46 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST TRADITIONS

discusses this tradition in Tr. V, 264, and explains it away as referring to personal privileges of the Prophet.

The same anti-traditionist reasoning is supposed but refuted in a tradition which makes the Prophet say: 'Let me find no one of you reclining on his couch, and, when confronted with an order or a prohibition from me, saying: I do not know [whether this is authentic or not], we follow [only] what we find in the Koran.'¹ Shafi'i quotes this tradition in Tr. V, 264, and in Ris. 15 on the authority of Ibn 'Uyaina with a full isnad back to the Prophet, but in Ris. 15 also on the authority of Ibn 'Uyaina from Muhammad b. Munkadir as a mursal from the Prophet. This latter form of the isnad is certainly the original one and shows that the polemics of the traditionists and anti-traditionists, which are reflected in this tradition, took place in the generation before Ibn 'Uyaina, that is, in the first third of the second century A.H.

This kind of argument drawn from the Koran against traditions from the Prophet is particularly familiar to the Iraqians;² but it is also used by the ahl al-kalam.³ As the latter go much farther in their anti-traditionist attitude, we find Shafi'i and the Iraqians on common ground against 'those who follow the outward meaning of the Koran and disregard the traditions' (Umm, vi. 115).

A secondary stage of this anti-traditionist argument is represented by the assumption that the Koran repeals traditions. In Ris. 32 where the opponent uses this argument, Shafi'i replies that no scholar will say that. But Ikh. 48 shows that an opinion based on this reasoning was held 'to this very day', and Tr. III, 60, identifies the holders of this opinion as the Medinese.⁴ Shafi'i's final argument in favour of the traditions, here and in other cases, is the truism that to reason in this way would mean whittling away the majority of the sunnas of the Prophet (Ris. 33 f.).

The followers of traditions went a step farther and formulated the principle that the sunna prevails over the Koran, but the Koran does not prevail over the sunna,⁵ or that the Koran may