JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

JAIS
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Pavel Pavlovitch
of Saʿīd b. Abī ʿArūba. It should be recalled that we failed to prove Ibn
Abī ʿArūba’s CL status. The same goes for Manṣūr b. Zādhān who is
Hushaym b. Bashīr’s intermediary to al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī. There is no
evidence that allows us consider Manṣūr as the tradition’s CL instead of
Hushaym b. Bashīr.
Coming to the matns, we have seen that Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj circulated an
early matn, which was edited by Hushaym b. Bashīr and Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd
al-Qaṭṭān. That is to say, both Hushaym and Yaḥyā based their versions
of the tradition of Shuʿba. At the same time neither Hushaym may be
proven to have derived his matn from al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, nor al-Qaṭṭān to
have received his version from Qatāda b. Diʿāma. If a core version of
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Qatāda had existed, one may conjecture that it is represented by the
tradition of Shuʿba b. al-Ḥajjāj, who quotes Qatāda directly. Note,
however, that we do not possess Shuʿba’s CL version, but have
reconstructed it tentatively from later collections. We are uncertain about
the wording of Shuʿba’s tradition as for instance clauses 3 and 4 in its
matn have the appearance of a later expansion of an earlier matn. One
also wonders whether the exclamation Khudhū ʿan-nī! and the following
reference to Qurʾān 4:15 were part of the original matn, which might
have been confined to the dual-penalty dictum.
The degree of epistemological uncertainty increases dramatically as
we try to delve into the single line below Shuʿba. An attribution to
Qatāda may be based on the conjecture that Shuʿba has transmitted
correctly the matn of his informant. If one concedes further a version of
al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī on the assumption that Qatāda in turn has also given
correctly the name of his informant, one would wonder about the
contents of al-Ḥasan’s tradition, which, at present, could be construed
only in terms of Juynboll’s hypothetical legal maxim.
The revelation cluster
Our study of the ʿUbāda cluster has shown that during the second half of
the second century AH Iraqi traditionists spread and developed a stoning
tradition that came to be closely associated with Qurʾān 4:15–6.
Although Qurʾān 24:2 could be treated as the verse that abrogates the
ordinance of Qurʾān 4:15–6, it mentions only flogging as punishment of
the sexual offenders. Consequently, the stoning penalty for adultery
needed justification. Given the lack of an explicit requirement for
stoning in the Qurʾān, the ʿUbāda tradition provided the sunnaic basis
for the stoning of the adulterers. The resort to the sunna, however,
brought forward as an unavoidable corollary the issue of the relationship
between the Qurʾānand the sunna.