SHĀFI'I AND LEGAL TRADITIONS 19

traditions from Companions to traditions from the Prophet and to his sunna, he nevertheless attacked both the Iraqians and the Medinese for not following the traditions from the Companions consistently enough.¹

Notwithstanding his reference to the position of authority occupied by the Companions of the Prophet, Shafi'i is unable to produce a stringent argument in favour of accepting their opinions: 'Q.: What do you say of the opinions of the Companions of the Prophet, if they disagree? A.: We adopt those which agree with the Koran or the sunna or the consensus, or are more correct from the point of view of analogy. Q.: What of the opinions of a single Companion, on which neither agreement nor disagreement of the others is known: is an argument in favour of adopting them to be found in the Koran or the sunna or the consensus?A.: There is no argument in the Koran or in the sunna, and the scholars sometimes adopt the opinion of a single Companion and sometimes discard it, and differ concerning some of those opinions which they adopt. Shafi'i's own attitude is to follow them if there is no ruling in the Koran or the sunna or the consensus, nor anything that can be deduced from these sources by analogy, but it is rare to find an opinion of an isolated Companion which is not contradicted by another (Ris. 82). So Shafi'i is reduced to repeating the argument of the ancient schools: 'The Companions knew the meaning of the Koran best and their opinion, we trust, does not disagree with the Koran' (Umm, vii. 20). But this is inconsistent because he refuses, as a matter of principle, to assign to the Companions the same role with regard to the sunna of the Prophet. In so far as the Companions act as transmitters of traditions from the Prophet, Shafi'i claims that 'all are reliable, thanks to Allah's grace' (Ikh. 360), but he does not yet know the tradition from the Prophet which was to be used later to justify reference to them as authorities: 'My Companions are like lodestars.'

Traditions from Companions are superseded not only by explicit traditions from the Prophet, but by analogical and other conclusions drawn from these last.² They are not superseded by later authorities or by personal opinion (ra'y).³ In his earliest