CONSENSUS AND DISAGREEMENT  87

of Ibrāhīm Nakha'ī.¹ This did not prevent them from differing occasionally from Ibrāhīm and from one another.

On the whole we find that although there is not much difference between the Iraqians and the Medinese in the way their consensus works in practice, the Iraqians developed its theory much farther, overcame theoretically at least its original provincialism, and were the first to identify it with the teaching of individual authorities.

In Tr. IV, 258, Shāfi'ī addresses an Iraqian opponent: 'Your idea of consensus is the consensus of the Companions or the Successors or the following generation and finally the contemporaries. . . . For example you take Ibn Musaiyib the scholar of Medina, 'Aṭā' the scholar of Mecca, Ḥasan the scholar of Basra, and Sha'bī the scholar of Kufa among the Successors, and regard as consensus that on which they agree. You state that they have never met as far as you know, and you infer their consensus from what is related from them. . . . But no one amongst them, as far as we know, has ever used the word consensus, although it would cover most legal knowledge if it were as you claim. Is it not sufficient to discredit your idea of consensus, that no one since the time of the Prophet is related to have claimed it, apart from cases in which nobody holds a diverging opinion, except your contemporaries?'

This agrees well with the idea of Iraqian consensus which we have gained so far, except for the hard-and-fast rule of establishing a consensus, which Shāfi'ī attributes in the course of his polemics to the Iraqians and which is not confirmed by the other indications on how their consensus is ascertained. Ḥasan and Sha'bī do not play the important role in the Iraqian tradition which Shāfi'ī assigns to them, and he neglects Ibrāhīm Nakha'ī, who in their doctrine takes a place even more important than that of Ibn Musaiyib for the Medinese. Moreover, the subservience of Iraqian consensus to the doctrine of other 'geographical' schools which Shāfi'ī implies, is not borne out by the facts; the broader, non-provincial character of the Iraqian idea of consensus is confined to their theory and does not extend to their practice. We must therefore consider this hard-and-fast rule not genuinely Iraqian, but rather a logical consequence which Shāfi'i forced on his opponents. There are other traces of Shāfi'ī's editing in this passage.²

For the predominance of consensus, in the doctrine of the Iraqians, over 'isolated' traditions from the Prophet and from Companions, see above, p. 28.