The Caliphal Order of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀

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After the month on the camel

In the previous article we rode along with Jabir ibn Abdullah ﵁, the aged Companion who at his advanced age travelled a full month to Damascus for one single hadith, who received one transmission at the door of Abdullah ibn Unays ﵁ and turned back without stepping over the threshold. We saw how the rihla, the journey in search of knowledge, turned the care for a pure chain from an attitude into a practice of life, and how generations of scholars after Jabir ﵁ gave their lives and their comfort to receive the transmission directly from its bearers.

In the articles we have read so far, that has been the pattern. The hadith lived in houses. It lived in mosque corners. It lived in private letters from one scholar to another, in a sahifa that a student carried with him on his travels, in the small arrangements Companions ﵃ made with one another about who would pass on what, and in the months-long journeys that a rare individual undertook to shorten one chain. For whoever wished to learn, there was abundance; for whoever came from outside, there was nothing institutional to knock on. The hadith was a personal inheritance, not a public library.

Until roughly the year 100 of the hijra. Then something changed that the history of the Islamic sciences would never undo. A caliph, and not just any caliph, gave the order to write hadith down. He sent letters to his governors, letters to his scholars, letters to the men who in every province carried the most of the transmission. He asked for compilation. Not for himself, not for his palace, but for the umma. From that moment on the hadith was no longer private property; it became, in the traditional formulation, also an affair of the state. The rest of this article is about that one letter, and about the man who wrote it.

It is important to position this correctly right away, for precisely here lies a pitfall. It is not the case that the hadith was written down for the first time with this letter. Al-Azami ﵀ notes emphatically that it is merely a widespread belief that Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ was the first to ask Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, al-Zuhri and others to collect hadith, and that al-Zuhri was supposedly the first to record. His whole book is aimed precisely at demonstrating that al-Zuhri ﵀ was neither the first recorder nor the first compiler. What happens in this article is not a birth of the written hadith. It is the formalisation of a written practice that had long existed. The letter converted an existing private discipline into a public one, but it did not create it.

With that reservation firmly in place, he is nonetheless the man on whose letter, if we look ahead, a large part of the later written hadith infrastructure could partly build: the schools from Yamama to Khorasan, the musannafat of the second century, the musnad tradition of Imam Ahmad ﵀, the sahihs of Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀, the Muwatta’ of Imam Malik ﵀. Not as the origin of those works, but as one of the moments at which the infrastructure was opened up and accelerated. Much of what would become the Sahih centuries found one of its early legitimations not in a classroom, but in a short letter from a caliph to a governor in Medina.

A dynasty and its exception

To understand why that order is so remarkable, we must first pause over the dynasty from which it emerged. The Umayyads had, ever since Mu’awiyah ﵁ consolidated power after the fitna of Siffin, transformed the caliphate from a council-borne leadership, as under the rightly guided caliphs, into something that looked much more like an Arab kingship. The capital had moved from Medina to Damascus. The succession had changed from a choice by the senior Companions ﵃ into a hereditary succession from father to son, first under Mu’awiyah ﵁ and Yazid, and thereafter under Marwan ibn al-Hakam and his descendants. The state administration grew increasingly courtly, with palaces in Damascus, court singers, a Byzantine palace culture in which the Bedouin-sober original community could scarcely recognise itself any more.

It is precisely this picture that the Hungarian orientalist Ignaz Goldziher would use at the end of the nineteenth century for a much larger argument. In his Muhammedanische Studien, a work that would shape orientalist research into the hadith for a century, Goldziher argued that the Umayyad period was precisely the time in which hadith was fabricated on a large scale. The caliphs, so he reasoned, had taken scholars into their service who produced “suitable” transmissions to legitimise their political positions. What was presented in later centuries as hadith of the Prophet ﷺ was, according to Goldziher, in reality an Umayyad political manufacture. Joseph Schacht would radicalise that thesis in the twentieth century into the famous starting point that virtually every legal hadith from this century is suspect until the contrary is proven.

It is an attractive story for anyone who views the Umayyads only through a political window. It breaks on one point, and on that point inexorably. It breaks on the man who took over the caliphate in 99 AH, and whose name has never been associated with political falsification even by the most critical classical scholar. It breaks on Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀.

For it is precisely this caliph, and no other, who goes down in history as the man who gave the writing of hadith the mandate of the state. Not Mu’awiyah ﵁, who had concentrated power. Not Yazid, who became notorious after Karbala. Not Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who reorganised the state and had the Dome of the Rock built. Not al-Walid, not Sulayman, not Hisham. But the one Umayyad whose personal piety is described with respect by every later source, including the fiercest critics of his dynasty. The one Umayyad who even in the Sunni tradition has received the honoured title of “fifth rightly guided caliph”.

Whoever wishes to dismiss the hadith compilation as Umayyad politics must explain why the man who gave the order was precisely the Umayyad who never clung to power, who renounced palace luxury, who dismissed officials who enriched themselves, and who used the short caliphate of two and a half years to undo the damage of his predecessors. That explanation, to anticipate, the orientalist reading does not give. Nor can it give it. For the order does not spring from the logic of power; it springs from the logic of fear of loss.

We shall return shortly to the content of the letter, and we shall return shortly to what it refutes. First the man.

Who was Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀

He was born around the year 63 AH, in Medina, in the house of an Umayyad governor. His father, Abd al-Aziz ibn Marwan, was the younger brother of caliph Abd al-Malik and the governor of Egypt. On his father’s side he was thus fully Umayyad, grandson of Marwan ibn al-Hakam, a distant cousin of Uthman ibn Affan ﵁.

But on his mother’s side lay something far weightier. His mother was Umm Asim, and Umm Asim was the daughter of Asim, son of Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁. The second caliph, the man who more than any other had shaped the structure of the young Islamic state, the man whose justice had become proverbial, was the great-grandfather of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ through the female line. He did not carry his name by accident. He carried it as a charge.

There exists a report, often told by later chroniclers, in which Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ during his caliphate walked through Medina at night and heard a woman forbidding her daughter to dilute milk with water, even though no overseer was present, because Allah ﷻ saw it. Umar ﵁ is said to have remarked that if he were ever to have a granddaughter from this house, he hoped she would bring forth someone who would restore justice in the caliphate. Whether the report can be traced historically in this form or is a later narrative construction is a matter on which scholars differ. What is undisputed is the fact itself: through his mother, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ descends directly from Umar ﵁, and that blood was felt by his contemporaries to point the way.

He studied in Medina. He sat in the circles of the tabi’in, the second generation. He heard Anas ibn Malik ﵁, who as a boy had served the Prophet ﷺ. He heard Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, the great jurist of Medina. He heard Urwah ibn al-Zubayr ﵀, the nephew of Aisha ﵂, who counts as one of the first systematic collectors of the prophetic biography. He grew up not only in the family tradition of the Umayyads; he grew up in the scholarly tradition of Medina, in the heart of where the hadith still lived.

As a young man he was appointed governor of Medina, from the year 87 AH under caliph al-Walid. It was a formal position of power, but for anyone who knew the city well it was more: it was a moral guardianship of the place where the Prophet ﷺ was buried. Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ surrounded himself there with a council of ten scholars from the city. He promised, later sources tell us, to decide nothing without consulting them. He restored the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ. He protected the population from the harshness of the central state. He learned, in those years, what it was to see governance and scholarship not as competing worlds, but as one shared responsibility.

When he was proclaimed caliph in Damascus in 99 AH after the death of his cousin Sulayman, something happened that no Umayyad before him had done. He refused the horse of state. He refused the guard of honour. He asked for his own mule. He entered the palace, and his first act was to leave the ceremonial robes of state, customary until then, untouched. In the two and a half years he would reign, he reportedly wore one and the same cloak, which he had mended whenever it wore out. He had the stables emptied of the thoroughbred horses his predecessors had collected and returned the proceeds to the treasury. He summoned officials from all the provinces and demanded an accounting. He sent back, in a case that would count as a judicial precedent, properties to non-Muslim communities which his predecessors had been shown to have seized unlawfully.

He lived, in other words, as if he were not the heir of Mu’awiyah ﵁ and Abd al-Malik, but the heir of his great-grandfather. The umma noticed. Even the Khawarij, who regarded every other Umayyad as illegitimate and who rose in revolt against the central authority for generations, laid down their arms during his caliphate according to several sources. He gave them no military reason for it; he gave them a moral one. A just caliph was, for anyone who had preserved even a trace of the original political morality in his heart, not an enemy to be fought.

It is in these circumstances, in this short window of moral restoration, that he writes the letter.

The letter to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀

Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Amr ibn Hazm al-Ansari ﵀ was at this time the governor of Medina, and moreover the judge of the city. According to the classical biographical dictionaries he was born around the year 50 AH and died around 117 AH. He was no distant administrator; he was himself a scholar, a man from a lineage of Ansari jurists, and he belonged to the inner circle of the Medinan fuqaha. His grandfather was Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, one of the younger Companions ﵃ to whom the Prophet ﷺ had personally sent a detailed letter about prayer, ablution, spoils, taxation, zakat and blood money, a Kitab that was passed down in the family for generations. In the house of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀, in other words, the two things came together that every other correspondent lacked: institutional authority in Medina, and direct access to the oldest written prophetic legacy.

In Medina in these years, other sources were still being consulted that we call of inestimable value for the hadith. Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman, the student of Aisha ﵂ in whose house Aisha ﵂ had spent her final years, was still alive. She carried a large part of what Aisha ﵂ had told of the private life of the Prophet ﷺ: his prayer, his fasting, his conduct with his wives, his bearing in difficult moments. Alongside her lived al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, grandson of Abu Bakr ﵁, nephew of Aisha ﵂, and one of the so-called seven jurists of Medina. What they knew, they knew at first hand. What they passed on was of a directness that no other city in the umma could match.

It was this richness, and the knowledge that it was mortal, that moved Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ to action. He knew how it worked. A Companion ﵁ who died took with him what no book yet contained. A tabi’i who died took with him what no student had yet written down. Every funeral in Medina was, for anyone with eyes to see, a silent library crumbling into dust. He did not wait. He summoned his secretary, and he dictated.

The content of the letter has been preserved almost word for word in later sources, notably in al-Tirmidhi’s al-Jami’, in Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat, in al-Bukhari’s Kitab al-Ilm as a ta’liq, and in al-Khatib al-Baghdadi’s Taqyid al-Ilm. In its various transmissions it is cited roughly as follows:

It is, in its simplicity, an extraordinary text. It contains no theological reflection. It contains no political justification. It contains no reference to any faction, party, or sect. It contains one fear, one instruction, and one condition. These words stand in the classical sources that preserve the letter, and not in some late summary; it is the preserved wording itself, in Taqyid al-Ilm, in Bukhari’s ta’liq and in Ibn Sa’d, that carries this weight.

The fear is that the knowledge will die with its bearers. That is no rhetorical concern. In the years preceding the order, the generation that had personally served the Prophet ﷺ had all but died out. Anas ibn Malik ﵁, the youngest Companion ﵁ still living in Medina, had passed away around 93 AH. Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀ had died in the preceding years. Urwah ibn al-Zubayr ﵀ had passed on around the same time. The generation that had heard them directly was old, and many were ill. What lived on in the younger generations was, more and more often, transmission at second and third hand. For anyone who still wished to preserve the source undamaged, it was almost too late.

The instruction is to write down what there is. Not to select anything, not to omit anything, not to interpret anything. To write it down. The caliph asks for no editing; he asks for collection. He acknowledges, implicitly, that he is not the scholar who can judge content. He acknowledges that the men on the spot, the fuqaha of Medina, know better than he what transmission is and what is not. His role is logistical, not substantive.

The condition is that only hadith of the Prophet ﷺ is accepted, nothing else. No Israiliyat, no loose sayings of Companions ﵃ that do not go back to the Prophet ﷺ, no later opinions of judges or scholars. Only what is attributed to the Messenger of Allah ﷻ himself. It is a methodological principle, set down in one sentence. It is not the case that the later criteria of the great collectors flow directly from this sentence, but one recognises in it the same spirit: the emphasis on what is marfu’, on what truly reaches back to the Prophet ﷺ, would a century and a half later also form the heart of the sahih selection of Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Abu Dawud ﵀, al-Tirmidhi ﵀, al-Nasa’i ﵀ and Ibn Maja ﵀.

What Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ did in one short letter was something that could never have carried the same weight in any private conversation between scholars. He gave the hadith the mandate of the state. He turned a personal discipline into a public affair. He took away its private character and gave it in exchange something that no private circle could offer: institutional durability.

Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ wrote. He collected, from Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman, from al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, from the other elders still living in Medina. He produced books. What exactly became of those books is a story of its own. According to the report in Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat, when the books were later asked after, the answer given was that they had been lost. A tragedy, at first sight. But the truth is that the content was absorbed, almost without loss, into other channels. Thus al-Azami notes that the son of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, Abd Allah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, himself wrote down ahadith and sent them to Ibn Juraij, and that Abd Allah possessed a book on the maghazi that was transmitted by his nephew Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr. The names of father and son must be kept sharply apart here: Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ is the governor and the recipient of the order; Abd Allah ibn Abu Bakr ﵀ is his son, the later transmitter, who has his own place in the biographical registers.

The parallel letter

For Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was not the only one. Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ wrote more than one letter in these months. Al-Azami records the traditional formulation itself: that the caliph requested Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, al-Zuhri “and others” to collect hadith. He sent, almost simultaneously, a second letter to the man who at that moment resided at his court in Damascus and who according to every classical source had gathered the broadest knowledge of the prophetic transmission then circulating in the umma: Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀.

We shall speak of al-Zuhri ﵀ at length in a later article, for his role deserves a space of its own. But it is important to understand here why the caliph wrote two letters, and not one. The letter to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was an institutional commission to a governor, aimed at the living knowledge of Medina. The letter to al-Zuhri ﵀ was a personal request to a scholar, aimed at a knowledge that was not bound to one city, but that stretched from Hijaz to Syria and that had been the fruit of years of travel, conversations, and notes.

The caliph understood that the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ could not be collected from one place. He understood that a governor in Medina, however learned, would not be able to record what circulated among scholars in Mecca, Kufa, Basra, Damascus, Hims and Fustat. For that, someone was needed who had himself travelled, who had sat in every city, who knew the names of the men who carried the most authority in every circle. For that, al-Zuhri ﵀ was needed.

In the capital, in the palace at Damascus in which Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ preferred not to live but which had fallen to him as caliph, the conversation took place that will form the centre of gravity of a later article. We know that the caliph personally requested al-Zuhri ﵀ to write down the hadith and to have copies made of it for the provinces of the empire. We know that al-Zuhri ﵀ accepted. We know that in the years that followed, even after the death of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ in 101 AH, he continued this task, and that a series of his students, among them Imam Malik ﵀ and Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀, would build further upon it.

What counts for our article here is that the caliph did not burden one man with the commission, but two. That is no coincidence. It is a methodological safeguard. What the one would write down could be checked by the other. What was collected in Medina could be compared with what was recorded in the provincial circles. It is the same caution we saw in the article on the Uthmanic compilation of the Quran, where a second, independent stream was deliberately brought in to be laid beside the primary archive. The form differed; the principle was the same. Truth grows stronger when two independent sources confirm it than when one source imposes it.

What this refutes

Here we must pause. For the story we have just told is a story that, in a certain current of Western scholarship, is never told this way.

In the orientalist reading of Goldziher, Schacht and their followers, every early hadith compilation is held to be suspect as a matter of principle. The argument runs roughly as follows: in the Umayyad period the state was strongly interested in religious legitimation; it had hadith produced that supported its political positions; what we know today as prophetic transmission is largely the product of this political manufacture. Schacht went so far as to doubt whether the statement of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ was authentic at all, because he held that virtually all legal ahadith were fabricated only long after his death, and that there could be no question of oral transmission, let alone of written recording, in this period.

The problems with this reading are numerous, and we have already pointed out some of them in earlier articles. But here the problem appears in its most acute form. For let us look precisely at what Goldziher’s thesis requires.

It requires that the Umayyad caliphs, as a group, had an interest in having politically favourable hadith produced. It requires that the man who gave the writing of hadith the mandate of the state fitted into that production. It requires that his motive was political. It requires that the content of his letter served the Umayyad state. It requires, in other words, that Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ was either an opportunist who had the hadith produced for political gain, or a pious man whose work was used by others for political gain.

Neither is compatible with the sources.

He was no opportunist. Every classical source, whether Sunni, Shi’i or Khariji, describes him as the exception to his dynasty. He stripped the Umayyad family of the privileges it had appropriated. He kept his own relatives at a distance from the treasury. He refused to give his own sons offices that would make them rich. He impoverished, according to later sources, his own household to the point that after his death his dependants could barely make ends meet. A man who governs like that does not govern for gain. What is done in his name cannot be captured in the logic of personal interest.

Nor did his letter serve the Umayyad state. Read it again. It does not say “write down what supports the doctrine of the caliphate”. It does not say “collect what confirms obedience to the rulers”. It does not say “record what strengthens the Marwanid claim to the caliphate”. It says one thing: write down the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, for I fear that the knowledge will die with the scholars. The motive is no political motive; it is a motive of preservation. It is the same motive that drives a scholar who wants to save his life’s work for the generation that comes after him.

And finally, and this is the weightiest, he gave the commission to scholars he could not politically control. Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was no Marwanid courtier; he was an Ansari jurist from Medina, a city that had always been ambivalent towards the Umayyad dynasty. Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀ was, despite his presence at court, an independent scholar whose network had not been created by the state. Had Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ or his successors wished to steer what was written down, they would have had to choose courtiers for this work, not scholars of independent standing. That they did not do so fits poorly with the idea that the order was a covert political instrument.

We do Goldziher no injustice here by setting out his argument sharply. The Umayyads have, on many other points, been rightly criticised by both classical and modern scholars. What is refuted here is not that individual Umayyad rulers at other moments used religious language for political ends. What is refuted is the generalising thesis that the hadith compilation itself was the product of that same Umayyad logic. It is not. It is the work of the one Umayyad who precisely does not fit that logic, given to two scholars who did not hang upon that logic, with a commission that cannot be read in that logic.

It is the exception that does not prove the rule but unmasks it.

From private to public

Let us now look ahead to what this moment sets in motion historically. In the article on the Prophet’s ﷺ permission to write, we saw how already in the time of the Prophet ﷺ himself, in the mosque of Medina, individual Companions ﵃ had begun writing down hadith. A sahifa of Anas ﵁, a sahifa of Abu Hurayrah ﵁, a sahifa of Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As ﵁. In the article on the early written transmission we saw how Amr ibn Hazm ﵁ received from the Prophet ﷺ personally a detailed Kitab that was preserved in his family for generations. In the article on the circles around Umar ﵁ and Uthman ﵁ we saw how the hadith was woven into counsels, letters and judicial decisions. In the article on the schools of Kufa and Basra we followed how Abdullah ibn Mas’ud ﵁ and Abu Musa al-Ash’ari ﵁ formed students who in their turn passed their knowledge on in writing. In the article on the Uthmanic compilation of the Quran we saw how that compilation itself created a precedent of state-mandated fixing of text. And in the article on the Meccan school of Ibn Abbas ﵁ we finally followed how hadith was passed on in a formal teaching circle and where the first real name-lists of students arose.

Up to that Meccan teaching circle, every step in this history was a private step. A Companion ﵁ decided for himself to write down his knowledge. A student decided for himself to follow his teacher. A scholar decided for himself what he passed on and to whom. The state had no role here, and the Quran compilation of Uthman ﵁ had been, though carried by state mandate, a one-off operation, limited to one text.

With the letter of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ that changes. For the first time in the history of the umma, the hadith itself, as a category, becomes an object of state care. We must be precise here: it is not the written hadith as such that comes into being here, for that already existed, but the public, state-supported compilation of it. The state does not wish to control the content; the state acknowledges that without institutional bearers even the purest oral tradition will be lost. It is a reversal of the relation between religion and state as it had existed in the Umayyad era. Previously the state used religion, at best, for self-justification, at worst, for political manipulation. Now the state places itself, briefly but unmistakably, in the service of religion. Not to direct it, but to protect it.

The consequences are hard to overstate. In the generations after Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, a scholarly circle flourishes in every great city of the caliphate, working increasingly in writing. Hammad ibn Salama ﵀ in Basra. Sufyan al-Thawri ﵀ in Kufa. Al-Awza’i ﵀ in Syria. Abu Hanifa ﵀ in Kufa, where the juristic tradition begins to crystallise. Imam Malik ﵀ in Medina, who in the second half of the second century will complete his Muwatta’. Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀ in Yemen, who will help develop the musannaf form. Abd al-Razzaq al-San’ani ﵀ in Yemen, who after Ma’mar ﵀ will compile one of the first great musannafat. All of them work within a tradition that was not created by the letter of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀, but that was legitimised, opened up and accelerated by it.

In a sense one can say that the Umayyad period, though often politically contested, was an important incubation period for the science of hadith. The state was strong enough to protect scholars and give their work an infrastructure; the state was, at the decisive moment, also morally receptive enough not to claim that infrastructure for itself. It is a combination that rarely occurs in history, and when it occurs, it often depends on one man. Here it depended on Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀.

When he died in the year 101 AH, roughly thirty months after his accession, he was by the usual reckoning thirty-eight to thirty-nine years old. Far too young, for anyone who saw the work he had accomplished in so short a time. According to several sources he was poisoned by family members from the Marwanid branch who wanted their lost privileges back; according to other sources he died of an illness with no malign cause. What is undisputed is that his successor Yazid II did not follow his example, and that the Umayyad dynasty abandoned, almost immediately, the direction in which Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ had briefly pushed it.

But the letter had been written. The books were being made. Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ wrote on in Medina. Al-Zuhri ﵀ wrote on in Syria. The letter was out, and what had once been a private discipline was now a compilation with a mandate.

A second life

There is one last detail to this history that deserves to be mentioned. The books of Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ himself, as we have seen, were according to the report lost. Later enquirers were told that they could no longer be found. It might seem as if the whole effort thereby went up in smoke. It did not.

The reason is that the scholarly tradition of that time did not work with one book and one owner, but with chains of transmission. What Abu Bakr ﵀ drew from Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman or from al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, other scholars drew as well. What he set down in his books was copied by his circle and absorbed into their own work. His son Abd Allah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ himself recorded ahadith and sent them to Ibn Juraij, and the book on the maghazi attributed to Abd Allah was transmitted by the nephew Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr ﵀. When an original was lost, the copies and the chains were already dispersed. The knowledge was, in other words, no longer locked up in one place. It had been multiplied along several lines, and that was precisely what the letter of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ had intended.

It is a pattern that will become characteristic of the science of hadith in the centuries that follow. Loss of a single manuscript is almost never loss of the content, because every important work was in circulation simultaneously in dozens or hundreds of copies, in different cities, with different students. The system was, to put it in modern jargon, distributed. No single central point could, through fire, war or neglect, drag down the whole tradition with it. The books could perish; the transmission went on.

In the scholarly density that would arise in the second and third centuries of the hijra in Medina, Mecca, Kufa, Basra, Baghdad, Damascus and Nishapur, we see that infrastructure come fully to maturity. But one of its foundations was laid around 100 AH, in a short letter from a caliph to a governor, with a fear, an instruction and a condition.

To Medina, to Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀

We have seen in this article what the letter was, who wrote it, and why it is so remarkable. We have seen how it marks the transition from hadith as a private discipline to hadith as a publicly mandated science, without being its origin. We have seen why the orientalist reading of Goldziher runs aground on this specific point. And we have seen how the books that followed upon this letter, even where they were physically lost, kindled a tradition that no later disaster could ever extinguish.

What we have not yet seen from close by is how the commission landed in Medina, in the house of the man who as governor and judge of the city was the second explicitly named recipient of the order. We have already met Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ in this article, but we have followed him from a distance. In the next article we step inside his house. Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀ and the empire-wide gathering entrusted to him we do not let fall in doing so; we take their thread up separately in a later article, for his role deserves a space of its own.

We shall see who Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ was, how he grew up in an Ansari lineage in which a written letter of the Prophet ﷺ was already being preserved, how he became at once governor and judge of Medina, and to which two sources the caliphal commission pointed him in the first place: Amrah bint Abd al-Rahman ﵀, the student from the house of Aisha ﵂, and al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, the grandson of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq ﵁. We shall see how he carried out the work, why the loss of his physical books was no loss of their content, and how precisely the presence of this Medinan compilation alongside that of al-Zuhri ﵀ constitutes a refutation of its own of a whole line of modern criticism of the early hadith tradition.

For now it is enough to let the letter stand as it was. A short text. A fear. An instruction. A condition. A caliph who knew he did not have much time, and who knew that the generation he wished to save had even less time than he. A dynasty in which he was the exception, and an umma of which he understood that without his intervention it would lose something irreparable.

He gave the order. Abu Bakr ibn Hazm ﵀ wrote. Al-Zuhri ﵀ wrote. And the hadith, formerly in the houses, in the mosque corners, in the private letters of scholars to one another, became from that moment on also a public affair that no one any longer possessed merely privately, and that no one could ever again make disappear.