Sunna in the Ẓāhirī Madhhab

Abstract

The founding of the Ẓāhirī madhhab¹ is attributed to Abū Sulaymān Dāwūd ibn ‘Alī ibn Khalaf al-Isbahānī al-Zāhirī (d. 270/884), whose biographers portray him as a scholar who possessed vast knowledge and argumentation skills and had many followers. The Shāfi’ī scholar Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 476/1083) goes so far as to state that the “mastership of knowledge in Baghdad culminated in Dāwūd,”² a problematic statement given the lack of some basic biographical information on Dāwūd and his life. Furthermore, none of Dāwūd’s works has survived. In his Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 438/1047) attributes to him a large number of works, including ones that obviously dealt with legal theoretical subjects of uṣūl al-fiqh—such as al-Uṣūl, a copy of which Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370) seems to have had a copy some five hundred years after Dāwūd’s death; Kitāb al-Dhabb ‘an al-Sunan wa-l-Aḥkām wa-l-Akhbār (“In Defense of Sunnas, Rulings, and Reports,” a work said to have comprised 1000 folios); Kitāb al-Ijmā’ (on consensus); Kitāb Ibṭāl al-Taqlīd (on the invalidity of the [uncritical] following of others’ views); Kitīb Ibṭṭl al-Qiyās (on the invalidity of analogy); Kitāb Khabar al-Wāḥid (on traditions narrated by one transmitter); Kitāb al-Khabar al-Mūjib li-l-’Ilm (on reports that establish apodictic knowledge); Kitāb al-Khuṣūs wa-l-’Umum (on the restrictedness and unrestrictedness of terms); Kitāb al-Mufassar wa-l-Mujmal (on clear and ambiguous terms); in addition to an untitled work where Dāwūd apparently presented some of Muḥammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfi’ī’s (d. 204/820) views (Kitāb al-Kāfī fī Maqīlat al-Muṭṭalibī).³ Dāwūd, in fact, began his scholarly career as a follower of al-Shāfi’ī and later Shāfi’ī biographers regularly refer to him as such.⁴