38 TECHNICAL CRITICISM OF TRADITIONS

mitter, except in a few special cases when he relates what cannot possibly be the case, or what is contradicted by better-authenticated information.'¹

Shafi'i is rather careless about his isnads, and often refers to his immediate authority simply as 'a reliable man'; but 'reliable' means nothing and is put in only for convenience, as appears from Tr. III, 148 (p. 249) where the isnad runs: Shafi'i—a reliable man—'Abdallah b. Harith (unless, Shafi'i is not sure, he has heard it from 'Abdallah b. Harith directly) —Malik, or from Tr. IX, 38, where Shafi'i says: 'a reliable man, I think Ibn 'Ulaiya'. In Ikh. 88 Shafi'i relates a tradition from 'more than one scholar', and still calls it 'a very reliable isnad'. In Tr. IX, 9, he says: 'I remember having heard from one of our companions whom I met personally'; this shows that Shafi'i did not have all his traditions from his authorities personally, and in Ikh. 359 he refers to a written record.

Shafi'i agrees with the Iraqians and the specialists that munqati' traditions, that is, traditions with an interrupted isnad from which a link is missing, are not to be recognized if they stand by themselves (Ikh. 53); Shafi'i never recognizes them if their transmitters are majhul, that is, not well known (Ris. 32). But this theoretical position had been gained only recently and was not yet consistently applied in actual reasoning. The gap between theory and practice could not be illustrated better than by Tr. VIII, 1, where Shaibani and Shafi'i confront each other with objections to their respective traditions because they are maqtu', which means the same as munqati'.

Mursal is a special case of munqati', where the mention of the first transmitter is lacking. In later terminology its use is restricted to traditions from the Prophet which are related without the authority of a Companion who was present; but in Shafi'i's time it was still used in a wider sense, including traditions from Companions without the authority of a Successor who was in immediate touch with them. The numerous traditions of Ibrahim Nakha'i from Ibn Mas'ud are mursal in this sense because Ibrahim was not in direct touch with Ibn Mas'ud. Shafi'i and the representatives of the ancient schools treat the mursal in the same way in which they treat the munqati'; these