AND PERSONAL OPINION 107

confined to Iraq (Tr. I, 104, 105, 200) and did not prevail in the Medinese school. The oldest variant of this group of traditions, a mursal ascribed to Ibn Musayyib and in itself evidently unhistorical (Muw. iv. 4), does not yet know the name of Māʿiz and the fourfold confession as such; another version which mentions the fourfold confession without naming the culprit is even a mursal of Zuhrī (ibid. 5 f.). It is obvious that the classical tradition of Māʿiz is late, and that its prototype became known in Ḥijāz, as the justification of an Iraqian qiyās, only in the generation preceding Mālik.

This qiyās provoked another, to the effect that the ḥadd punishment for theft could be applied only after a twofold confession of the culprit, by analogy with the two witnesses demanded in this case. This doctrine is expressed in a tradition from ʿAlī (Tr. II, 18 (s)), but not all Iraqians hold it.¹

The minimum value of stolen goods, for the ḥadd punishment for theft to be applicable, was fixed in Iraq, by a crude analogy with the five fingers, at 5 dirhams. This is the doctrine of Ibn Abī Lailā (Tr. I, 198) and one of the doctrines ascribed to Ibn Masʿūd (Tr. II, 18(x)), and the parallel is explicitly drawn in a tradition from ʿUthmān (quoted in Sarakhsī, ix. 137). The generally accepted Iraqian raʾy, however, was to fix the minimum value of stolen goods arbitrarily at 10 dirhams, and as a justification of this, traditions from Ibn Masʿūd, ʿAlī, and the Prophet were produced (Tr. I, 198). We have to consider this as the original doctrine, and the qiyās as a refinement which remained unsuccessful.

The minimum value of stolen goods provided the starting point for fixing, by a crude analogy, the minimum amount of ṣadaq, the contractual payment to be made by the bridegroom to the bride which is an essential element of the marriage contract (donatio propter nuptias). Here too, the original Iraqian reasoning was arbitrary raʾy, such as Shāfiʿī ascribes to “some followers of Abū Ḥanīfa” who say: “We think it shocking that intercourse should become lawful for a trifling amount” (Tr. III, 54). This stage of doctrine is represented by the opinion ascribed to Ibrāhīm Nakhaʿī in a late source (ʿIyāḍ, quoted in