TRADITIONS IN THE ANCIENT SCHOOLS OF LAW 29

This is the opposite of Shāfi‘ī's interpretation of the Koran in the light of the traditions from the Prophet.

Apart from these restrictions to its application, the Iraqi thesis of the overruling authority of traditions from the Prophet is definitely relegated to a subordinate place by the importance which the Iraqians attach, in theory and practice, to traditions from Companions. We find this principle explicitly formulated in many places, for instance, Tr. I, 89: ‘They pretend that they differ from no one among the Companions of the Prophet’; § 183: ‘Abū Ḥanīfa pretends that he never diverges from the opinions of the Companions’; Tr. VIII, 9, where Shāfi‘ī addresses Shaibānī: ‘It is your avowed principle not to disagree with the decisions of any of the Companions, when no other Companion is known to have differed’. It is certainly on account of their explicit formulation of this principle, that Shāfi‘ī acknowledges repeatedly that the Iraqians have got a better excuse than the Medinese for diverging from traditions from the Prophet.¹

The argument of the Iraqians for attaching this importance to the opinions of the Companions is the same as that of the Medinese, that the Companions would not have been unaware of the practice and the decisions of the Prophet,² and it was claimed that their opinions were likely to coincide with the decisions of the Prophet: ‘Ibn Mas‘ūd was asked about a problem; he replied: “I am not aware of any decision of the Prophet on this”; asked to give his own opinion (ra’y), he gave it; thereupon one of the men in his circle declared that the Prophet had given the same decision, and Ibn Mas‘ūd was exceedingly glad that his opinion coincided with the decision of the Prophet.’³ It is therefore not surprising that traditions from Companions supersede traditions from the Prophet, that both kinds of traditions are mentioned on the same level, and that traditions from the Prophet are interpreted in the light of traditions from Companions.⁴