Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years.

• Author: Vikor, Knut S.

Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years. By GARRETT DAVIDSON. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 160. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. xii + 333. $150.

Anybody who works on Maliki scholars in the early modern Maghreb will be familiar with 'Abd al-Hayy al-Kattani's Fahras al-faharis wa-l-athbat, the celebrated biographical dictionary of scholars and their networks up to the early twentieth century (al-Kattam died in 1962). Garrett Davidson, who discusses al-Kattam's work in the last chapter of his study of hadith transmission in the postcanonical age, can now tell us what kind of work this really is. It is, he contends, only incidentally an encyclopedia of scholars--primarily, it is a work that aims to cement al-Kattani's links to the Prophet through a catalogue of the chains of transmission (sg. isnad) that end in himself. And in this, it is the modern incarnation of a tradition that goes back to the earliest centuries of Islam.

Davidson's starting point is the moment of the creation of the great hadith collections in the ninth century. Although now in written form, the process of copying and recopying still introduced the danger of error and the creeping in of variations. Thus, there was still need for a system of authorized transmission, as in the precollection period--only now it was the written text that was transmitted through an isnad going back either to al-Bukhari and the other collectors, or to their sources. However, after two or three centuries so many trustworthy copies of the great collections had been made that these had achieved canonical form, that is, the written text itself was said to be mutawatir. the high number of identical copies ensured that none could be false. From that point on, there was not really any need for an oral or aural transmission of the text--a mere comparison of a copy with a trusted written original would be sufficient.

Yet the transmission of hadith continued, in various forms. Davidson's claim is that from this point, the transmission, "I read al-Bukhari with [name]" was no longer a certificate of authenticity of the text, but a pious exercise to show the reader's link with the great hadith collector, and through his isnad, back to the Prophet. And, freed from the shackles of actually having to authenticate the text, the process of transmission turned into a competition among scholars to have the most elevated status in this respect...