Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence

ARGUMENT FOR AND AGAINST TRADITIONS 43

tradition, and a tradition is authoritative only if they accept it unanimously as such.¹ Shāfi'ī draws the, to him, obvious conclusion that this means depriving the traditions of their authority, and substituting the consensus for them.

To us, if we may anticipate part of the results of Chapter 8 below, Shāfi'ī's doctrine expresses the reaction of a traditionist against the principle of consensus as embodying the 'living tradition'; this principle had found natural recognition in the ancient schools of law and was to come into its own again in the doctrine of consensus of the classical theory of Muhammadan law, a theory which had to take into account, however, the status which had meanwhile been won by Shāfi'ī for the traditions from the Prophet.

This seemingly simple picture of what Shāfi'ī regards as the anti-traditionist attitude of the ancient schools has to be qualified in two respects. Firstly, at the time when Shāfi'ī appeared, the ancient schools were already on the defensive against the mounting tide of traditions from the Prophet. We find a trace of this in the preceding extract. It becomes clearer still from a passage in the same context (p. 256) where Shāfi'ī claims that the opponents regard as the best authorities on law those who are most knowledgeable on traditions. But the list of ancient authorities on law which Shāfi'ī gives in this connexion and which has been translated before,² contains the names of lawyers and not of traditionists, and the farther we go back, the more we find the lawyers independent of traditions.

Secondly, the ancient schools of law make an exception in favour of traditions from individual Companions of the Prophet. This is only another aspect of the independent authority which they ascribe to certain Companions and which we have discussed in Chapter 4. From the point of view of the traditionists a single Companion, whether he transmits explicitly from the Prophet or gives his own doctrine which can be presumed to agree with a decision of the Prophet, is only a single transmitter. The adherents of the ancient schools had therefore to justify their apparent inconsistency in relying on the authority of single