106 ANALOGY, SYSTEMATIC REASONING

Approved warmly. Goldziher has given the general reasons which speak for a late origin of this tradition.¹ Shāfiʿī refers to it, without isnād, in Tr. VII, 273, but not in the other passages where he speaks of ijtihād. It reappears in Ibn Ḥanbal, v. 230, 236, 242, transmitted by, respectively, Muḥammad b. Jaʿfar al-Hudhalī, Wakīʿ, and ʿAffān b. Muslim—Shuʿba—Abū ʿAwn Muḥammad b. ʿUbaydallāh—Ḥārith b. ʿAmr—several Ṣaḥāba of Muʿādh—Muʿādh. This isnād is fictitiously Syrian in its upper part, down to Ḥārith b. ʿAmr, who is “unknown,” and in its lower part Iraqian; and Iraqian also is the reference to the sunna of the Prophet.² The isnād becomes real beyond doubt only from Shuʿba onwards, from whom three transmitters relate it. This, together with the obviously doubtful character which the tradition still possessed in the time of Shāfiʿī, enables us to conclude that it originated in the generation before him, in the period of Shuʿba.

Iraqian qiyās

The general conclusion which will emerge from what follows is that the ancient Iraqians were familiar with the method, but used the term only exceptionally in their writings.

The oldest examples of Iraqian qiyās show a crude and primitive reasoning. Some are typical of a group of “unsuccessful” traditions from ʿAlī,³ and Shāfiʿī calls the primitive analogy in one of them raʾy.

An old qiyās which prevailed in the Iraqian doctrine was to demand a fourfold confession of the culprit before he incurred the ḥadd punishment for adultery, by analogy with the four witnesses prescribed by Qurʾān 24:4. This was originally pure qiyās, and the only Iraqian tradition on this subject of which I am aware is one of the “unsuccessful” traditions from ʿAlī, which makes him turn away an offending woman four times and only punish her after her fifth confession.⁴ This presupposes the qiyās and exaggerates the underlying tendency. This doctrine spread into Ḥijāz, and was put there under the aegis of the Prophet, in a group of traditions the final outcome of which in the classical collections is the tradition of Māʿiz, who was turned away three times by the Prophet and punished after his fourth confession. Most versions go so far as to state that the confessions were made on four separate occasions.⁵ Although expressed in traditions, the doctrine remained