Chapters on Marriage and Divorce: Responses of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Rahwayh.

• Author: Juynboll, G.H.A.

The responses on marriage and divorce of Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Hanbal (d. 241/855) and Ishaq b. Ibrahim b. Makhlad, known as Ibn Rahwayh (d. 238/853), are here presented in a dependable translation by Susan Spectorsky. The translated text is based partly on published collections with additional MS materials, partly on mss alone, and is divided into three sections. The first section is that compiled by Ibn Hanbal's pupil Abu Dawud (d. 275/888), the well-known author of the Sunan (ed. M. R. Rida [Cairo, 1934]), the second comprises the compilation of Ibn Hanbal's son Abd Allah (d. 290/903, ed. Zuhayr Shawish [Beirut, 1981]) and the third is that of Ishaq b. Mansur al-kawsaj (d. 251/865, a Zahiriyya ms). I have carried out numerous checks and have found the rendering on the whole very reliable, albeit that on various occasions brief, admittedly mostly redundant, phrases were left untranslated without a warning to the reader.

Both Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Rahwayh are famous collectors of hadiths, and the products of their juridical thinking, partly derived from these hadiths, as they assert, partly from their own personal insight, are laid down in their masa il, an early genre of juridical literature not solely based upon precedent. Each response begins with an introductory statement of the transmitter of the masa il, e.g., Ibn Hanbal's son Abd Allah, who says: "I asked my father about...," or a question raised by an anonymous person on a certain. legal issue: "while I was present my father was asked ... to which he answered...." The masa il genre, at least with the two authors translated here, is still far from a systematic survey of legal doctrines, but rather a haphazardly constructed catalogue of opinions, loosely brought together in largely unstructured fiqh chapters. The legal parlance used in these masa il lacks consistency, for the most part, and is often ultra-concise. It is therefore far from easy to translate. One cannot help being surprised by the more than fortuitous, indeed striking, resemblance which the different masa il show with the dozens of chapter headings in the nikah and talaq chapters in pre-canonical hadith collections, such as those of Abd ar-Razzaq as-San-ani (d. 211/826) and Abu Bakr b. Abi Shayba (d. 235/849). This all too frequent verbatim similarity is one more piece of evidence for the hypothesis that a large proportion of Islamic hadiths and theoretical legal doctrine share a common origin, namely, the imagination of...