Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀: the first systematic compiler

From the touchstone to the executor

In the previous article we followed Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀ in Basra, who after the Fitna raised the isnad requirement to the core criterion of the transmission. Name us your men had been his short formula, and with that requirement the community received a touchstone with which it could separate reliable from unreliable transmitters. But a touchstone weighs only what is laid before it. Whoever demanded the names also needed someone who collected the names, ordered them and set them down in writing, so that the chain could not only be asked for but also looked up and compared. The criterion of Basra called for a compiler, and that compiler worked in Medina.

At the foundation of the organisation of that corpus, moreover, lay a caliphal order. Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ had a letter sent out from Damascus to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ in Medina, with the instruction to write down everything that was present of hadith of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, out of fear of the disappearance of the knowledge and the dying of its bearers. It was a decree, addressed to the governor and to the qadi of Medina at once. That order was no invention but a formalisation: the Sahaba ﵃ had already written hadith down, and their students among the Tabi’in did the same, but the commanding act of a rightly guided caliph lifted a private practice into a state-recognised discipline.

An order without an executor is a word on parchment. What this article follows is the executor. Muhammad ibn Muslim ibn Ubaydullah ibn Shihab az-Zuhri ﵀, born in Medina, probably around 50 or 51 AH, and died in 124 AH in Shaghb in Palestine, was the scholar who answered the decree. He was, in the words of his own students, one of the first writers in the history of Islamic literature, a scholar who collected the hadith systematically, fixed it in writing and passed it on to generations of students at once. What Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ formulated in an order, al-Zuhri ﵀ carried out in a life’s work. And it is precisely for that reason that al-Zuhri ﵀, in the orientalist literature that wished to distrust the transmission, became the central target of a large-scale attack.

This article has two areas of attention at once. We follow the life, the teachers, the method and the students of al-Zuhri ﵀ in concrete detail, and we place at the same time the attack that Ignaz Goldziher formulated against this scholar in his Muhammedanische Studien in 1890, together with the meticulous refutation that Mustafa al-Azami ﵀ delivered in Studies in Early Hadith Literature. The attack has become a textbook example of what has counted in the Western academy as scholarly criticism of the hadith. The refutation is a textbook example of what a scholar with access to the sources and with patience for the details can lay bare when he sets that criticism point by point beside the facts.

A Quraishi in Medina

Al-Zuhri ﵀ descended from a branch of the Quraish, the Banu Zuhra, the same clan from which the mother of the Prophet ﷺ, Amina bint Wahb, had come. Through his descent he did not stand in Medina at a distance from the families who had experienced the Prophetic era from close by, but in their midst. When as a young man, somewhere in the sixties of the first century AH, he first sought out the student life of the city, the last Sahaba ﵃ were still living there. Anas ibn Malik ﵁, who had served the Prophet ﷺ for ten years and would die in Basra in 93 AH, came regularly to Medina in these years. The young al-Zuhri ﵀ met him personally and received hadith from his mouth. Sahl ibn Sa’d as-Sa’idi ﵁, who died in 91 AH, was likewise in his circle of study. For a Tabi’i this is the highest attainable: not only receiving transmission from the second generation, but directly hearing a man whose ear had been touched by the ear of the Prophet ﷺ. Azami does point out that the best documented direct Sahaba link for al-Zuhri ﵀ is that of Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁, from whom, however, he recorded only two transmissions.

The principal teachers of al-Zuhri ﵀, however, were not Sahaba ﵃ but the great Tabi’in of Medina. The city housed in the second half of the first century AH a dense circle of jurists, and al-Zuhri ﵀ learned directly from a number of them. At the top of the row named by Azami stands Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, who died in 94 AH, the son-in-law of Abu Hurayra ﵁ and the man who himself carried in his memory a great part of the hadith legacy of the desert reciter. Sa’id ﵀ was strict. He did not give transmission to everyone who came to sit around him; he first tested sincerity and memory. That al-Zuhri ﵀ was admitted for years into Sa’id ﵀'s circle, and that according to Azami he accompanied Ibn al-Musayyib ﵀ for at least seven years in order to attend every available sitting, says something about both the scholar and the student.

A second pillar in his formation was Urwa ibn az-Zubayr ﵀, who died in 94 AH, the son of az-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam ﵁ and of Asma bint Abi Bakr ﵂. Urwa ﵀ was the nephew of Aisha ﵂, and his principal hadith source was his aunt. Whoever learned from Urwa ﵀ received in effect a direct passage to the transmission from the household of the Prophet ﷺ, with her detailed memory of the Meccan years, the Hijra, the first two years of war and the whole Medinan phase. Urwa ﵀ was also one of the earliest Tabi’in who tried to write down the life history of the Prophet ﷺ in an ordered form, with maghazi fragments that he dictated to his students. Al-Zuhri ﵀, as his later Maghazi work shows, took this ordering over from Urwa ﵀; Azami states expressly that the work of al-Zuhri ﵀ was mainly planned on the scheme of Urwa ﵀, and that he built it out into a genre of his own.

Ubaydullah ibn Abdullah ibn Utba ibn Mas’ud ﵀, who died in 98 AH, is likewise counted by Azami among the teachers; he was the jurist who embodied the combination of a Quraishi affiliation and a deeply Medinan training. He had sat with Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁ and passed on to al-Zuhri ﵀ the tafsir tradition of his circle. Azami names in the same breath Abdullah ibn Tha’labah ﵀ as one of al-Zuhri ﵀'s teachers, a name often omitted in later surveys. To these teachers enumerated by Azami, the classical biographical literature, notably Ibn Sa’d and al-Mizzi ﵀, adds still others: Salim ibn Abdullah ibn Umar ﵀, who died in 106 AH, the grandson of Umar ﵁, who supplied al-Zuhri ﵀ with the Umar transmission in its full juridical richness plus the hadith that his father Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁ had gathered in a long life; Abu Bakr ibn Abdur-Rahman ibn al-Harith ibn Hisham ﵀; Qabisah ibn Dhu’ayb ﵀ in Damascus; and Aban ibn Uthman ﵀, the son of the third caliph. These last names thus come from the classical surveys, not from Azami’s own enumeration.

Al-Zuhri ﵀ spoke in his later years about his own education. Two transmissions are of particular importance for history. The first is a methodical self-description in which he tells how he composed his transmissions from what he had heard with Alqamah, Sa’id ﵀, Urwa ﵀ and Ubaydullah ﵀, so that the one report supplemented the other; he did not bind himself to one scholar but drew the transmission from every mouth in which it was pronounced strongly and correctly.The second is a confession that Azami transmits word for word: We had an aversion to the recording of knowledge until these amirs forced us to it, and then we were of the opinion that we should not withhold it from any Muslim. This second statement has, as we shall see below, acquired in the hands of Goldziher an entirely different import than al-Zuhri ﵀ gave it. Azami points out emphatically that the statement has nothing to do with forgery, and that a translation which suggests this does violence to the text.

The method: between memory and pen

A hadith scholar from the second half of the first century AH worked in an intermediate space in which memory still played the leading role and writing was an auxiliary instrument. Al-Zuhri ﵀ organised that intermediate space with more precision than his predecessors. His student Abu az-Zinad ﵀ transmits that al-Zuhri ﵀ went about with tablets and sheets of paper and immediately recorded everything he heard.He heard a hadith from the mouth of his teacher, he wrote it down at once, and in a phase after that he memorised what was recorded until it stood indelibly in his memory. His fellow student Salih ibn Kaysan ﵀ has transmitted how they wrote down together what came from the Prophet ﷺ, and how their approaches on that point diverged and came together again.

His student Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀, who would later compile his own Jami’ in Yemen, preserved about the writing fervour of his teacher that al-Zuhri ﵀ wrote even on the soles of his shoes, and that he collected books in great quantity.His wife is even said to have complained that these books were harder to bear than three co-wives. Al-Zuhri ﵀ consulted his records, he compared them with one another, and he urged his students, in case of doubt, always to go back to the original. Only when the content of a record had passed fully into his memory and he could recite it identically in different circles did he regard it as a piece of secure transmission.

That al-Zuhri ﵀ wrote in this phase has in the later hadith discussion sometimes been made into a point of polemic by commentators who held that the writing down of hadith was forbidden. The early hadith literature does indeed contain a number of transmissions in which the Prophet ﷺ had warned against writing down hadith beside the Quran for fear of mixture. But it contains just as much transmissions in which the Prophet ﷺ gave specific Sahaba ﵃ explicit permission, and even instruction, to write. Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁ possessed the well-known Sahifa as-Sadiqa, which is treated elsewhere in this series. Anas ibn Malik ﵁ had writings of his own, as did Abu Hurayra ﵁ through his student Hammam ibn Munabbih ﵀, who has his own article on the Sahifa of Hammam in Sanaa. The ban on writing was, as the hadith scholars have unanimously established, an early precaution that lost its reason for existence with the standardisation of the Quranic text and the growth of the umma. Al-Zuhri ﵀ thus did not stand in a deviation; he stood in the mainstream of the Sahaba practice that he had inherited from his teachers.

What distinguished him was the scale. A Sahabi who made a sahifa for himself did so for his own use. Al-Zuhri ﵀ made his records with a view to teaching hundreds of students. He organised his material by subject, for his students did not all come for the same hadith. A Sufyan ﵀ from Mecca sought different transmission than an Ibn Ishaq ﵀ who came for the maghazi, or a Malik ﵀ who came for the Medinan practice. Al-Zuhri ﵀ had to be able to find in his records what he needed for which student, and that forced him into a form of classification that was new in his time. Thus he supplied, as Azami transmits, whole prepared collections to students such as Shu’ayb ibn Abi Hamza ﵀, and dictated to the son of Hisham four hundred transmissions at once.

From his final years a striking image has been preserved. Azami describes how al-Zuhri ﵀ towards the end of his life gave books to a number of students without reading them out to them and without allowing them to be read out to him, after which he withdrew from teaching.It is a gesture that befits a man who regarded memory and the isnad chain as the real guarantee of the transmission, and who saw the material carrier merely as an aid.

Hundreds of students, five capitals

What makes al-Zuhri ﵀ an exceptional figure in history is not only what he received from his teachers, but what he passed on to his students. 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 hundreds of his students. Azami gives a more concrete and more checkable datum: more than fifty of al-Zuhri ﵀'s students possessed his transmissions in writing.What counts for this article is that his principal students did not live in one city, but in all the great capitals of the umma at once.

In Medina, Malik ibn Anas ﵀, who died in 179 AH, received his formation partly in al-Zuhri ﵀'s circle. When Malik ﵀ later compiled his Muwatta, the first systematic law book of Islam, al-Zuhri ﵀ was one of the most frequently cited isnad nodes in it. Ibrahim ibn Sa’d ﵀ and Salih ibn Kaysan ﵀ can also be added to this Medinan line.

In Mecca, Sufyan ibn Uyayna ﵀, who died in 198 AH, was one of the most prominent conveyors. Sufyan ﵀ gathered what he had learned from al-Zuhri ﵀ and developed in Mecca a circle of his own in which the Zuhri transmission occupied a central place. Beside him must here be named Abdul-Malik ibn Jurayj ﵀, who died in 150 AH, who in Mecca would compile one of the first systematic musannafat, with al-Zuhri ﵀ as one of his principal sources.

In Yemen and Basra, Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀, who died in 153 AH, was the conveyor. He had sat for years at al-Zuhri ﵀'s feet in Medina, had gone with him to Damascus in the years that al-Zuhri ﵀ resided in the vicinity of the caliphal court, and brought what he had received to Yemen where he compiled his Jami’. This Jami’ Ma’mar ibn Rashid, in which al-Zuhri ﵀ is a prominent source, was published by the hadith scholar Habib al-Rahman al-A’zami, a modern editor who must not be confused with Mustafa al-Azami, the author of Studies in Early Hadith Literature. The Jami’ is one of the oldest preserved hadith collections we possess, and the fact that al-Zuhri ﵀ appears in it so often is a vivid indication of his central position in the chains of transmission of his time.

In Sham, that is the Bilad as-Sham from Damascus to Beirut, Abdur-Rahman al-Awza’i ﵀, who died in 157 AH, was the principal recipient. Al-Awza’i ﵀ founded a fiqh school of his own that was dominant throughout the Levantine region in the second and third centuries AH, and he based a considerable part of his legal conclusions on the hadith he had received from al-Zuhri ﵀. In Egypt the principal recipient was Yunus ibn Yazid al-Ayli ﵀, who died in 159 AH, who had spent years in Medina and later maintained a circle of students in his Egyptian home town of Ayla. To this list must still be added Aqil ibn Khalid ﵀, Shu’ayb ibn Abi Hamza ﵀ and, for the maghazi tradition, Muhammad ibn Ishaq ﵀. Ibn Ishaq ﵀'s Sirah, which has come down to us in the redaction of Ibn Hisham ﵀, leans in countless places on al-Zuhri ﵀ as the intermediate link to Urwa ibn az-Zubayr ﵀, and so to Aisha ﵂.

This geographical spread is not decorative for the argument of this article. It is structural. A teacher who has students in five capitals at once passes the same basic material on to each of those capitals. His students later compare, in their own circles and with one another, what they have received. A Sufyan ﵀ in Mecca who reports a hadith of al-Zuhri ﵀ can be measured against a Malik ﵀ in Medina, a Ma’mar ﵀ in Yemen, an Awza’i ﵀ in Damascus and a Yunus ﵀ in Egypt. When all five arrive at the same formulation, the attribution to al-Zuhri ﵀ is indisputable. When one deviates, it can be established precisely where the deviation lies and how much it weighs. The dispersed circles of students were each other’s mutual control mechanism, and al-Zuhri ﵀'s own transmission was, through the scale of that dispersal, impossible to doctor or falsify without the discrepancy immediately coming to light.

It is precisely against this structural reality that the attack which now follows must be tested.

The attack of Goldziher

Ignaz Goldziher, a Hungarian-Jewish orientalist who published at Halle the two volumes of his Muhammedanische Studien, of which the second volume appeared in 1890, has become the man whose work cast a shadow over the science of hadith that would last a hundred years. His thesis was, in the broadest summary, that the hadith literature does not go back to the Prophet ﷺ and the Sahaba ﵃ but to the political, legal and theological struggles of the second century AH, with hadith fabrication as a common weapon between the contending parties. What was presented as an authorised transmission of the Prophet ﷺ was, according to Goldziher, in most cases a later insertion, placed in the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ to legitimise a later position.

For this thesis Goldziher had to designate a scholar who stood at the hinge point. Someone who had been connected with the Umayyad state, who had been in a position of influence, and who had access to a large circle of students in which fabricated transmission could spread. Al-Zuhri ﵀ fitted this role like no other. He had indeed resided for years in the vicinity of Damascus. He had indeed taught the sons of Hisham. He had indeed maintained extensive circles of students. And, for Goldziher the decisive element, he was indeed the scholar who was asked by Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ to write down the hadith, in an operation that could not have taken place without caliphal backing.

The polemical passage on which Goldziher based his principal accusation came from the Tarikh of Ahmad ibn Wadih al-Ya’qubi, a Shi’i historian from the third century AH who in his work took a consistently anti-Umayyad standpoint. Al-Ya’qubi reports in volume II of his Tarikh, in his treatment of the caliphate of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, that Abd al-Malik, after the revolt of Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ in Mecca, no longer dared let the pilgrims from Sham go to Mecca, for fear that they would swear allegiance to Ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ in the Meccan mosque. He is therefore said to have erected the Qubbat as-Sakhra in Jerusalem as a substitute centre of pilgrimage, and, citing a hadith of al-Zuhri ﵀, to have offered the pilgrims a substitute for the Hajj in the form of a visit to Jerusalem. According to Goldziher it was left to the theologian al-Zuhri ﵀ to legalise and justify this action.

Goldziher made this passage into the anchor point of a larger argument. In his reading we see here how a hadith was fabricated on caliphal command, how a scholar of the first rank let himself be made into an instrument of the state, and how the system of the isnad chain supposedly offered no protection against such a forgery. The thesis was built out by his successors, Joseph Schacht in 1950 foremost, into a methodical principle. Whoever doubts a hadith need only point to an Umayyad or Abbasid political interest it could have served, and the doubt stands. The work of half a century of Western hadith studies is, in a sense, the shadow work of this one assumption.

The refutation in six points

Mustafa al-Azami has, in Studies in Early Hadith Literature and in still more elaborated form in his later On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, dissected this attack point by point. The refutation falls into six arguments, which we work out here one after another because in their coherence they demonstrate that the attack on al-Zuhri ﵀ is factually untenable.

The first argument is chronological. Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan completed the Qubbat as-Sakhra in 72 AH. In that year al-Zuhri ﵀ was, as Azami establishes, somewhere between ten and eighteen years of age.He was in that year no scholar of the first rank whom a caliph would commission to forge a hadith. He was a young Medinan student who had only just, or barely, begun to sit at the feet of Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀ and Urwa ﵀, and who had not yet set foot in Damascus. Azami points out moreover that al-Zuhri ﵀ did not meet Abd al-Malik before 81 AH. A commission from Abd al-Malik to a scholar who at that moment was still a child or a boy, and who had not even met the caliph yet, is a historical impossibility.

The second argument is biographical. When al-Zuhri ﵀ later, after the caliphate of Sulayman and in the reign of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ and the caliphs Yazid II and Hisham who followed, became a figure of significance at the caliphal court in Damascus, the Qubbat as-Sakhra was already an established structure. A hadith that was supposed to have legitimised it as a substitute goal of pilgrimage was at that moment no longer needed. The political crisis with Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ had ended, and the Hajj was, as Azami indicates, simply performed under Umayyad rule, including in the years 68, 72 and 75 AH.Al-Hajjaj had Mecca under control in 72 AH, and Ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ was killed in 73 AH, after which all pilgrim routes lay open again. A fabrication that would have been introduced thirty or forty years after the occasion serves no political purpose any more.

The third argument concerns the source. Al-Ya’qubi is a historian with an unmistakable Shi’i standpoint, whose work formulates a continuous critique of the Umayyad state.An accusation against a scholar who had stood in close relation to that state fits into this broader agenda. Moreover, the passage in al-Ya’qubi’s Tarikh is a one-man report without isnad. He names no source, no chain of transmission, no eyewitness. For a methodical historian this is the type of report that in the science of hadith itself would immediately be disqualified as weak. Goldziher used a report without isnad to discredit an entire isnad system, a methodical circle that would be acceptable in no other historical discipline.

The fourth argument is the weightiest. In the whole transmission of al-Zuhri ﵀, as it is included in the Sittah works of Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Abu Dawud ﵀, an-Nasa’i ﵀, at-Tirmidhi ﵀ and Ibn Majah ﵀, plus in Malik ﵀'s Muwatta, in Ma’mar ﵀'s Jami’ and in al-Awza’i ﵀'s transmitted fatwa material, there exists not a single hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ designates the visit to Jerusalem as a substitute for the Hajj to Mecca. What is present in al-Zuhri ﵀'s transmission is the well-known hadith about the three mosques for which special travel preparations are permissible, that is the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the Prophetic Mosque in Medina and the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. This hadith says nothing about the Hajj. It institutes no substitution. It merely gives the three mosques as the three holy places to which a believer may travel with religious intention. Azami observes that al-Zuhri ﵀'s wording does not with a single word mention or even suggest the sacredness of the Rock or a tawaf around it.The fabricated hadith of which al-Ya’qubi speaks simply does not exist in al-Zuhri ﵀'s registration. Goldziher ascribed to al-Zuhri ﵀ a hadith that cannot be ascribed to al-Zuhri ﵀, because it does not occur in his corpus.

The fifth argument concerns the structural impossibility of forgery. We have discussed above the hundreds of students, spread over Medina, Mecca, Yemen, Damascus, Egypt and smaller centres. A hadith that al-Zuhri ﵀ would have fabricated on the commission of a caliph would immediately have been noticed by this circle of students. A Malik ﵀ in Medina would have marked and reported a hadith he had never before heard from al-Zuhri ﵀, but which suddenly surfaced in a Damascene circle. A Sufyan ﵀ in Mecca would have done the same. Azami points out in this connection that, if the Syrian scholars had been anti-Umayyad, their protests against such a fabrication would have had to surface somewhere in the transmission, and that of this there exists no trace.The early hadith criticism, which was already functioning in the second century AH, possessed precisely this instrument: the comparison of transmissions between students of the same teacher. A hadith inserted for a political interest by a scholar of al-Zuhri ﵀'s stature could not possibly have been accepted uniformly by all five geographical schools.

The sixth argument, finally, touches on al-Zuhri ﵀'s own relation to the Umayyad state. He was, unlike Goldziher’s portrait suggests, no submissive court scholar. Azami has shown that al-Zuhri ﵀ was more than once heavily in debt, and that those debts were paid off by the caliphs, but that his relation to them was not for that reason smooth; it was impossible for him to make a false statement.The biographical literature has preserved two episodes from which that independence clearly appears. In the first, al-Walid asked him about a saying, and al-Zuhri ﵀ proved that the saying was entirely wrong, instead of confirming it.In the second he flatly contradicted Hisham on a historical point concerning Ali ﵁, and he swore that he would not lie:

These episodes are preserved in the sources, and they draw a scholar who was invited to the court because of his knowledge, but who did not let his knowledge be determined by who invited him.That he taught princes was his educational task; that he taught them within the bounds of what he had received was his scholarly discipline. He accepted that his debts were settled by the caliphs, but he refused to lie in favour of their positions.

The Hajj-substitute hadith in the broader literature

We linger here a little longer over the core point of the attack, because in the orientalist literature it was recycled for many decades more and in popular booklets is sometimes repeated to this day. The claim is that there exists, or existed, a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ equates the visit to Jerusalem with the Hajj. In the classical collections no hadith of that purport is ascribed to al-Zuhri ﵀. What does exist is the well-known transmission about the three mosques, plus a number of fada’il hadith about the merits of prayer in the al-Aqsa Mosque. This fada’il hadith says nothing about the Hajj. Azami points out moreover that the transmission about the mosque of Jerusalem does not run only through al-Zuhri ﵀, but through many others; his own enumeration of isnad chains for the three-mosques hadith names among others Ibn Umar ﵁, Ali ﵁, Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁, Abu Hurayra ﵁ and Abdullah ibn Amr ﵁ as Sahaba sources.

What is ascribed to al-Zuhri ﵀, then, does not exist. What does exist about the al-Aqsa Mosque is transmitted along many chains and is no Hajj substitution. The attack collapses completely in this one observation. Goldziher assumed a hadith on the basis of an isnad-less passage in al-Ya’qubi, ascribed it to a scholar who never transmitted it, and built on that ascription a methodical conclusion that renders the whole hadith transmission suspect. Azami lets the matter end with the judgment of the orientalist Josef Horovitz, who wrote of al-Zuhri ﵀'s transmission that there is no ground whatever to doubt that al-Zuhri ﵀ really heard the hadith from the mouth of Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀.

Al-Zuhri ﵀ and the Umayyads

Yet the picture of al-Zuhri ﵀ that remains after this refutation is not that of a court scholar who kept his distance. He had an eventful relationship with the successive Umayyad caliphs, and the sources do not conceal that relationship. He lived and worked, with interruptions, in the vicinity of Damascus. He taught the sons of Hisham, and in that capacity received a number of payments from the court. He had outstanding debts, which were paid off by the caliphs. At the end of his life he withdrew to his estate at Shaghb in Palestine, where he died in 124 AH.

The portrait that the biographical literature draws is that of a scholar who mastered the tension between knowledge and politics not by withdrawal but by discipline. He regarded Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, the only Umayyad caliph to whom the tradition grants the honorific ﵀, as his trusted contemporary and kindred spirit; Azami transmits that Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ admired him and advised people to attend his study circle.He was, as we saw with the caliphal codification decree of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, the scholar who was asked to give effect to the codification of the hadith. He served Hisham as caliph in the educational role towards his children, but refused to let his transmission be steered by the wishes of the government. The chaos under Yazid III and the bloody succession struggle that heralded the end of the Umayyad dynasty he no longer had to witness; he had already died about eight years before the death of Marwan II, the last Umayyad caliph, in 132 AH.

This relationship did not make him suspect in the eyes of later generations. Imam Malik ﵀, who grew up in Medina with the Umayyad legacy still fresh in memory, spoke of his teacher al-Zuhri ﵀ only in superlatives. Imam ash-Shafi’i ﵀ treated al-Zuhri ﵀ in his fiqh works as an unquestionable source. Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, who in their collections included only transmission that met the strictest isnad criteria, included al-Zuhri ﵀ transmission in hundreds of places in their Sahih works. Azami sums up the judgment of the tradition: the hadith scholars agree unanimously that al-Zuhri ﵀ was an authority on the Sunnah and a most trustworthy scholar.When a scholar is recognised as reliable without exception by the succeeding generations of hadith criticism, that is an institutional judgment that weighs more heavily than a polemical remark in a Shi’i chronicle.

The position in the structure

It is good, at the end of this biographical part, to zoom out and place al-Zuhri ﵀ in the structural context that the whole theme is about. The compilation of the Quran, which we followed in eighteen articles in the first sub-map of this theme, knew a double preservation: a written skeleton, standardised in 25 AH under Uthman ﵁, and an oral isnad chain that found its formal canonisation in the science of the qira’at. The science of hadith, to which this second sub-map is devoted, went through a comparable but temporally stretched development.

The oral phase began under the Sahaba ﵃, as we have treated in earlier articles. The written phase was formalised under Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ by a caliphal decree. Al-Zuhri ﵀ was the first scholar who carried out this formalisation in a systematic work, with writings, with geographical dispersal, with a network of students in which the transmission was recorded multiple times over. What he did in this position was the transition from a private practice to a public science. He did not invent the hadith discipline, and he did not fabricate its material; he organised the existing practice into a corpus that could be handed down to later generations in ordered form.

In that respect he stands precisely on the hinge between the Sahaba generation and the canonical phase that would find its completion in the third century AH with Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀. Without his work, the Sittah literature, which came into being well over a hundred years after his death, could not have drawn on an already systematised corpus. With his work the step from personal sahifa to public musannaf became possible, a step that his students Ma’mar ﵀, Malik ﵀, Ibn Jurayj ﵀ and al-Awza’i ﵀ took in their own works.

The parallel with Basra

While al-Zuhri ﵀ in Medina and Damascus took the written organisation of the hadith in hand, in Basra the development had taken place that we followed in the previous article, and that in its significance is akin to al-Zuhri ﵀'s work. In Basra, Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀, who died in 110 AH, was the scholar who in his famous statement formulated the isnad requirement as the core criterion of hadith transmission. Before the Fitna we did not ask about the isnad. But when the Fitna came, we said: name us your men. We then looked: if he belonged to Ahl as-Sunnah, we accepted his hadith; if he belonged to Ahl al-Bid’ah, we did not accept it. This statement, which was recorded by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj ﵀ in the introduction of his Sahih, formalised in a single formulation what had long been happening in practice, and what al-Zuhri ﵀ in Medina was carrying out at the same time in his methodical ordering.

The two men were contemporaries and they knew each other. Ibn Sirin ﵀ died in 110 AH, al-Zuhri ﵀ in 124 AH; their working years overlap completely. They worked in two different capitals, with two different circles of students, on two different fronts of the same science. In Medina al-Zuhri ﵀ worked on the organisation of the material into an ordered corpus; in Basra Ibn Sirin ﵀ had formalised the criterion by which that material was tested. The Basra line, with Ibn Sirin ﵀ as principal figure and with the isnad requirement as the formal separation between what the umma accepted as transmission and what it rejected as unconfirmed attribution, has been followed in detail elsewhere in this series.

What becomes visible in these two lives together is that the science of hadith in the first decades of the second century AH was not built up by one scholar in one city, but by a network of scholars in different centres at once, who stood in mutual contact and who strengthened each other’s work. Al-Zuhri ﵀ in Medina and Ibn Sirin ﵀ in Basra are the two pillars of that construction. What they began, their students carried further to Mecca, Damascus, Yemen, Egypt and Kufa, until in the third century AH the Sittah redactors brought in the harvest and fixed it in six definitive collections.

The chain passed on

Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀ died in 124 AH on his estate at Shaghb, at a distance of several days’ journey from Medina, in the quiet of a life he had lived in the service of the transmission. His legacy was not a book he had signed himself. He published, as far as we know, not a single work in his own redaction. His writings, which he had partly left to students, have not come down to us as independent works. What has remained of him lives in the works of others: in Ma’mar ﵀'s Jami’, in Malik ﵀'s Muwatta, in the fragments that appear in Ibn Ishaq ﵀'s Sirah via the intermediate link of Salih ibn Kaysan ﵀, in the hundreds of hadith that the Sittah works report from him via multiple independent isnad chains.

This manner of survival is, for the aims of this theme, not incidental. A scholar whose work had been preserved exclusively in his own books could have been removed from history by one single fire or by one deliberate destruction. A scholar whose work had fanned out via hundreds of students in five capitals, and whose transmission was fixed in later works through countless independent chains, could be erased by no political event whatsoever. When Goldziher and his successors wished to discredit the hadith of al-Zuhri ﵀, they did not stand before one book that they could have dissected with textual criticism; they stood before a network of chains, in five capitals at once, with mutually comparable transmissions and with a control mechanism built into the discipline itself. It is no coincidence that their attack, however much executed with scholarly apparatus, had to lean on a one-man report without isnad from a polemical source. A network transmission is not broken with a one-man report.

What was closed with al-Zuhri ﵀ in 124 AH was a life; what was not closed with him was the science he had organised. The science of hadith that found its double foundation in him and in Ibn Sirin ﵀ was from the beginning so arranged that no individual scholar, however great, stood above its criteria. Al-Zuhri ﵀ organised it in Medina; Ibn Sirin ﵀ tested it in Basra; and it is in the tension between those two functions that the discipline acquired the credibility it still carries today.

But the organisation that al-Zuhri ﵀ set in motion in Medina leaves open a question that no theory about method can answer. Does there still exist tangible material from this generation, a written document from the second century AH that we can lay in our hands and test against the later collections? In the next article we return to Medina and follow the nuskhah of Suhail ibn Abi Salih ﵀, the smallest preserved manuscript that goes back via his father to Abu Hurayra ﵁, and which a scholar from India in 1966 in Cambridge chose as the central piece of evidence to show that the written transmission of which al-Zuhri ﵀ embodied the systematics was no later construction but an early reality.