Islamic Law and Society Islamic Law and Society 15 (2008) 408-423 www.brill.nl/ils

Book Reviews

Encyclopedia of Canonical Ḥadīth. 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 ḥadīth criticism, second a long, “alphabetical list of persons with whom canonical traditions may be associated,” then a list of 45 traditionists also identified as abdāl, an index to the alphabetical list, and finally an index of Qurʾānic 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 asānīd to any particular ḥadīth 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 ḥadīth 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.

600 500 400 300 Hadith invented 200 100 0 10s 30s 50s 70s 90s 110s 130s 150s 170s 190s 210s 230s

Juynboll lists about 150 traditionists, to whom he assigns 2,280 ḥadīth reports, with texts in translation (necessarily ignoring most variant wordings). Here is a time line of the invention of ḥadīth, according to his estimates: Juynboll credits Ibn ‘Abbās with two ḥadīth reports, or at least holds that their content is conceivably from the time of the Prophet; he credits ʿĀʾishah more confidently with six. The great age of inventing ḥadīth, or more precisely mutūn as they appear in the Six Books (i.e., not counting the invention of alternative

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156851908X366174 Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 15 (2008) 408-423 409 asānīd), appears to be the lifetime of al‑Shāfi‘ī and the half-century before, contra Schacht, who asserted that it was his lifetime and the half-century after. The champions are al‑Zuhrī with 86 to his credit, al‑Aʿmash with 153, Sufyān b. ʿUyayna with 175, Shuʿba with 316, and Mālik with 373. Juynboll expresses some interesting preferences among later collectors; e.g., for Ibn Abī Shayba over ʿAbd al‑Razzāq, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, and other major collectors of the 3rd/9th century and, among the Six Books, for Bukhārī and Muslim over the other four where they include a ḥadīth report that Bukhārī and Muslim do not. Let me review a sample entry, chosen at random: “Mālik b. Mighwal (d. 157 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 ḥadīth report that he will identify Mālik b. Mighwal as inventing: Ṭalḥa b. Muṣarrif asks ʿAbd Allāh b. Abī Awfā, “‘Did the Prophet leave a will?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘But,’ Ṭalḥa went on, ‘why are the Muslims enjoined to leave a testament at all?’ Said ʿAbd Allāh, ‘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 ḥadīth report in al‑Mizzī, Tuḥfa. Juynboll then notes, “Mālik 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[irmidhī] is quoted … that Mālik b. Mighwal tafarrada bihi, which amounts to saying that he is probably the CL of this tradition … . What substantiates Mālik b. Mighwal’s position in this bundle as (S)CL is the fact that in Ḥilya, 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 ḥadīth 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 majhūl ” (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 majhūl; e.g., al‑Awzāʿī and Sufyān al‑Thawrī. I would say that uncertainty about a trans­mitter’s death dates is due to biographers’ inferring data from the asānīd in which he appeared, which showed them who had been able to meet and relate ḥadīth 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 asānīd. Nevertheless, as the entry on Mālik b. Mighwal illustrates, Juynboll’s actual method depends heavily on pre-modern scholarship—