egypt received new deliveries of material from Medina at least twice a year, with instructions as to who had to pass on what to whom, in which wording and with which isnad chain. This is a logistical impossibility, and the sources show not a single trace of such an organisation. What they do show is a network of independent scholars who stand in mutual correspondence, who exchange students back and forth, and who differ from one another on many points of detail.

A network of independent nodes is not broken with a general accusation of fabrication. One would have to prove the accusation node by node, with an explanation of why in Egypt, Yemen, Khurasan, Kufa, Basra and Sham the same fabrication procedure would have taken place non-simultaneously without a trace of coordination remaining anywhere. The orientalist literature has never delivered this proof. Nor could it have delivered it, for the evidence it would have needed for such a claim does not exist and has never existed.

Why His Own Works Did Not Survive as a Separate Canon

Whoever knows the history of the hadith canon can pose a fair question at this point. If al-Layth ﵀ was such a central figure in the second-century hadith science, why is there no Sahih al-Layth or Muwatta al-Layth that survived as an independent canonical collection beside Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀ and Malik ﵀. The question is fair, and the answer to it is not a sign of weakness but a sign of the way hadith transmission works.

Al-Layth ﵀'s own works in his own redaction have not come down to us as independent books, so far as we can establish today. What has remained of him lives in two other forms. First, in the citations that his direct pupils, in particular Ibn Wahb ﵀ and Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀, included in their own works. Second, in the hundreds of hadith that through these pupils ended up in the Sittah collections of Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Abu Dawud ﵀, an-Nasa’i ﵀, at-Tirmidhi ﵀ and Ibn Majah ﵀. A hadith that is transmitted in Sahih al-Bukhari with the isnad chain Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ from al-Layth ﵀ from Uqayl from al-Zuhri ﵀ is, in its middle link, a Layth hadith. The Egyptian material entered the Sittah canon in this way to a very considerable degree, only not under the name of its own collector.

This absorption has to do with the way the third-century canon formation worked. Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ did not compose geographical collections. They composed thematic collections in which the best material from each geographical school was taken up, arranged by fiqh chapter and not by provenance. An Egyptian hadith that met their strict criteria came under the right rubric, with the complete isnad chain going back to al-Layth ﵀ and his teachers, but without a separate Egyptian section or a separate mention that this was a Layth corpus. The canon formation neutralised, so to speak, the geographical identity of the material and rearranged it according to a thematic logic.

For the independent identity of a Layth canon this was a loss. For the uniformity of the Sittah canon it was a gain. The later generations of believers, in Egypt as elsewhere, gained access to al-Layth ﵀'s transmission through the books they used in any case, namely the Sahih works, and they had no need of a separate Egyptian canonical collection that would have offered the same material in a local arrangement. Egyptian learning lived on in the canon in use, not beside it.

A second reason for the absence of an independent Layth canon is that he himself, unlike Malik ﵀ with the Muwatta, never published one definitive book in which he offered his whole corpus in edited form. He taught for fifty years, he had his scribe Abu Salih ﵀ fix his dictations in ordered form, he corresponded with fellow scholars, he answered fiqh questions, and his material flowed away into hundreds of pupils’ heads and hundreds of pupils’ books. It remained a tradition of teaching without any single book by his own hand acquiring the status of the Layth work. When after his death in 175 AH his son Shu’ayb ﵀ continued the teaching, the inheritance was already so dispersed that an attempt at the redaction of one definitive work was no longer possible.

A third reason is that the Maliki madhhab in Egypt itself, through Ibn Wahb ﵀ and the generation after him, gradually absorbed or overwrote the Layth position. In the third century AH Egypt became a Maliki bastion, with a few Shafi’i enclaves after the arrival of ash-Shafi’i ﵀ in 195 AH. The Layth tradition was not erased in this development but taken up, and its identifiable contours faded into the broader Maliki-Shafi’i-Egyptian synthesis. What in the second century AH was an independent school became in the third century AH a layer in the Egyptian madhhab formation.

The absence of a Layth canon is thus no indication of weakness of the Cairo school. It is an indication of the way in which the hadith science, in its third-century canonisation, melted its geographical diversity down into a thematic unity. What was lost in this melting down was the geographical signature of the material. What was preserved was the material itself, in a form that was usable for the whole ummah and that has withstood the centuries.

The Generous Scholar

A last dimension of al-Layth ﵀'s biography that is of significance for the whole portrait concerns his material prosperity and his attitude toward the Abbasid rulers. These data do not come from Azami’s Studies in Early Hadith Literature but from the classical biographical tradition, among others from adh-Dhahabi ﵀'s Siyar and from Ibn Khallikan. The only point of contact with Azami is, moreover, the reverse side of the matter: Azami mentions that al-Layth ﵀, himself a very generous man, described the generosity of al-Zuhri ﵀. According to the classical biographies al-Layth ﵀ was a wealthy man in his own right. He was the owner of estates in the delta of the Nile and had income from trade along the Egyptian coast, and his yearly income was estimated by the later biographers at considerable sums.

With this prosperity he supported a whole circle of students, families of scholars who were in need, and charitable projects in Fustat. The anecdotal tradition has preserved countless examples of his generosity. Once Imam Malik ﵀, who in Medina had fallen into financial need through personal circumstances, had asked an Egyptian pilgrim whether he could convey to al-Layth ﵀ that a financial contribution would be welcome. Al-Layth ﵀ sent by return a considerable sum of money, with an accompanying note in which he asked Malik ﵀ not to speak of the gift and to regard it as a normal exchange between brothers in knowledge. The anecdote has been preserved by several reporters, with some variants in the details, and it shows a scholarly collegiality that reached across the geographical and methodological differences.

What distinguished his attitude toward the Abbasid state was, according to that same biographical tradition, his reserve toward caliphal favours. The transmission tells that the caliphs al-Mansur, al-Mahdi and Harun ar-Rashid each treated him with respect and had offers made to him, and that al-Layth ﵀ preserved his scholarly independence and based his fatwas on the transmission and not on the wish of the court. His financial self-sufficiency made him less vulnerable to the usual mechanisms of pressure, and his moral authority in Egypt was great. The precise details of these anecdotes differ per source, and they carry the hagiographic colouring that is proper to such stories.

This figure of a scholar-landowner who financed his intellectual freedom with his wealth, and who placed this freedom at the service not of himself but of his students and of his correspondents in other capitals, is in the history of Islamic learning not unique but certainly rare. He stands at the other end of the spectrum from the mid-second-century Kufa scholars such as Sufyan ath-Thauri ﵀, who lived in utter poverty and fled al-Mahdi’s arrest warrants by going into hiding. The two figures together show that the second-century hadith science had no uniform socio-economic background, but that it took in scholars of very diverse positions and judged them on the ground of their learning, and not on the ground of their station.

The Position in the Structure

It is good, at the end of this biographical part, to zoom out and place al-Layth ﵀'s position in the broader structure of the second-century hadith science. In earlier articles we followed the Medinan axis, from al-Zuhri ﵀ as systematic compiler through Ibn Sirin ﵀ in Basra and the isnad criticism, to the rihla culture and the narrator criticism, and to Ibn Ishaq ﵀ as the Medinan Tabi’i who extended his field of work to Kufa and Baghdad. In this article we have added the southern axis. By 150 AH the hadith science was no longer a Hijazi axis with provincial offshoots. It was a manifold network with great nodes in Medina, Mecca, Kufa, Basra, Sham, Yemen, Khurasan and Egypt, and with smaller nodes in many smaller cities that were connected to the great nodes by correspondence, exchange of pupils and pilgrim traffic.

Al-Layth ﵀ has not been one of the greatest names in this network, in the sense that his name today is not the first to be mentioned in an average overview of the second-century hadith masters. But his historical position as the chief representative of the Egyptian branch, as the correspondent-peer of Malik ﵀, and as the supplier of a considerable part of the Egyptian material that was taken up into the Sittah canon, makes him an indispensable figure for whoever wishes to understand the true geographical breadth of the second-century hadith science. Without him the picture is incomplete. With him the picture is so many-formed that no centralised fabrication hypothesis holds up.

Azami’s catalogue of early second-century scholars in Chapter III mentions, besides the Hijazi figures, also Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi scholars, among them Yazid ibn Abi Habib ﵀ and other Egyptian muhaddithun, with the scattered mentions of al-Layth ﵀ that we cited earlier. What that catalogue shows is that the second century AH was a rich period in which every geographical centre had its own schools, its own scribes, its own book tradition and its own chains of transfer. Such multiplicity is, for whoever had taken the orientalist single-source hypothesis seriously, an unwelcome discovery. For whoever wishes to reconstruct the true history of the hadith science, it is the factual reality from which every reconstruction must set out.

Closing: Toward Medina

Al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀ passed away in Fustat in the year 175 AH, eighty-one lunar years old, after fifty years of teaching in the same city in which he had grown up. His funeral was attended in great numbers, with a gathering in which the Egyptian governor, the qadi of Fustat, and representatives of the Egyptian cities were present. His son Shu’ayb ﵀ led the prayer and then took over the teaching in the Mosque of Amr ﵁. The Egyptian school went on in the next generation, with Ibn Wahb ﵀ as its foremost scholar until his death in 197 AH, and with Yahya ibn Bukayr ﵀ as the transmitter into the third century AH.

What was closed with al-Layth ﵀'s death in Fustat was a life. What was not closed with him was the Egyptian tradition of learning that he had formed, nor the broader hadith science to which he had made his contribution from Egypt. At the moment of his death his correspondent in Medina, Imam Malik ibn Anas ﵀, was eighty-three years old and engaged in the last redaction of his Muwatta. Four years later Malik ﵀ too would pass away, in 179 AH, and the generation of the second-century Tabi’i-Tabi’in would lose its great representatives in rapid succession. What they had built up passed to the generation that in the first decades of the third century AH would compose the Sittah corpus, with Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀ at the head.

In the next article we follow Malik ﵀ in Medina itself. We do not follow him as a Hijazi monopolist, for as we have seen in this article, his field of work was surrounded by scholar-peers from outside Medina, with al-Layth ﵀ in Fustat as his foremost correspondent and with al-Awza’i ﵀ in Beirut, Sufyan ath-Thauri ﵀ in Kufa, and al-Awza’i ﵀'s pupils throughout Sham as his parallel workers. We follow him as the scholar who in Medina, in the city of the Prophet ﷺ and in the school of his own Medinan teachers, composed a specifically Medinan product, the Muwatta, in which the Medinan practice and the Medinan transmission found their classical deposit. We follow him as the man who corresponded with al-Layth ﵀ about fiqh differences, who acknowledged and respected these differences, and who defended his own position without regarding the Egyptian counter-voice as illegitimate.

The relationship between the two men, the Medinan master of the Muwatta and the Egyptian master of the Cairo school, is one of the hinge relationships of the second-century hadith science. In this article we have viewed it from Egypt. In the next article we shall view it from Medina. What becomes visible in the two articles together is that the hadith science we know today was not built up by one scholar in one city, but by a network of scholar-peers in mutual respect and mutual disagreement, who across great distances read one another, corrected one another, and brought one another’s work together in a shared discipline whose credibility lay enclosed in this very multiplicity.