The Rihla: Jabir ﵁ Travels a Month for One Hadith

In the previous chapter we sat in the circle of Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁ in Mecca, where the knowledge of the Prophet ﷺ went from mouth to mouth and where the first real name lists of students arose. We saw how there, in the shadow of the Ka’bah, the reverence for the word of the Messenger of Allah ﷻ translated itself into a discipline of careful receiving and careful passing on. But such reverence remains an attitude as long as it is not put to the test. A student can nod in agreement at the value of a short, pure chain and meanwhile calmly take in whatever the first storyteller to hand offers him. The question this century left open was not whether the pure chain sounded logical. The question was whether men would rise who would make it good with their bodies.

This chapter is about one of those men. He was old, he was tired, and he had every reason to stay in Medina. He did not stay.

Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁, the Companion who as a young man had counted on the fingers of the Prophet ﷺ how many children he wanted, who had seen more than sixty years of Islamic history with his own eyes, sat around 70 AH in his house in Medina. He was advanced in age, far into his eighties according to the later transmissions. His knowledge was fathomlessly deep; younger scholars came daily to his door to draw from it. And when he heard that somewhere, far away in Damascus, another Companion lived who had heard one particular hadith of the Prophet ﷺ that no one else could still transmit directly, he did something that has no counterpart in the history of any other religion.

He filled his waterskins. He mounted his riding animal. And he rode for a month.

For one hadith.

What rihla meant

The Arabic word rihla literally means journey, trek, expedition. A Bedouin went on rihla when he brought his herd to new pastures. A merchant went on rihla when he departed with a caravan for Sham or Yemen. A diplomat went on rihla when he served as envoy for his tribe to a foreign ruler. It was, in the pre-Islamic Arab mind, a word that combined perseverance, discomfort and the acceptance of the unknown.

Within one generation after the death of the Prophet ﷺ, the word acquired a new charge. Ar-rihla fi talab al-'ilm, the journey in search of knowledge, became a fixed expression. And within it arose an even sharper subcategory: ar-rihla fi talab al-hadith, the journey in search of one single hadith, sometimes undertaken for one single word, sometimes for one single detail in the chain of transmitters that a scholar wished to verify with the highest available source.

This was no tourism. This was no pilgrimage to a holy place, although the Hajj itself often provided the occasion to meet scholars in passing. This was something much more precise and much heavier. A rihla in the technical sense meant: departing from your city, leaving behind your family, your students, your income and your safety, in order to seek out in another city one man who had heard something you wished to hear. And then, having heard it, to return.

No longer course of study. No years with the same teacher. One meeting, one recording, one chain to verify. And home again.

Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀, himself a writer of the fifth century AH who devoted an entire book to this custom, gathers in his work the motives for which a man would undertake a rihla. The first, to hear a hadith he already knew directly from its highest living source, instead of through an intermediary. The difference between five links in the chain and four links was for the hadith scholar what the difference between four and three decimal places was for an astronomer. The second, to verify a hadith of which he doubted whether the version circulating in his city was correct. And the third, to learn a hadith he did not yet know at all and that was still available only with that one man in that one city.

Jabir’s journey fell into the first category. He already knew the hadith. He wanted to hear it from the man who had heard it directly from the Prophet ﷺ.

The man in Damascus

Who was Abdullah ibn Unays al-Juhani ﵁?

He was a Sahabi of the second rank in the sense that he did not belong to the Ten Promised Paradise, not to the first converts of Mecca, not to the direct in-law family of the Prophet ﷺ. But within the generation of the Medina Sahaba he was a known name, a man with a place of his own in the sira literature. He was of the Juhayna tribe, an Arab tribe to the northwest of Medina. He had served the Prophet ﷺ for years, taken part in several battles, and was known for his courage in one of the most sensitive missions the Prophet ﷺ ever gave: the elimination of Khalid ibn Sufyan al-Hudhali, a tribal chief who openly called for an attack on Medina. Ibn Unays ﵁ had set out alone, tracked the man down, and returned. That kind of man.

After the passing of the Prophet ﷺ and the period of the conquests, Ibn Unays ﵁ moved to Sham and finally settled in Damascus. There he lived quietly, far from the great political quarrels of Medina and Kufa, in a house that knew neither poverty nor luxury. Here we run into a tension that the sources themselves do not resolve. Most transmissions place his death in 54 AH; others place it later. For the chronology of Jabir’s journey we adopt the variant in which Ibn Unays ﵁ was still alive in the late sixties of the first century AH. Various isnads and the internal dating of the transmission leave room for that later date, but one must be honest: if 54 AH is the correct date of death, then a journey around 70 AH is chronologically difficult to reconcile. We deliberately leave the dating open. The core of the story, the journey of an old Companion to one living source for one hadith, stands in the classical sources independently of the precise years named around it.

What made him the goal of such a journey?

One hadith. A hadith about the Day of Judgment, about the way in which Allah ﷻ on that Day will gather the people and address them directly, without interpreter and without intermediary. The Arabic core text speaks of yuhsharu an-nas yawm al-qiyama, the people are brought together on the Day of Resurrection, naked, unshod, stripped of possession and title, and the Caller calls with a voice that the first and the last hear. Near for whoever was far, far for whoever was near.

Jabir ﵁ had heard the content of this hadith before, most probably through an intermediary. Ibn Unays ﵁ was, as far as he knew, the only human being still alive on earth who had heard this hadith directly from the Prophet ﷺ. Otherwise the chain would forever remain one link longer than it could be. And a hadith about the Day of Judgment, a hadith that makes the listener picture how he himself will soon stand, unclothed, before the Creator, was not a hadith you wanted to carry secondhand.

He decided to go.

Departure from Medina

Picture Medina in the late sixties of the first century AH. The city is no longer the capital. The Umayyads rule from Damascus, and most political energy has shifted north. What Medina keeps is its spiritual weight. The mosque of the Prophet ﷺ is still the place where the oldest living Sahaba gather daily, where the youngest Tabi’in crouch on the stone floor around a grey-haired elder and take notes on fragments of parchment or in their memory.

Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁ is one of those elders. He leads a teaching circle of his own. A man from Basra who wishes to visit him knows that at set times he sits in a corner of the mosque, surrounded by students who ask him about the battles he had lived through as a young man, about the treaties of Hudaybiyya, about the farewell pilgrimage, about the way the Prophet ﷺ ate, slept, washed, prayed. The classical sources, incidentally, do not agree on whether Jabir ﵁ as a boy was himself present at Uhud; several transmissions report that his father kept him home then, and that he fought only in later expeditions. What is certain is that he belonged to the longest-living eyewitnesses of the Prophetic era.

The preparation for a journey to Damascus was no small matter. The distance is by modern measure about thirteen hundred kilometres as the crow flies, and the actual route along the caravan roads through the Hijaz, past Tabuk, through the basalt fields of Harrat ash-Sham, was considerably longer. By camel a practised traveller covered that distance in an estimated three to four weeks, provided he met no setback. For a man of such age it was the physical feat of a lifetime.

Money had to be arranged. A riding animal was made ready. Waterskins were filled, dates and dried bread packed, a cloak laid out for the desert nights. A travelling companion was needed, since no sensible man undertook such a trek alone; some sources tell that a mawla or servant travelled with him, others are silent on it. The letters of introduction were written, if necessary, for the governors along the way.

And the reason for the journey. When his younger colleagues asked him why on earth, at his age, for one hadith, Jabir ﵁ gave the answer that al-Khatib would later record with respect: “I fear that I will die before I have heard it from his lips.” Not before I teach it. Not before I write it down. Before I have heard it from his lips.

For Jabir ﵁ the chain was no academic technique. It was the touch. A hadith that had passed through four links felt to him like a letter copied out by four copyists. A hadith that had passed through three, and the third was this man Ibn Unays ﵁ who still sat in his house in Damascus, was something he could still receive flesh-to-flesh in this life.

He departed.

The road

What happened on the way? The sources give little detail about it. We know that the route ran past Tabuk, a town the Prophet ﷺ himself had visited during his last great expedition. We know that the desert between Tabuk and the South Syrian edge of the cultivated land was notorious for its summer heat and winter cold. We know that the caravan hostels in this period were still primitive; only under the Abbasids would a dense network of built-out funduqs and khans arise. In the Umayyad era the hospitality of local tribes was often the only shelter a traveller had.

We can imagine what the trek meant for a man of his age. The rhythm of a camel is in the long run exhausting for younger men; for a grey-haired elder every hour in the saddle is a negotiation with his own body. The mornings before sunrise, when the desert cool makes progress possible. The afternoons under an improvised awning while the sand grew so hot that a bare foot could not stand on it. The evenings when the prayer was performed and then the simple meal, dates and water and some bread soaked in the waterskin to remain edible.

At every halting place Jabir ﵁ will have repeated in silence why he was going. A man of his age knows what can befall him on the road. A heart failure. A fall from the riding animal. Bandits who hold no awe for age or learning. The choice to go anyway, and to make that choice anew every morning as long as the body still would, was itself a form of testimony. Not only about the value of the specific hadith he was going to fetch, but about the whole world in which that hadith lived.

A world in which transmission was not literature. In which a word that went from tongue to tongue had a value no written text could replace. In which the distance between two men who looked each other in the eyes, a distance at which the breath was still audible, was the most reliable form of communication that human life knew.

Arrival at the door

After a good month of travelling, or perhaps a little less, or perhaps a little more, Jabir ﵁ came within the walls of Damascus. The city lay in a plain surrounded by mountains, cut through by the Barada river, with the Umayyad mosque being built in those same decades on the site of an old basilica. Jabir ﵁ had no interest in the mosque, no interest in the markets, no interest in the palaces of the governors. He asked where Abdullah ibn Unays ﵁ lived.

The house was pointed out to him. He dismounted. He knocked.

A servant or a family member opened. What followed, we know from the well-known transmission that al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀ included in his Ar-Rihla fi Talab al-Hadith with several chains, and that is preserved in simpler form in the hadith collection of al-Bukhari ﵀ in Al-Adab al-Mufrad.

The message was brought inside. A moment later Ibn Unays ﵁ himself came forward, in haste, not knowing what the old man from Medina was doing at his door after such a journey. What the sources tell next, the hadith tradition has passed down for centuries as one of the purest moments of its own history.

Ibn Unays ﵁ stood at his own front door, one old Companion facing another old Companion, and he understood. He did not ask what the purpose was. He did not ask whether Jabir ﵁ perhaps first wished to rest, eat, wash, sleep. He knew what it was to come for a hadith, and he knew that a man who had travelled a month had not come for a guest cushion.

He began to recite.

The hadith itself

The hadith that Ibn Unays ﵁ pronounced at the door for Jabir ﵁, in something that lay between a conversation and a formal transmission, has different versions in the sources. The core is the same in all versions. It is a hadith about the gathering of humanity on the Day of Judgment, cast in the visual and acoustic images with which the Prophet ﷺ painted this event for his Companions ﵃.

يُحْشَرُ النَّاسُ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ عُرَاةً غُرْلًا بُهْمًا

"The people will be gathered on the Day of Judgment, naked, uncircumcised, without possession."

Hadith in al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, with wording similar to what Jabir ﵁ heard from Ibn Unays ﵁

The version specifically connected with Jabir’s journey adds that a Caller addresses the people with a voice that yusmiuhu man qaruba kama yusmiuhu man ba’uda, makes those hear who stand near just as he makes those hear who stand far. No distance exists in that voice. The first of creation and the last of it stand on one plain, in one light, under one Call.

For Jabir ﵁ this was not only a hadith about the future. It was a hadith about what his whole journey meant. He was himself, at that moment, an old man standing far from home at a stranger’s door, a man who knew that the distance between Medina and Damascus, between his own age and his own death, could be lifted at any moment. The hadith was about a Day on which distance itself falls away. He had come to fetch it at an age at which distance had become for him personally the heaviest it had ever been.

Ibn Unays ﵁ pronounced it, until Jabir ﵁ was certain of the exact wording. Jabir ﵁ repeated it. One Sahabi passed on to another Sahabi, in a street of Damascus, a word that the Prophet ﷺ had spoken in a mosque of Medina forty years earlier. The chain had now become one man shorter instead of two.

And then, without setting his foot over the threshold, Jabir ﵁ turned around, mounted his camel, and began the journey back.

What this moment meant

We must not walk past this scene. It is one of those rare moments in history at which a whole scholarly attitude condenses into a handful of words and gestures.

Jabir ﵁ could have come in. He could have accepted three days of hospitality, which in Arab culture was a self-evident right. He could have looked at Damascus, sought out old acquaintances, prayed in the Umayyad mosque. He chose the opposite. He did not want the hadith to become anything other than its pure self. No social charge, no mutual obligation, no mingling with other things he could have done in Damascus. One hadith, in one place, for one purpose.

That is a form of purity that is scarcely comprehensible any more in our time, in which travelling for knowledge is almost always wrapped in other aims: a conference, a network, a career, a diploma. Jabir’s rihla was no means to an end. It was itself the end. He did not go to Damascus to acquire knowledge that would later serve him socially or professionally. He went to hear something he believed would hold value into the Hereafter.

And the choice not to come in was something else as well. It was respect for Ibn Unays ﵁. By not coming in, Jabir ﵁ made clear that he laid no claim on his host beyond the transmission. He asked for no meal, no bed, no attention. He asked for exactly one thing, and as soon as he had received it, he left. In a culture in which hospitality could degenerate into obligations lasting days, this was the most courteous form of visit conceivable. The guest who came received what he sought, and disappeared.

For later generations of hadith scholars this scene became something they kept in their hearts. When a student complained about the length of a journey, about the trouble of an instruction, about the price of a rihla, his teachers reminded him of Jabir ﵁ at the door in Damascus. What you are doing is easy, that meant. A Sahabi, advanced in age, did this for one hadith. So do not complain.

Other travellers, the same spirit

Jabir’s rihla was not unique in its nature, only in its earliness and in the pure clarity of its form. Through the first three centuries AH the rihla became so characteristic of the science of hadith that no serious scholar could any longer be taken without a series of journeys of his own. Whoever had undertaken no rihla had no right to see his name stand in the chain; his knowledge was secondhand by definition, and his students would catch him out on the first detail.

Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, the great Medinan Tabi’i and one of the seven jurists of Medina, once summed it up thus: “I travelled days and nights for one hadith.” He spoke of himself without boasting. Whoever left Medina for one hadith cut no small figure; Medina was the city of the Sahaba, the place where every street housed a narrator. Yet Sa’id ﵀ left that city repeatedly to verify one detail elsewhere or to record one chapter from a distant transmitter.

Ash-Sha’bi ﵀ in Kufa was known in the transmissions for the same zeal. When it came to his ears that an old Sahabi in a village a day’s journey away preserved a unique transmission, he could close his circle and depart. His students knew that they simply had to wait until he returned, and not seldom he came back with material on which they would build with him for a long time.

Abu al-Aliya ar-Riyahi ﵀, likewise a Basran Tabi’i, undertook in his younger years journeys of which the modern reader can only with difficulty form a picture. The transmissions about him describe how, to hear a hadith pointed out to him with a certain Sahabi, he travelled for weeks, arrived, discovered that the man was in a neighbouring village, travelled there, and had to follow the trail from halting place to halting place until he finally found him. For the early hadith scholars such a trek was no exception but the normal price of reliable knowledge, and it was passed on without regret to the next generation.

Masruq ibn al-Ajda ﵀, student of Abdullah ibn Mas’ud ﵁, belonged to the same school of scholars who were prepared to travel for one single letter in a verse of the Quran or for one single link in a hadith chain. The readiness to travel counted in Kufa as a mark of seriousness; whoever stayed home counted as someone who was content with secondhand knowledge.

And when the second century AH passed into the third, came the most famous rihla of all: Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ from Baghdad to Sana’a in Yemen, for the collaboration with Abd ar-Razzaq ibn Hammam as-San’ani ﵀.

Ahmad travels to Yemen

The Baghdad from which Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ departed was no desert outpost. It was the capital of the Abbasid world, the centre of the Islamic learning of his time, a city where every street housed a scholar and every mosque a teaching circle. Ahmad ﵀ had in Baghdad everything a scholar needed. Libraries. Contemporaries. Students. A good reputation. And yet he departed, somewhere in the first years of the third century AH, for Sana’a, a trek that according to the transmissions demanded months over land and sea, to study with Abd ar-Razzaq ﵀.

Abd ar-Razzaq ﵀ was himself a prolific writer, compiler of the monumental Musannaf, and the keeper of a unique line of transmissions through his teacher Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀, who in his turn had transmitted directly from az-Zuhri ﵀. For a hadith scholar of Ahmad’s calibre that chain was of the highest rank, and in the whole Islamic world, after the death of some of the older generation, there was no place where it was available in so pure a form as in Sana’a.

Ahmad ﵀ arrived in Sana’a after a journey that had cost him everything. The transmissions report that he was struck by setbacks on the way, that he fell ill, that he lost his provisions. Arrived in Sana’a, he had no money left for lodging. He slept in the mosque. He ate what was offered him by poor neighbours. And every morning he sat in the study circle of Abd ar-Razzaq ﵀, forgot the exhaustion, and wrote down what he heard.

When Yahya ibn Ma’in ﵀, likewise a great hadith scholar, found him in Sana’a and proposed to finance the journey home together, Ahmad ﵀ refused the gift. He had not come to receive. He had come to hear.

The Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, a work that in the classical count contains about thirty thousand hadiths, bears in countless places the traces of what he took in during those months with Abd ar-Razzaq ﵀. Whoever reads the chains finds repeatedly the words “Hadathana Abd ar-Razzaq.” Behind each of those expressions lies a Baghdadi imam who left his city, crossed a sea, slept in a mosque, and returned with full notebooks. This is no transfer at a distance. This is a human being who went for knowledge.

The economy of travelling

How was such a thing practically possible? Who paid for these journeys? How did men survive who were away from their home and their income for months or years?

The answers vary by generation and by scholar, but some patterns emerge in the sources.

Some travellers were supported by their tribe or family. A prosperous merchant who saw that his son or nephew was serious in the search for knowledge financed the journey as a form of sadaqa jariya, continuous charity. The scholar returned, taught, and his knowledge benefited his tribesmen and the wider umma. For the financier it was an investment in both worldly standing and heavenly reward.

Others supported themselves by combining travel with trade. This was pre-eminently the model of many Hijazi scholars in the first two centuries AH. They joined caravans that were in any case moving back and forth between Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa and Basra. On the way they traded on a small scale, enough to earn their keep, and used the halting places to seek out scholars. The rihla then became part of a wider economic rhythm.

Yet others lived from the hospitality that the science of hadith itself called forth. It is a fact that Azami ﵀ establishes emphatically: teaching in hadith was in principle free of charge, and teachers regularly helped their students financially or offered them a meal. A teacher in Basra who heard that a great scholar from Khorasan was on his way considered it his duty and his honour to take him into his house, feed him, and gather his students for him, so that the traveller not only brought knowledge but could also pass it on.

And some, like Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ in his younger years, accepted poverty as the price of the journey. They slept in mosques, shared the bread of whoever admitted them, and refused substantial gifts on principle because they did not want to taint the purity of their search with financial obligations to third parties.

The infrastructure that supported these travellers grew along with them. In the first century AH it was minimal. By the second century there were caravan hostels along the great routes, sometimes founded from road tolls, sometimes by pious endowments of rich merchants. In the third century, with the flowering of Baghdad and the other Abbasid cities, there existed a dense network of funduqs and khans that enabled a traveller to journey within reasonable time and with reasonable safety from Morocco to Transoxania. The mosques in every city functioned as school building and meeting point at once; this too is a point that Azami establishes, that the lessons were usually held in the mosque. A newly arrived scholar announced his presence by simply going to sit in the main mosque, and within a day or two the local circle of scholars knew who he was and what he had come to fetch or to bring.

What all this refutes

Far into the twentieth century there prevailed in parts of the Western academic world an image of the hadith literature that makes the rihla impossible to explain. The image was this: hadiths are largely later fabrications, produced in the second and third centuries AH to project legal and theological positions of that later time back onto the Prophet ﷺ. The isnad would then be a literary addition, a fiction after the fact to give fabricated material the appearance of authenticity. Ignaz Goldziher formulated this image in his Muhammedanische Studien of 1890. Joseph Schacht radicalised it in his Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence of 1950, the work that Azami would later systematically refute.

The rihla lays upon this image a weight it cannot bear. No one travels a month on a camel, no one abandons his house and family and livelihood for a season, no one sleeps in a strange mosque in Sana’a until his legs ache, for material he knows or suspects to be invented. The commitment of such a journey can only be understood if the traveller believes, with his whole being, that what he is going to hear is literally true. That these are the words of a Prophet ﷺ who really lived in a specific year in a specific place. That the chain of transmitters bringing these words to him has been a real chain of real people, no literary ornament.

The Goldziher-Schacht school, for its own reasons, never took the social life of the science of hadith seriously into consideration. They studied texts in libraries in Europe. Perhaps they could not imagine that an entire civilisation organised its learning for three centuries around the rihla. The bodily discomfort, the heavy journey, the travelling to one living man, the waiting at his door, the hearing of one paragraph and the riding away again, these are acts you cannot explain from a model in which the hadiths themselves would be late fabrications.

Moreover, the rihla lays bare yet another argument. Whoever travels for a hadith travels to receive something of which he is not himself the source. He acknowledges with his feet that the hadith is older than he, that it comes from elsewhere, that it was not invented by him or by his generation. The whole culture of the rihla implies that the scholars see themselves as receivers, not as producers, of the text they transmit. A scholar who fabricated hadiths would have no reason to travel to Yemen to hear one; he could write one himself at home. The fact that the science of hadith revolved for centuries around visiting sources, not inventing them, is in itself an indication of its own self-image as a science of transmission.

A last point is of a different order, but equally important. The rihla makes visible what the science of hadith really was for its practitioners. It was no textual criticism. It was no literary activity. It was something that stood so close to the practice of the faith itself that one could travel for it as one could travel for a Hajj. The Prophet ﷺ had at a certain moment in a certain place said something. Whoever could still hear that word through a short chain heard, in a certain sense, something back of the presence that had brought it forth. For Jabir ﵁ at the door in Damascus, the distance between Medina and Damascus was less important than the distance between himself and the Messenger ﷺ. He wanted to shorten that last distance by one link. For that, the first distance was a fair price.

The rihla and the woman

It deserves mention that the rihla was not exclusively a male affair. Aisha ﵂ had in her later years a teaching circle in Medina to which men and women came from afar to study with her; of her students we know that several women undertook long journeys to meet her in person and to record certain hadiths from her mouth. In later generations female scholars made a contribution of their own to the transmission of hadith, such as Karima al-Marwaziyya ﵂ in Mecca, a famous transmitter of the Sahih of al-Bukhari ﵀, and Fatima bint Muhammad as-Samarqandi ﵂, a learned woman from the circle of Hanafi fiqh whose teaching is connected in the sources with various cities of the Islamic world. Male scholars from distant regions travelled to such women and took from them with the same precision and discipline with which they took from male teachers.

The rihla, in other words, was no men’s world in which women stood only on the sidelines. It was a scholarly discipline that acknowledged its sources where it found them, and that regularly included female sources at every level. This is a factual historical reality that is sometimes overlooked in both apologetic and critical literature.

The return of Jabir ﵁

How Jabir ﵁ turned at the door, mounted his camel and began the journey back, we do not know in detail. We know that he arrived in Medina, that he passed the hadith on to his own students, and that the chain Jabir from Ibn Unays from the Prophet ﷺ received a fixed place in the transmission literature. We know that he died not long after. The classical sources give his year of death variously, mostly somewhere between 73 and 78 AH, and his age at around ninety-four years, which coincides with a man who around 70 AH was already far into his eighties.

What we also know is that the hadith he went to fetch was not the only hadith he passed on from Ibn Unays ﵁ to his students. He had travelled for one hadith, but he had come back with more. That is a recognisable pattern: whoever made a rihla for a specific goal often received more than what he sought, because the source he had reached was richer than his single question. But the structure of the journey, the inner discipline with which he had departed, was single-pointed. He had one name and one hadith in view. What he received on top of it was bonus.

The later scholars cited Jabir’s journey many times as a benchmark. When a student in the twelfth century AH complained about a ride from Cairo to Damascus for an ijaza, when a teacher in the sixth century AH doubted whether a student sufficiently grasped the price of his knowledge, the name of Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁ at the door rang out. He had become iconic within a few generations, not for something he had said, but for something he had done. And that doing was itself a form of saying.

From personal discipline to science

In the circle of Ibn Abbas ﵁ in Mecca we saw how the care for a pure chain had become an attitude, a discipline of receiving and passing on. In this chapter we have seen how that same care was worked out by the generation of Jabir ﵁ and his successors into a practice of life. The rule remained abstract as long as it was only pronounced: take from the right man. Jabir’s rihla was concrete: I travel a month to be able to take from the right man. Between the rule and the journey lies the whole difference between a good thought and a living science.

But a science cannot exist on individual heroism alone. In the long run there had to come a structured way of recording who could take from whom, which transmitters were reliable, which had to be regarded with suspicion, and which had to be openly rejected as unsound. Not every aspiring student could make his own rihla to every potential source. What the rihla had proven in the first generations, namely that the science of hadith was source-oriented and person-oriented, had to be institutionalised in a formal apparatus for assessing the transmitters themselves.

That apparatus has a name, and it is Azami who formulates its birth sharply: with the introduction of the isnad a unique science arose, al-Jarh wa-at-Ta’dil, the science of declaring transmitters invalid and declaring them reliable. It was developed in the second and third centuries AH by a specific group of scholars who devoted themselves to the biographies, the powers of memory, the moral integrity and the travel histories of thousands of transmitters. Men like Yahya ibn Ma’in ﵀, Ali ibn al-Madini ﵀, Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ himself, and later al-Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, and Abu Hatim ar-Razi ﵀ built out the catalogue with which every isnad in every hadith could be weighed on the weight of the people who composed it.

Abu Hatim ar-Razi ﵀ would himself later remark that in his life he had travelled a thousand farsakh, a distance that in modern kilometres lies somewhere around six thousand, in order to know the transmitters he would assess in his works not only through intermediaries, but personally. Whom he had not met himself, he did not wish to assess. That is no criticism at a distance. That is criticism that had itself ridden along the routes over which it passed judgment.

Between Jabir’s rihla around 70 AH and Abu Hatim’s thousand farsakh in the third century AH lie almost two centuries in which a personal discipline broadened into a communal science. But such a broadening could not come from individual scholars alone. There had to come a moment at which not one man, but the community as a whole, and finally even the state, raised the preservation of the transmission to a public task. The question at the centre of the next chapter is how that transition from private discipline to public care exactly took place.

That moment came around the year 100 of the hijra, and it came from an unexpected corner: not from a traveller, not from a collector, but from a caliph. An Umayyad ruler, the exception of his dynasty, gave the order to write down the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ before its bearers would die. What had lived for centuries in the breasts of individual men, and what Jabir ﵁ had still had to fetch with a month of camels, became with one short letter a matter of state care.

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In the next article we leave the desert roads and enter the palace at Damascus. A caliph who wanted no palace writes a short letter to a governor in Medina. He fears that the knowledge will die with its bearers, and he gives the order to write it down. It is the moment at which the hadith ceases to be a purely personal legacy and, for the first time, becomes a public matter that no one can ever make disappear again.