An essay to reconstruct the redaction of al-Shaybāni’s Aṣl
an analisys of a Cairene manuscript
2009 Volume 58 Pages 1-46,en3
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2009 Volume 58 Pages 1-46,en3
Calder writes that the Aṣl in the present form was “the end-product of a lengthy period of development, involving accumulation of basic materials, successive redaction,” and so on, before it was attributed to al-Shaybānī, one of the founders of the Ḥanafī school of law, as was usually the case with juristic texts dating from the third/ninth century. Hallaq, who extensively examined works of legal sciences ((ilm uṣūl al-fiqh), remarked that the jurists active in the ninth century often attributed their own opinions, which they developed on the basis of those of the founders of their schools, to the founders themselves, with the result that their opinions were blended with those of the founders in an indistinguishable way. However, neither Calder nor Hallaq clarifies how and when the jurists of that period began to blend their opinions with those of the founders of their school.
This articles seeks to shed light on the process by which such blending of legal doctrine was undertaken by analyzing a manuscript of “the book of locatio” of al-Shaybānī’s Aṣl, some chapters of which appear to reflect the first phase of editing that led eventually to the final version of the Aṣl. My contention is that these chapters point to at least three stages of organic growth of the text.
(1) Some chapters consist uniquely of the original Aṣl, i.e. the statements of al-Shaybānī.
(2) In the next stage the pupils of al-Shaybānī added to the original text new materials, which they put in a detached text. It is worth remarking that they tried to distinguish these new materials, which they deduced mostly from the doctrine of the founders by way of systematic reasoning (qiyās), from the latter’s doctrine by using the phrase like “according to qiyās from the thesis of Abū Ḥanīfa, Abū Yūsuf, and al-Shaybānī.”
(3) In the third stage his pupils or the following generation(s) incorporated into the original text the materials produced during the second stage and their own materials. This stage ended toward the end of the ninth century.
The transition from the second stage to the third stage may point to the general attitude of the Ḥanafī jurists of that period to regard the totality of the founders’ doctrine and that which derived from it as the Ḥanafī doctrine, rather than that of Abū Ḥanīfa and/or his immediate pupils.
