JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

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Pavel Pavlovitch
Although no works of Dāwūd b. Khalaf have survived, one may think
that his name is of foremost significance in the argumentation of the
Ẓāhirī Ibn Ḥazm. Al-Marwazī’s anonymous locution ṭāʼifat un min ahl i
ʿaṣr i -nā wa-qurb i -hi along with Ibn Ḥazm’s list of those proponents may
be construed as an indication that the dual-penalty dispute unfolded
some time after al-Shāfiʿī’s demise in 204/820. If al-Marwazī’s death in
294/907 be thought of as the terminus ante quem for the dual penalty
dispute, the terminus post quem may be defined by an argument from
silence. Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) does not cite any traditions that indicate
his acquaintance with the dual-penalty issue. However, the collectors of
several Masāʾil works attribute to Aḥmad contradictory pronouncements,
161
some of which endorse the dual penalty, while others go in the opposite
direction. Still other collectors prefer to remain silent about Aḥmad’s
attitude towards the dual-penalty issue. Clearly, these inconsistences call
for additional research, but at present a comparison with the works of al-
Muḥāsibī and Ibn Qutayba may suffice. Al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857–8)
does not address the dual-penalty dispute, but one may argue that due to
the exegetical nature of his work, he was not interested in such a fiqhī
issue. The same cannot be said about Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), whose
last work, Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Ḥadīth, is devoted to contested prophetic
traditions. On two occasions Ibn Qutayba does refer to the traditions
about Māʿiz b. Mālik and the woman’s servant in a polemical context, 55
but in neither case does he mention the dual-penalty issue. If Ibn
Qutayba was unaware of the dispute, then it would have arisen only in
the last decades of the third century AH. If, on the other hand, Ibn Ḥanbal
is proven to have discussed with his students the dual-penalty question,
the above date will have to be pushed back to the first half of the second
century AH.
Of course, one should not ignore the possibility that while, towards
the end of the second century AH, al-Shāfiʿī merely suggested a dual
penalty for adultery; it was only several decades later that the Ẓāhiriyya
contested his view. This may explain why Ibn Ḥanbal remained silent
Ḥanbal’s response. Uneasiness about Aḥmad’s attitude, however, may be discerned
in the somewhat later Masāʾil collections of Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī (d. 275/888)
and Aḥmad’s son, ʿAbd Allāh (d. 290/903), which do not discuss the dual-penalty
issue.
55 The first has a bearing on the relationship between the Qurʾān and the sunna
(Ibn Qutayba, Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Ḥadīth, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm [Beirut:
Dār al-Fikr, 1995/1415], 88–90); in the second Ibn Qutayba discusses the number
of voluntary confessions needed for the imposition of rajm (Taʾwīl, 175–7).