ABSTRACT
Western scholars like Goldziher, Schacht and more recently Juynboll, among others, maintain that ḥadīth literature originated at a later stage than that accepted by the classical Muslim tradition. One of the evidences adduced by Juynboll to support this hypothesis is that provided by the awā’il and, among them, by the awā’il “dealing with those people who were credited with having been the first to introduce ḥadith, specified in genre as well as unspecified, into certain areas of the Islamic world”. 1 ) On his part, Schacht has studied the impact of ḥadīth in the field of law, on the assumption that the origins of Islamic jurisprudence were not based on ḥadīth. Al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 204/820) was the first to formulate the theory of the uṣūl al-fiqh which was to become classical and the attempts to incorporate ḥadīth into the field of fiqh had to overcome the resistance of the “ancient schools of law”. In this process a confrontation took place between the groups called by the sources ahl al-ra’y and ahl al-ḥadīth. 2 )
