78 SUNNA, 'PRACTICE' AND 'LIVING TRADITION' 

tradition'. His main line of argument starts from the traditions from the Prophet (and the Companions) which the Medinese themselves transmitted but did not follow, those traditions which had grown up in Medina beside the 'living tradition' of the school and had not succeeded in modifying it. In Tr. III, 68, he addresses the Egyptian Medinese: 'So you relate in this book [the Muwaṭṭa'] an authentic, well-attested tradition from the Prophet and two traditions from 'Umar, and then diverge from them all and say that judgment is not given according to them and that the practice is not so, without reporting a statement to the contrary from anyone I know of. Whose practice then have you in mind when you disagree on the strength of it with the sunna of the Prophet-which alone, we think, ought to be sufficient to refute that practice-and disagree not only with the sunna but with 'Umar also? . . . At the same time, you fall back on practice, but we have not discovered to this very day what you mean by practice. Nor do I think we ever shall.'¹

The spurious information on the opinions of old Medinese authorities, which by Shāfi'ī's time had grown up beside traditions from the Prophet (and from Companions), provides him with another argument against the Medinese 'living tradition', as expressed in the generally recognized doctrine of the school.² So he finds that Mālik and the (Egyptian) Medinese diverge from 'sunna, practice, and athār [that is, traditions from persons other than the Prophet] in Medina' (Tr. III, 54) and that their practice is not uniform as they always claim (ibid. 119). And he considers that their alleged 'ancient practice' is something introduced by governors, an argument which had already appeared in the polemics between the ancient schools.³

Logically from his point of view, Shāfi'ī appeals from the actual to an ideal and fictitious doctrine of the Medinese which he reconstructs, just as Auzā'ī had opposed the alleged custom of the 'good old time' to the real and 'recent' practice: 'There is no one in stronger opposition to the [hypothetical] people of Medina than you. .. . You disagree with what you relate from the Prophet . . . and from authorities whose equals cannot be found. One might even say that you are self-confessedly and