4. THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF MUHAMMADAN LAW

Tirmidhi, Ibn Māja, and Nasā'ī. Other well-known collections of traditions, to which we shall have occasion to refer, are by Ibn Hanbal, Dārimī, Dāraquṭnī, and Baihaqī. This concentration of interest on traditions from the Prophet, and the almost complete neglect of traditions from Companions, not to mention Successors and later authorities, reflects the success of Shāfi'ī's systematic insistence that only traditions going back to the Prophet carry authority.

It is generally conceded that the criticism of traditions as practised by the Muhammadan scholars is inadequate and that, however many forgeries may have been eliminated by it, even the classical corpus contains a great many traditions which cannot possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract from this often self-contradictory mass an authentic core by 'historic intuition', as it has been called, have failed. Goldziher, in another of his fundamental works,¹ has not only voiced his 'sceptical reserve' with regard to the traditions contained even in the classical collections,² but shown positively that the great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the time to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of development of doctrines during the first centuries of Islam. This brilliant discovery became the corner-stone of all serious investigation of early Muhammadan law and jurisprudence,³ even if some later authors, while accepting Goldziher's method in principle, in their natural desire for positive results were inclined to minimize it in practice.

The importance of a critical study of legal traditions for our research into the origins of Muhammadan jurisprudence is therefore obvious. This book will be found to confirm Goldziher's results, and to go beyond them in the following respects: a great many traditions in the classical and other collections were put into circulation only after Shāfi'ī's time; the first considerable body of legal traditions from the Prophet originated towards the middle of the second century, in opposition to slightly earlier traditions from Companions and other autho-