ABSTRACT
The oral/aural contact that earlier predominantly accounted for the transmis-
sion of literary and scholarly material was supplemented, not supplanted, by the
reliance on books and written evidence. A look at the akhba¯r (accounts, sing.
khabar) reported in fourth/tenth-century works of adab reveals that although a
good deal of information is taken from books, anecdotes preceded by the
transmission formulae dhakara (“he mentioned”), qa¯la (“he said”) and h ˙ aka¯ (“he
recounted”), for instance, a great deal is also still obtained through oral
testimony, as the formulae akhbaranı¯ (“he informed me”) and h ˙ addathanı¯ (“he told
me”) attest.1 In spite of the increasingly pervasive presence and influence of
books, book culture did not supplant oral intellectual culture but complemented
it, creating an interdependence. Writers of the late second/eighth and early
third/ninth centuries did not rely all that much on available written sources.
Walter Werkmeister has shown, for instance, that the majority of the material
used by Ibn ( Abd Rabbihi (d. 328/940) was obtained from maja¯lis (sing. majlis,
discussion sessions, class sessions) and h ˙ alqahs (study circles), and not from written
sources.2 Jurists did not rely greatly on written materials either. As Jeanette Wakin
has noted, “jurists never modified their attitude toward written documents and
managed to avoid the Quranic injunction [to draft written documents under
certain circumstances] by interpreting it as a simple recommendation.”3 Behind
the principle that oral testimony deserved more credence than written evidence
lay “the correct assumption that numerous documents used in legal claims . . .
were forgeries. . . . The technology of written record was insufficiently advanced
to be efficient or reliable.”4
