eager listeners wherever they went. The stories they related passed from lip to lip, losing nothing in the process of transmission; and so it came to pass that each of the great Muhammadan cities of Asia-Koufa, Basra, Damascus, Jerusalem, Meron, Herat-became possessed of a body of Traditions, which were handed on orally by masters to their pupils. But no attempt was made to sift and criticise this immense accumulation of anecdotes. Millions of Traditions floated amid the Faithful; tens of thousands of these were pure forgeries, and hundreds of thousands of them were contradictory. None knew how to discriminate between the true and the false, or how to ascertain the "abrogating" Traditions, from those which were abrogated by them. Abou Hanifa and the "legists of Irak" had proposed to get rid of the difficulty by setting aside the entire mass of traditional literature, and deducing their jurisprudence exclusively from the Koran. But the verbal quibbling and legalized immorality* in which their practice had resulted, had occasioned the strong reaction in favour of the Traditions, at the head of which stood the Imam Ahmad ibn

* I give an example by way of illustration. "Haroun al Rashid, having one day declared with an oath that he himself was one of those who were to enter Paradise, consulted doctors of the law on the subject. None of them opined that he was one of those persons, and, as Ibn as Sammak's name was then mentioned to him, he had him called in, and asked his opinion. Ibn as Sammak proposed to him this question, 'Had the Commander of the Faithful ever the occasion of committing an act of disobedience towards God, and abstained from it through fear of offending Him?' 'Yes,' said al Rashid, 'in my youth, I fell in love with a slave-girl belonging to a person in my service, and having once found a

Hanbal. When," said one of the Imam's disciples, "the horseman of the Traditions gallops about in the hippodrome of contestation, the heads of analogical deductions are struck off and given to the winds.' But, in order to provide "the horseman of the Traditions" with weapons that should not snap in the using, it was necessary that the great mass of Traditions should be collected, and by the application of a severe and searching criticism, the authentic separated from the spurious. This was the task which devout men now set before themselves as their life-work. Undeterred by the dangers and hardships of travel, they journeyed through all the provinces of the Muhammadan worlddevoting twenty and thirty years of their life to this laborious enterprise—and made complete collections of all the Traditions they found among the people. These they then subjected to critical tests, discarding those which were wholly false, and rearranging the rest according to the degree of credibility attaching to each Tradition.

Abou Daoud Sulaiman, a member of the tribe of Azd, was one of the first of these devoted men. He

favourable opportunity, I resolved on committing with her the evil deed, but reflecting on the fire of hell and its terrors, and recollecting that fornication was one of the grievous sins, I abstained from the girl through fear of Almighty God.' Then, let the Commander of the Faithful rejoice! thou art one of those who shall enter Paradise,' said Ibn as Sammak. 'How,' said al Rashid, 'dost thou know that?' From the words of the Almighty Himself,' replied the other; 'He has said, ' But whoever shall have dreaded the appearing before his Lord, and shall have restrained his soul from lust, verily Paradise shall be his abode' (Sura lxxix. 40). These words gave al Rashid great joy."-(Ibn. Khall. Biog. Dic., vol. iii., p. 19.)

travelled through Irak, Khorasan, Syria, and Egypt; visiting all the principal cities, and taking down in writing the Traditions in use among the doctors resident in each of them. The book thus compiled he presented to the Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Speaking of this work, Abou Daoud said :

"I wrote down five hundred thousand Traditions respecting the Prophet, from which I selected these, to the number of four thousand eight hundred, which are contained in this book. I have mentioned herein the authentic, those which seem to be so; and those which are nearly so; but of them all a man only requires four for his religious conduct-the first, those words of the Prophet, 'Deeds are to be judged by the intentions;' the second, 'A proof of man's sincerity in Islamism is his abstaining from what concerns him not;' the third, 'The believer is not truly a believer until he desireth for his brother that which he desireth for himself;' the fourth, 'The lawful is clear, and the unlawful is clear, but between them are things doubtful.'"

This excellent man was born A.H. 202 (A.D. 817-818), and died at Basra A.H. 275 (A.D. 889).

Another eminent Traditionist, contemporary with Abou Daoud, was Yahya ibn Maiu. He devoted his entire life to the collection of Traditions, and the sifting of the false from the true. His father had left him a fortune equivalent, in our money, to the sum of twenty thousand pounds. The whole of this he expended upon his life-work, and brought himself thereby to such destitution, that he had not a shoe to put on. He wrote down six hundred thousand Traditions with his own hand; and the relaters of Traditions are said to have written down for him as many more. Referring to these labours, he said, “I wrote down quantities of Traditions under the dictation

oven.

of liars, and made use of the paper for heating my I thus obtained at least one advantage-bread well baked." On his death he left one hundred and thirty cases, and four water-jar stands filled with books. He was a great master in what was technically called, "The art of improbation and justification." This art had for object to determine the degree of credibility attaching to individual reporters of Traditions, by a close investigation of their lives, and the reputation they had acquired for good conduct, piety, veracity, exactness, and a retentive memory. A close friendship existed between Yahya, and the Imam ibn Hanbal, and they studied together all the sciences connected with the Traditions. The latter affirmed of his friend that God had created him for the purpose of exposing the falsehoods of lying Traditionists; and that every Tradition unknown to Yahya ibn Maiu might be regarded as false on that account alone. Yahya departed this life in his seventy-seventh year (A.H. 233). He had been at Mekka, and when returning to Baghdad, the city where he dwelt, he visited Medina, and abode there three days. He then set out once more with his fellow-travellers; but at the first halting-place he had a dream, in which he heard a voice calling to him, and saying, "O Abou Zakariya ! dost thou then dislike my neighbourhood?" When the morning came, he said to his companions, "Continue your journey; as for me, I return to Medina." They did so, while he went back to the city, where he passed three days, and then died. His corpse was borne to the grave on the bier which had been used on

the occasion of the Prophet's burial; and a man preceded the funeral train, crying out, "This is he who expelled falsehoods from the Traditions left by the Prophet of God."

Among the pupils of Yahya ibn Maiu, there were two, upon whom his spirit descended in an eminent degree. They were Muhammad ibu Ismail al Bokhari, and Muslim ibn al Hajjaj. "I saw in a dream,” we are told by al Bokhari, "the Prophet of God, from whom I brushed away the flies. When I awoke, I inquired from one skilled in the interpretation of dreams, the meaning of the vision. He said to me, "You shall keep lies from him." Thus encouraged, he set out from Baghdad, and journeyed to all the great cities of Khorasan, Irak, Hejaz, Syria, and Egypt, collecting traditional information from the doctors resident there. Sixteen years of his life were devoted to this pious work. "I never," he said, "inserted a Tradition in my collection till after I had made an ablution and offered up a prayer of two rakats." Or his return to Baghdad, whither his fame had preceded him, the doctors and jurists of that city determined to put his knowledge to a severe test. They selected one hundred Traditions, and prefixed to each a wrong isnad. These they gave by tens to ten different persons, whom they directed to attend the conference held by al Bokhari, and submit to him these Traditions, and see what judgment he would pronounce upon them. When the appointed day came, a great number of Traditionists from Khorasan proceeded with those of Baghdad to the meeting. The assembly