Encyclopedia of Canonical adth by G. H. A.

Juynboll
Review by: Christopher Melchert
Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2008), pp. 408-411
Published by: BRILL
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BRILL Islamic Law and
Society
15 (2008)
408-423 www.bTill.nl/ils
Book Reviews
Encyclopedia of
Canonical Hadith.
By
G.H.A.
Juynboll.
Leiden/Boston:
Brill, 2007.
Pp.
xxxiii + 804. ISBN 978 90 04 15674 6.
209; $289.00.
This
hefty
volume
comprises
first an introduction
presenting
the latest version of
Juynboll's
method of hadith
criticism,
second a
long, "alphabetical
list of
persons
with whom canonical traditions
may
be
associated,"
then a list of 45 traditionists
also identified as
abdl,
an index to the
alphabetical
list,
and
finally
an index of
Qur'anic passages
cited.
Juynboll expounded
his basic
method,
with
appropriate
credit to
Joseph
Schacht,
in Muslim Tradition
(Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
He collects and
compares
the asnid to
any particular
hadith
report
and looks for
the Common
Link,
the earliest
person
in the
complex
who
evidently
dictated this
basic text to
multiple
auditors. In
subsequent
articles,
he has introduced
many
refinements,
notably
the "Partial Common
Link,"
a teacher with
multiple
auditors
besides the evident Common Link
-
the more of
these,
the more
plausible
the
identification of the Common Link above
them;
the "dive"
by
which someone
reports having
heard the same hadith
report through
an otherwise unattested chain
from the Common Link's own
reported
source;
and the
"spider,"
a collection of
"single
strands,"
uncorroborated lines of transmission
up
to the
putative
source.
These are
clearly
and
succinctly
described in the introduction to the
Encyclope-
dia.
Juynboll
lists about 1 50 traditionists,
to whom he
assigns
2,280
hadith
reports,
with texts in translation
(necessarily ignoring
most variant
wordings).
Here is a
time line of the invention of
hadith^
according
to his estimates:
Juynboll
credits Ibn 'Abbas with two hadith
reports,
or at least holds that their
content is
conceivably
from the time of the
Prophet;
he credits cA'ishah more
confidently
with six. The
great age
of
inventing
hadith^
or more
precisely
mutn
as
they appear
in the Six Books
(i.e.,
not
counting
the invention of alternative

Koninklijke
Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156851908X366174
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Book Reviews I Islamic Law and
Society
15 (2008)
408-423 409
asnid),
appears
to be the lifetime of al-Shafi'l and the
half-century
before,
contra
Schacht,
who asserted that it was his lifetime and the
half-century
after. The
champions
are al-Zuhrl with 86 to his
credit,
al-Acmash with
153,
Sufyn
b.
cUyayna
with
175,
Shu'ba with
316,
and Malik with 373.
Juynboll expresses
some
interesting preferences among
later
collectors;
e.g.,
for Ibn Abi
Shayba
over cAbd
al-Razzq,
Ahmad b.
Hanbal,
and other
major
collectors of the 3rd/9th
century
and,
among
the Six
Books,
for Bukhrl and Muslim over the other four where
they
include a hadith
report
that Bukhrl and Muslim do not.
Let me review a
sample entry,
chosen at random: "Malik b.
Mighwal
(d.
1 57
or 159/774 or
776)"
-
regrettably, Juynboll's
conversion from
Hijri
to Common
Era is
usually approximate,
without
split
dates,
and sometimes erroneous
-
"was
an Arab who lived in Kufa." After a few comments on his
reputation, Juynboll
quotes
the one hadith
report
that he will
identify
Malik b.
Mighwal
as
inventing:
Talha
b. Musarrif asks 'Abd Allh b. Abl
Awf,
'"Did the
Prophet
leave a will?'
'No/
he said.
'But/
Talha went
on,
'why
are the Muslims
enjoined
to leave a
testament at all?' Said (Abd
Allah,
'He
charged
us to follow the Book of God.'"
After
quoting
this
matn,
Juynboll
follows it with a series of
citations,
beginning
with the number of this hadith
report
in
al-MizzI,
Tuhfa. Juynboll
then
notes,
"Malik b.
Mighwal
has three PCLs and several SSs in this bundle which
supports
one version of a
MC,
so he is in
any
case the
(S)CL" (see
pp.
404-05). Abbreviated,
here are some common terms of
Juynboll's:
Partial Common
Link,
Single
Strand,
Matn
Cluster,
and
Seeming
Common Link. The
persistence
of
parentheses
around
"seeming"
is an
example
of the
provisional, speculative
nature of
Juynboll's
evalua-
tions,
often
expressly acknowledged.
"Furthermore, t[irmidhi]
is
quoted
... that
Malik b.
Mighwal tafarrada
bihi,
which amounts to
saying
that he is
probably
the CL of this tradition .... What substantiates Malik b.
Mighwals position
in
this bundle as
(S)CL
is the fact that in
Hilya,
V,
p.
21,
lines
14-18,
a number
of
people
are enumerated that
emphasize
his
key figure position
even more
convincingly." Juynboll
is
fairly disparaging
of the Islamic tradition of hadith
criticism,
asserting,
for
example,
that
although noticing
the
phenomenon
of
Common Links,
pre-modern
critics "fail to draw
plausible
conclusions"
(xxiii).
Sometimes,
I think he is
overly
harsh,
as when he
alleges
that "absence of a
year
of death is
mostly
a sure
sign
that a certain
figure
is a
majhl" (p.
417).
Sixty
percent
of the transmitters in the Six Books have no dates at all attached to them.
Mostly
minor
figures, perhaps they
are so
many
unknowns. But even
major figures
are often associated with
multiple proposed
death
dates,
like the
figure Juynboll
has
just
called a
majhl\ e.g.,
al-Awza'I and
Sufyn
al-Thawri. I would
say
that
uncertainty
about a transmitter's death dates is due to
biographers' inferring
data
from the asnid in which he
appeared,
which showed them who had been able
to meet and relate hadith from him.
Accordingly,
I doubt whether the
biographical
record is an
independent
source when it
says
that someone met someone
else,
but
I also doubt whether
uncertainty
about death dates must have come from the
invention of names in asnid.
Nevertheless,
as the
entry
on Malik b.
Mighwal
illustrates,
Juynboll's
actual method
depends heavily
on
pre-modern scholarship
-
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4 1 0 Book Reviews I Islamic Law and
Society
15
(2008)
408-423
the
Encyclopedia
is
generously
dedicated to cAbd as-Samad Sharaf
ad-Din,
first
editor of the
Tuhfa
-
and seems rather more
complementary
to it than Harald
Motzki s method.
Students of
early
Islamic law will
probably
wish to consult
Juynboll
on all the
hadith
reports they
consider,
giving
his assessments more or less
weight
as
they
consider his method more or less reliable. For an article I
recently completed
about
judicial procedure, especially
the
principle
that
proof
is incumbent on the
plaintiff,
an oath on the
defendant,
succinctly
stated in a famous hadith
report,
I wished
that
Juynboll
s index were more detailed. I find no
entry
for
"defendant,"
"plaintiff,"
or "law suit." Under
"oath,"
there are 26
page
references without further
analysis.
After
working through
them,
I did find the one I
wanted,
which
happened
to be
the thirteenth.
Juynboll
attributes the hadith
reports preface
(about
the need to
restrain human
cupidity)
and second half
(about
the
defendant)
to Ibn
Jurayj (p.
220). But,
because he omits to consider most literature
apart
from the Six
Books,
he does not mention
advocacy
of the
principle by
the Hanafi school
(where
the
earliest sources attribute the
saying
to
Followers,
not to the
Prophet),
to which I
would characterize Ibn
Jurayj
's hadith
report
as a
response.
Another test: in an article about women in
mosques,
I
began
with a treat-
ment of the hadith
report,
"Forbid not God's handmaidens to enter the
mosque"
("Whether
to
Keep
Women out of the
Mosque:
A
Survey
of Medieval Islamic
Law,"
Proceedings of
the 22nd
Congress of
L'Union
Europenne
des Arabisants et
Islamisants)
.
Fortunately,
in
Juynboll's
index,
"women" is not one
entry.
Rather,
the index has one reference for "women in the
mosque,"
which led me to
Sufyn
b.
cUyayna
(d. 198/814),
whom
Juynboll
credits with the
version,
"When a man's
wife asks to
go
to the
mosque,
he should not
stop
her." Another
entry,
"women
forbidden to
go
to
mosque,"
led me to
this,
which
Juynboll
ascribes to the Kufan
al-A'mash
(d. 148/765-6?):
"Ibn cUmar related the
Prophet's
words: 'Do not
prevent
your
women from
going
out in the
night
to the
mosque.'
Then a son of Ibn
cUmar's said: 'We will not let them
go
out to defile the
place.' Whereupon
Ibn
cUmar scolded him and said: 'I said that the
Messenger
of God said
this,
and
you
say:
We won't let them?!'" I have
supposed
that the
controversy
was older than
al-A'mash,
but this
particular wording
need not be older. "Forbid not God's
handmaidens to enter the
mosque"
is not in the
Encyclopedia
because,
evidently,
it is
supported only by single
strands,
about which
Juynboll
will draw no conclu-
sions. I observed that these
permissive
hadith
reports
were Medinese in their
upper
reaches
(Companion
and Follower
levels),
whereas Kufan sources
reported negative
positions
of Ibn Mas'ud and Ibrahim
al-Nakha%
from which I inferred that Kufa
was the home of
opposition
to women's
going
to the
mosque, opposition
that
survived in the
relatively
restrictive
position
of the Hanafi school.
Juynboll
s
analysis
would
suggest nothing
of the
sort,
although
harmonization is
possible:
if al-Acmash
was indeed the author of this form of the
report,
then he
gives
us a dissident
Kufan
view,
also a clear terminus ante
quern
for the
principle
that the
Prophet's
dicta have
priority
over Followers'. What I conclude is first that one dare not end
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Book Reviews I Islamic Law and
Society
15 (2008)
408-423 4 1 1
an
investigation
of some
early legal controversy
at
Juynboll's
verdict,
but second
that one
may expect
such an
investigation
to be enriched
by consulting Juyn-
boll.
I think this is
enough
to
justify adding
the
Encyclopedia
to ones
library.
The
introduction becomes the first
place
to send a student for an
exposition
of
Juynboll's
method,
as I think I would send the same student first to Harald
Motzki,
"Dating
Muslim
Traditions," Arbica,
lii
(2005), 204-53,
for an
exposition
of his method
and to Eerik
Dickinson,
The
Development of Early
Sunnite hadith Criticism
(Leiden:
Brill, 2001),
chapter
6,
for an
exposition
of 9th and
10th-century
Sunni methods
(as
distinct from the list of technical terms that has
usually
served for a
description
of
pre-modern
hadith
criticism,
I
suspect by
incautious reliance on the literature
of usl
al-fiqh).
Christopher
Melchert
University
of Oxford
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