To Malik the matn, or text, of a tradition had been the only thing of importance. To the isnad, or chain of authority running back to the Prophet, he had paid little attention. He, as we have seen, was a lawyer and gathered traditions, not for their own sake but to use them in law. To others, the tradition was the thing, and too much care could not be given to its details and its authenticity. And the care was really called for. With the course of time and the growing demand, the supply of traditions had also grown until there was no doubt in the mind of anyone that an enormous proportion were simple forgeries. To weed out the sound ones, attention had to be given to the isnad; the names upon it had to be examined; the fact of their having been in intercourse to be determined; the possibility of the case in general to be tested. Thus there were formed real collections of supposedly sound traditions, which were called Musnads, because each tradition was musnad—propped, supported—against the Companions from whom it proceeded. In accordance with this also they were arranged according to the Companions. After the name of the Companion were given all the traditions leading back to him. One of the earliest and greatest of these books was the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died A.H. 241; of him more hereafter. This book has been printed recently at Cairo in six quarto volumes of 2,885 pages and is said to contain about thirty thousand traditions going back to seven hundred Companions.
But another type of tradition-book was growing up, less mechanical in arrangement. It is the Musannaf, the arranged, classified—and in it the traditions are arranged in chapters according to their subject matter. The first Musannaf to make a permanent mark was the Sahih—sound—of al-Bukhari, who died in A.H. 257. It is still extant and is the most respected of all the collections of traditions. The principle of arrangement in it is legal; that is, the traditions are classified in these chapters so as to afford bases for a complete system of jurisprudence. Al-Bukhari was a strong opponent of speculative law and his book was thus a protest against a tendency which, as we shall see later, was strong in his time. Another point in which al-Bukhari made his influence felt and with greater effect, was increased severity in the testing of traditions. He established very strict laws, though of a somewhat mechanical kind, and was most scrupulous in applying them. His book contains about seven thousand traditions, and he chose those, so at least runs the story, out of six hundred thousand which he found in circulation. The rest were rejected as failing to meet his tests. How far the forgery of traditions had gone may be seen from the example of Ibn Abi Awja, who was executed in A.H. 155, and who confessed that he had himself put into circulation four thousand that were false. Another and a similar Sahih is that of Muslim, who died in A.H. 261. He was not so markedly juristic as al-Bukhari. His object was rather to purify the mass of existing tradition from illegitimate accretions than to construct a basis for a complete law code. He has prefixed a valuable introduction on the science of tradition generally. In some slight details his principle of criticism differed from that of al-Bukhari.
These two collections, called the two Sahihs—as-Sahihan—are technically jami‘s, i.e. they contain all the different classes of traditions, historical, ethical, dogmatic and legal. They have also come to be, by common agreement, the two most honored authorities in the Muslim world. A believer finds it hard, if not impossible, to reject a tradition that is found in both.
THE SUNAN
But there are four other collections which are called Sunan—Usages—and which stand only second to the two Sahihs. These are by Ibn Maja (d. 303), Abu Da’ud as-Sijistani (d. 275), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279) and an-Nasa’i (d. 303). They deal almost entirely with legal traditions, those that tell what is permitted and what is forbidden, and do not convey information on religious and theological subjects. They are also much more lenient in their criticisms of dubious traditions. To work exclusion with them, the rejection needed to be tolerably unanimous. This was required by their stand-point and endeavor, which was to find a basis for all the minutest developments and details of jurisprudence, civil and religious.
These six books, the two Sahihs and the four Sunans, came to be regarded in time as the principal and all-important sources for traditional science. This had already come about by the end of the fifth century, although even after that voices of uncertainty continued to make themselves heard. Ibn Maja seems to have been the last to secure firm footing, but even he is included by al-Baghawi (d. 516) in his Masabih as-sunna, an attempted epitome into one book of what was valuable in all. Still, long after that, Ibn Khaldun, the great historian (d. 808), speaks of five fundamental works; and others speak of seven, adding the Muwatta of Malik to the six above. Others, again, especially in the West, extended the number of canonical works to ten, though with varying members; but all these must be regarded as more or less local, temporary, and individual eccentricities. The position of the six stands tolerably firm.
So much it has been necessary to interpolate and anticipate with regard to the students of tradition whose interest lay in gathering up and preserving, not in using and applying. From the earliest time, then, there existed these two classes in the bosom of Islam, students of tradition proper and of law proper. For long they did not clash; but a collision was inevitable sooner or later.
Yet, if the circle of the Muslim horizon had not widened beyond the little market-town of al-Madina, that collision might have been long in coming. Its immediate causes were from without, and are to be found in the wave of conquest that carried Islam, within the century, to Samarqand beyond the Oxus and to Tours in central France. Consider what that wave of conquest was and meant. Within fourteen years of the Hijra, Damascus was taken, and within seventeen years, all Syria and Mesopotamia. By the year 21, the Muslims held Persia; in 41 they were at Herat, and in 56 they reached Samarqand. In the West, Egypt was taken in the year 20; but the way through northern Africa was long and hard. Carthage did not fall till 74, but Spain was conquered with the fall of Toledo in 93. It was in A.D. 732, the year of the Hijra 114, that the wave at last was turned and the mercy of Tours was wrought by Charles the Hammer; but the Muslims still held Narbonne and raided in Burgundy and the Dauphiné. The wealth that flowed into Arabia from these expeditions was enormous; money and slaves and luxuries of every kind went far to transform the old life of hardness and simplicity. Great estates grew up: fortunes were made and lost; the intricacies of the Syrian and Persian civilizations overcame their conquerors. All this meant new legal conditions and problems. The system that had sufficed to guard the right to a few sheep or camels had to be transformed before it would suffice to adjust the rights and claims of a tribe of millionnaires. But it must not be thought that these expeditions were only campaigns of plunder. With the Muslim armies everywhere went law and justice, such as it was. Jurists accompanied each army and were settled in the great camp cities which were built to hold the conquered lands. Al-Basra and al-Kufa and Fustat, the parent of Cairo, owe their origin to this, and it was in these new seats of militant Islam that speculative jurisprudence arose and moulded the Muslim system.
RISE OF SPECULATIVE JURISPRUDENCE
The early lawyers had much to do and much to learn, and it is to their credit that they recognized both necessities. Muslim law is no product of the desert or of the mind of Muhammad, as some have said; but rather of the labor of these men, struggling with a gigantic problem. They might have taken their task much more easily than they did; they might have lived as Muhammad had done, from hand to mouth, and have concealed their own sloth by force and free invention of authorities. But they recognized their responsibility to God and man and the necessity of building up a stable and complete means of rendering justice. These armies of Muslims, we must remember, were not like the hordes of Attila or Chingis Khan, destroyers only. The lands they conquered were put to hard tribute, but it was under a reign of law. They recognized frankly that it was for them that this mighty empire existed; but they recognized also that it could continue to exist only with order and duty imposed upon all. They saw, too, how deficient was their own knowledge and learned willingly of the people among whom they had come. And here, a second time, Roman law—the parent-law of the world—made itself felt. There were schools of that law in Syria at Cæsarea and Beyrout, but we need not imagine that the Muslim jurists studied there. Rather, it was the practical school of the courts as they actually existed which they attended. These courts were permitted to continue in existence till Islam had learned from them all that was needed. We can still recognize certain principles that were so carried over. That the duty of proof lies upon the plaintiff, and the right of defending himself with an oath upon the defendant; the doctrine of invariable custom and that of the different kinds of legal presumption. These, as expressed in Arabic, are almost verbal renderings of the pregnant utterances of Latin law.