The Relation of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 157
trine, before the rise of the Ḥanbalī school but well after the age of the
Prophet.
Knowing Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s doctrine was a complex issue for the
tradition, as indicated by the frequency with which it reported mul-
tiple versions of what Aḥmad had said. Several collections of Aḥmad’s
opinions from immediate disciples of his are extant.^15 Contradictions
are found among them, the consequence of Ibn Ḥanbal’s changing his
mind, being misunderstood, or having things put in his mouth that
he did not actually say but that the quoter thought he must have said,
had someone asked him. However, such contradictions in the earli-
est record come nowhere near concerning every third question, as
in quotations of Ibn Ḥanbal reported by al-Mardāwī.^16 Most of the
multiple versions in al-Mardāwī were evidently the consequence of
takhrīj, attributing to the eponym of the school an opinion not that
he was remembered as expressing but that seemed, to the writer, to
follow from his principles.^17 Al-Mardāwī himself defines takhrīj as the
transfer of an assessment from one question to another, similar one,
considering them equivalent (naql ḥukm masʾala ilā mā yushbihuhā
wal-taswiya baynahumā fīh).^18 Ibn Taymiyya describes it as a famous
15 On the Masāʾil collections, see Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, chapter 3,
pp. 59–81, esp. pp. 68–70. To those cited now add Masāʾil al-imām Aḥmad b.
Ḥanbal wa-Isḥāq b. Rāhawayh, recension of al-Kawsaj, ed. by Abū al-Ḥusayn
Khālid b. Maḥmūd al-Rabāṭ, Wiʿām al-Hawshī and Jumʿa Fatḥī, Riyadh
1425/2004, and Masāʾil al-imām Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Ḥanbal wa-Isḥāq
b. Rāhawayh, recension of Ḥarb b. Ismāʿīl al-Kirmānī, ed. by Nāṣir b. Saʿūd b.
ʿAbd Allāh al-Salāma, Riyadh 1425.
16 For a sample of contradictions among the Masāʾil collections, see Ibn al-Farrāʾ,
Abū Yaʿlā: al-Masāʾil al-ʿaqdiyya min Kitāb al-Riwāyatayn wal-wajhayn, ed. by
Saʿūd b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Khalaf, Riyadh 1419/1999.
17 Al-Mardāwī names three possible bases of a version (riwāya): Aḥmad’s express
declaration (naṣṣ), an indirect indication by him of his opinion (īmāʾ), and takhrīj
on the part of adherents of the school: Qāʿida nāfiʿa, vol. 12, p. 196. I have not
remarked any estimate from him of how many versions were based on each of
these, but he certainly seems less naive than the many writers of the present who
assume that contradictory quotations are the product of someone’s changing
his mind, not back projection of opinions from later generations. On takhrīj in
Islamic legal literature generally, see Hallaq, Wael B.: Authority, Continuity and
Change in Islamic Law, Cambridge 2001, chapter 2. For examples in the early
record of al-Shāfiʿī’s opinions, see Melchert, Christopher: The Meaning of qāla
al-Shāfiʿī in Ninth-Century Sources, in: Montgomery, James E. (ed.): Abbasid
Studies, Leuven 2004, pp. 277–301.
18 Al-Mardāwī, al-Inṣāf fī maʿrifat al-rājiḥ, vol. 1, p. 17; idem, Qāʿida nāfiʿa, vol. 12,
p. 190.
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