0021-1818_islam_98-1-2-i-259

48 Andreas Görke, Harald Motzki, Gregor Schoeler
eminence of their ancestors.” 201 On the one hand anonymous “rumors and legends,”
on the other, the Ka^b b. Malik family’s “tall tales”? Motzki assumes the
latter to be the case, although he suspects that the “tall tales” had already been
condensed to story-form by al-Zuhr\’s informant. Shoemaker considers this improbable
arguing, unconvincingly, that the names of al-Zuhr\’s source were “invented.”
202 Otherwise, Shoemaker and Motzki agree that al-Zuhr\ is the author
of the account. 203 Motzki emphasizes at the end of his study that al-Zuhr\ did not
necessarily report his informant’s tradition word for word. 204
The methodological problem that emerges in this discussion between
Motzki and Shoemaker concerns the evaluation of the informant(s) or source(s)
of the common link. Is it methodologically responsible to critically and cautiously
use the information about the source(s) available in the traditions themselves and
in other Islamic works, or must all of this information generally be disregarded
because it is potentially counterfeit? Motzki considers the latter approach too extreme
because the assumption of counterfeit is based on generalizations that are
methodologically unacceptable. All unprovable information is rejected simply
because of some individual, provable cases of forgery. In the case at hand, it is the
names of the informant(s) of the common link that Shoemaker considers bogus,
without concrete proof in that regard. Motzki, however, argues that the possibility
that a common link received at least the essence of his tradition from the person
he indicated as his informant should not be excluded a priori. Whether and
how convincingly this can be proved depends on the available evidence. In the
present case, the evidence points to one or more of Ka^b b. Malik’s children as
sources for al-Zuhr\’s tradition.
Abu Is1aq al-Sab\^\’s ^ Version
As already noted, Shoemaker accepts Motzki’s conclusion that the Medinan
scholar al-Zuhr\ is the common link of one of the lines of transmissions, i.e., he
was the first systematic propagator of one of several different accounts regarding
the murder of the Jew Ibn Ab\ l-0uqayq. However, Shoemaker disputes Motzki’s
identification of al-Zuhr\’s Kufan contemporary, Abu Is1aq al-Sab\^\, as a common
link and therefore also Motzki’s dating of the traditions attributed to him. Shoe-
201 Ibid., 333.
202 Ibid., 332.
203 Ibid., 333.
204 Motzki, “The Murder,” 207.