72 SUNNA, 'PRACTICE' AND 'LIVING TRADITION'

§ 3 (b) he refers to the alleged early practice of the Caliphs of the Muslims in the past, until the civil war (in the parallel text in Ṭabarī, 68, he adds: after the death of Walīd b. Yazīd). And in § 24 he says: 'The Muslims always used to . . . , no two men disagreed on this until Walīd was killed.' The parallel passage to § 1 in Ṭabarī, 89, contains an even stronger condemnation of the recent practice. Here Auzā'ī contrasts recent practice with what he alleges to have been the custom since the time of the Prophet, and even accepts a practically undesirable consequence of the old practice.

The civil war which began with the death of Walīd and marked the beginning of the end of the Umaiyad dynasty, was a conventional date for the end of the 'good old time' and not only with regard to the sunna.¹

In view of what we have already seen, we must regard Auzā'ī's 'recent' custom as the real practice (which is indeed admitted and regulated by the Iraqians in the case of § 1), and his alleged 'old' custom as an idealized picture of the 'good old time'.² It is relevant to note here that the Syrian Auzā'ī still accepts practically the whole of the Umaiyad period, including even the reign of the 'impious' Walid, as a normative model on an equal footing with the earliest period of Islam. There is as yet no trace of anti-Umaiyad feeling in him, and several anecdotes, although they cannot be taken as historical, reflect this fact.³ The real practice as it appears in Auzā'ī's doctrine may be dated towards the end of the Umaiyad period.

Auzā'ī shows a particular kind of dependence on the authority of the Prophet: on the one hand, he is far from Shafi'ī's insistence on formally well-attested traditions with full isnads going back to the Prophet;⁴ on the other, he is inclined to project the whole 'living tradition', the continuous practice of the Muslims, as he finds it, back to the Prophet and to give it the Prophet's