SUNNA, 'PRACTICE' AND 'LIVING TRADITION'  75

he opposes sunna to isolated traditions;¹ from §§ 7, 8, where he refers to sunna beside traditions; from § 14 where he distinguishes between what he has heard on the authority of the Prophet, the traditions (āthār), and the well-known and recognized sunna (al-sunna al-maḥfūẓa al-ma‘rūfa). This last is simply the doctrine of the school, the outcome of religious and systematic objections against the ancient lax practice.

In Tr. IX, 18, Abū Yūsuf applies the term ‘sunna of the Prophet’ to a case in which nothing to the contrary is known on the authority of the Prophet and of the Companions. In § 21 he refers to ‘the sunna and the life-history (sīra) of the Prophet’, quoting several traditions on history without isnād, and says: ‘The Muslims and the pious forebears, the Companions of the Prophet, have never ceased to do the same, and we have not heard that any of them ever avoided doing so.’ In this case, where Auzā'ī’s doctrine happens to represent the religious scruple against the rough-and-ready practice, Abū Yūsuf’s reasoning is of the same kind as that of Auzā'ī elsewhere.

In Tr. IX, 24, Auzā'ī had referred to the unanimous practice ‘until Walīd was killed’. Abū Yūsuf retorts: ‘One does not decide a question of allowed and forbidden, by simply asserting that people always did it. Most of what people always did is not allowed and ought not to be done. There are cases which I could mention, . . . where the great mass (‘āmma) acts against a prohibition of the Prophet. In these questions one has to follow the sunna which has come down from the Prophet and the forebears, his Companions and the lawyers (al-sunna ‘an rasūl Allāh wa-‘an al-salaf min aṣḥābih wa-min qawm fuqahā’).’ This shows that Abū Yūsuf’s idea of sunna, notwithstanding his polemics, was essentially identical with that of Auzā'ī. There was only a greater degree of technical documentation on the part of the Iraqian scholar.

In Kharāj, 99, Abū Yūsuf relates a tradition from ‘Alī, according to which the Prophet used to award 40 stripes as a punishment for drinking wine, Abū Bakr 40, and ‘Umar 80. He comments: ‘All this is sunna, and our companions are agreed that the punishment for drinking wine is 80 stripes.’

The degree to which Shaibānī puts the doctrine of the Iraqians under the aegis of the Prophet becomes clear from