Sufy ā n al-Thawr ī and the Kufans

Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 161/777?) was a major Kufan jurisprudent with a later reputation for special hostility to Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) and his school and for upholding hadith against ra‌ʾy . However, the record of his hadith transmission as preserved in third/ ninth-century collections shows that he mainly collected and disseminated hadith in Kufa. The record of his agreements and disagreements in law as preserved in Muḥammad b. Naṣr al-Marwazī (d. 295/907–8?), Ikhtilāf‌ al- fuqahāʾ , Ibn al-Mundhir (d. 318/930–1?), al- Ishrāf , and al-Jaṣṣāṣ al- R āzī (d. 370/981), Mukhtaṣar Ikhtilāf‌ al -ʿulamāʾ , shows preponderant agreement with the Ḥanafiyya and a lower degree of agreement with, among others, al-Awzāʿī and al-Shāfiʿī. The biographical dictionaries record few traces of a personal school of law after him. Doubts have been raised, but in the end he is to be counted an adherent of the Kufan regional school of law.


Introduction
Abū ʿAbdallāh Sufyān b. Saʿīd b. Masrūq al-Thawrī, the Kufan traditionist, jurisprudent, and renunciant, was born in the year 97/715-6 and collected hadith in Kufa, Basra, the Hijaz, Syria, and Mesopotamia (al-Jazīra). He left Kufa for good in 154/770-1 or 775/771-2 and died in Basra in 161/777, 161/778, published sources in the mid-1960s; for example, surviving fragments of al-Ṭabarī's survey of disagreements among jurisprudents (ikhtilāf) were available but not those of Muḥammad b. Naṣr al-Marwazī and Ibn al-Mundhir, likewise the Muṣannafs of ʿAbd al-Razzāq and Ibn Abī Shayba. He was also insufficiently critical of his sources. Joseph van Ess has observed his failure to sift through the many contradictory, idealizing accounts of al-Thawrī's theological position.10 It is my own thesis that the image of al-Thawrī as a precursor to al-Shāfiʿī, mainly as a great combiner of hadith and ra ʾy (rational speculation) largely independent of any local tradition, opposed to Abū Ḥanīfa as an adherent of ra ʾy, was worked up over the course of the third/ninth century. Although he recognizes al-Thawrī's connection to the Kufan school, I would say that Raddatz was overly influenced by this third/ninth-century image.
In Arabic, a similar monograph appeared in the early 1970s by the Syrian scholar Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh Abū l-Fatḥ al-Bayānūnī, who had recently got his doctorate at al-Azhar. Like Raddatz, al-Bayānūnī stresses al-Thawrī's independence and asserts that he combined the "schools" of ra ʾy and hadith.11 Almost twenty years later, Muḥammad Rawwās Qalʿah'jī collected al-Thawrī's juridical opinions from various sources and arranged them alphabetically by subject. In his introduction, he accepts reports that Abū Ḥanīfa admired al-Thawrī and characterizes both of them as following the tradition of the Companion ʿAbdallāh b. . It was the "school" (madrasa) of ra ʾy, whose other adherents were the earlier Kufans Ibn Shubruma (d. 144/761-2) and Ibn Abī .12 In somewhat the same line, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Duqr shortly thereafter reviewed examples of particular positions in his own monograph. He points out examples of agreement with Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. Baghdad,241/855),d. Baghdad,270/884),264/878?), and al-Awzāʿī (d. Beirut, 157/773-4?) but most often with Abū Ḥanīfa, concluding that al-Thawrī's jurisprudence mostly inclined toward the Kufan.13 The present article agrees with this evident trend of Arabophone scholarship, distinguished from it mainly by treating the biographical literature more sceptically and the literature of hadith and law more systematically.
Gérard Lecomte offered sensible observations concerning al-Thawrī's Koran commentary but nothing new on his jurisprudence.14 The most active student 10 Van Ess,TheologyandSociety,I,255. 11 Bayānūnī, al-ImāmSufyānal-Thawrī, 96; a closer survey of al-Thawrī's legal opinions at 99-103. 12 Qalʿah′jī,Mawsūʿa,[54][55][56] Duqr, al-ImāmSufyānal-Thawrī, 85-88. 14 Lecomte, Sufyān al-Tawrī. of al-Thawrī in English has been Steven C. Judd. In one study, Judd interprets stories of how al-Awzāʿī and al-Thawrī interacted with the new Abbasid dynasty as reflecting the polemical interests of the rival Awzāʿi and Thawri schools of law that formed in the third/ninth century. There were no methodological issues to argue over, such as the relative priority of hadith and analogy, so they stressed character, especially principled defiance of the Abbasids.15 He is not much concerned here with al-Thawrī's relation to the Kufan tradition.
In another article, Judd does treat al-Thawrī's relation to the Kufan tradition, asking whether al-Awzāʿī and al-Thawrī together represented a super-regional Umayyad school.16 His stress here is first on their prominence together in part of al-Ṭabarī, Ikhtilāfal-fuqahāʾ, secondly intersections in lists of studentsmore on this to come. In Religious Scholars and the Umayyads, finally, Judd treats al-Thawrī as one of five leading jurisprudents of the later Umayyad period. He says here that although three-quarters of Sufyān's hadith reports are from Kufan shaykhs, the sources include more anecdotal information about his time in Basra, Mecca, and Yemen. The relative silence of the sources suggests that Sufyān spent little time in Kufa after he reached adulthood, as Raddatz implied.17 I tend to assign the prevalence of anecdotes about Basra, Mecca, and Yemen mainly to the third/ninth-century reconstruction of al-Thawrī's image, since my surveys of hadith transmission to and from al-Thawrī and of his juridical agreements and disagreements with other jurisprudents both connect him mainly with the Kufan tradition.
Hüseyin Uçan has recently collected interesting data from the biographical literature about wide learning, piety, orthodoxy, and other criteria by which traditionist-jurisprudents enjoyed more or less prestige, using al-Thawrī and Sufyān b. ʿUyayna (Kufan,transferred to Mecca,d. 198/814) as examples of two who enjoyed a great deal. His lists of al-Thawrī's main teachers and students confirm an association especially with Kufa, but their source is apparently not new work to determine where he was active, rather the standard lists of 15 Judd teachers and students in the biographies.18 Uçan is not centrally concerned, anyway, with either geography or change over time.

The Image of al-Thawrī
The idea of Sufyān al-Thawrī as the great adversary of his Kufan contemporary Abū Ḥanīfa seems to have developed over time. In the early third/ninth century, ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī (Basran, d. 234/849) simply placed him in the middle of the Kufan tradition: The disciples of ʿAbdallāh (meaning Ibn Masʿūd) were six who recited the Koran and gave legal opinions. After them were four and after them Sufyān al-Thawrī, who followed their doctrine (madhhab) and gave the same opinions as theirs.19 It will be remembered that al- Al-Thawrī himself is quoted as calling Abū Ḥanīfa one who both has strayed and leads astray.30 He joins numerous others in reporting that Abū Ḥanīfa was twice asked to repent of unbelief.31 To the contrary, although the earliest extant Ḥanafi biographical dictionary does not number al-Thawrī among Abū Ḥanīfa's disciples (they were near contemporaries, after all), it does relate that al-Thawrī would come secretly to Abū Ḥanīfa's circle to learn from him. When they made the pilgrimage together, it says, al-Thawrī always walked behind and let Abū Ḥanīfa answer questions first.32 Another early Ḥanafi biographical dictionary reports that when al-Thawrī was shown the books of Abū Ḥanīfa (the next story names someone he asked to procure them for him), he would say, "This is my position," whereas if he was asked to explain any such position, he would be unable.33

Sufyān al-Thawrī's Identification with Kufa: The Evidence of Hadith
The biographical dictionaries all identify al-Thawrī as a Kufan. One measure of al-Thawrī's involvement with the traditions of different regions may be the list of those from and to whom he related hadith. The graph below (Figures 1A and 1B) shows the classifications of shaykhs and disciples in one biographical dictionary and three collections of hadith.
"Mizzi" refers to the lists in Tahdhīb al-Kamāl of those in the Six Books from and to whom Sufyān al-Thawrī related hadith.34 "Ahmad" refers to samples of over 250 hadith reports appearing in the Musnad, while "Ibn Majah" and "Tirmidhi" refer to all the hadith with al-Thawrī in the isnād in the Sunan of Ibn Mājah (over 200) and the Jāmiʿ of al-Tirmidhī (over 300). The four are fairly similar when it comes to Sufyān al-Thawrī's shaykhs. Al-Mizzī differs most widely from the other three when it comes to the names of those who transmitted hadith from al-Thawrī. With Aḥmad, Ibn Mājah, and al-Tirmidhī, the "other" category is swollen mainly by the importance of one Yemeni collector, ʿAbd al-Razzāq (d. 211/827). All three document the irrelevance of Medinese hadith collectors after the end of the second/eighth century: al-Thawrī was valued by later Iraqi collectors primarily for continuing the tradition of Kufan hadith transmission but secondarily for bringing hadith out of Medina, whereas the  Hijazis of the generation after Mālik (unlike ʿAbd al-Razzāq) were evidently uninterested in whatever al-Thawrī brought from Iraq.35 It might be added here that G.H.A. Juynboll attributes the formulation of fifty-four hadith reports in the Six Books (that is, their mutūn) to al-Thawrī. By contrast, he attributes to al-Aʿmash (Kufan, d. 148/765?) 153 original formulations, to Sufyān b. ʿUyayna 175, to Shuʿba 316, and to Mālik 373.36 Insofar as we accept Juynboll's method of attributing successful hadith texts, it appears that either al-Thawrī relied more heavily than these others on existing texts to support his opinions (or indeed presumed less to advocate novel positions) or his name commonly appears in our third/ninth-century collections of Prophetic hadith by retrospective generations of parallel chains of transmission -"the spread of isnāds." (The extant sections of al-Ṭabarī, Ikhtilāfal-fuqahāʾ, suggest that he more often cited hadith from Companions and Followers in support of his opinions than from the Prophet.37) He was notorious for transmission by paraphrase (al-riwāya bi-l-maʿnā) and disguising his authorities (tadlīs), both of which might simply reflect the looser norms of hadith transmission that prevailed in the mid-second/eighth-century.38 But they might equally reflect later, unsystematic back projection in aid of strengthening hadith from these other heroes of Kufa, Basra, and Medina and of building up al-Thawrī's reputation for hadith-based jurisprudence. 35 The relatively inward-looking hadith tradition of Medina is provisionally documented by Melchert, Centre and Periphery, 57-59. The collapse of hadith scholarship in Medina after the mid-second/eighth century is observed by Lucas,Constructive Critics,354. 36 Juynboll,Encyclopedia,[628][629][630][631][632][633][634][635][636][637][638][639][640][641][642][643] Ṭabarī, Ikhtilāf al-fuqahāʾ. On this basis, Raddatz, Sufyān al-Thawrī, says, "Al-Thawrī's views and methods coalesce into an independent complex of legal and religious statements, frequently based on Companion or Successor and -more rarely -Prophetic tradition." 38 As for paraphrase, he is quoted as saying, "If I tell you I am relating hadith to you as I have heard, I am lying": Aḥmad, ʿIlal, I, 550 = Jāmiʿ, I, 201; Tirmidhī, Jāmiʿ, VI,. Asked to relate hadith as he had heard, he reportedly said, "No, by God -there is no way to do so. It is only meanings": Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilya, VI, 370; similarly, Rāmahurmuzī, Muḥaddith, 535. Another quotation suggests that paraphrase was usual among his teachers before him: "I record a hadith report in seven versions (min sabʿat awjuh) but the meaning is one": Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilya, VII, 72. As for tadlīs, see for example a list of big names from al-Nasāʾī apud Ibn Abī Ḥātim, Jarḥ, IV, 225, Sulamī, Suʾālāt, 365-366, and Dhahabī, Mīzān, II, 169. Cf. Scott C. Lucas's discussion of al-Thawrī's recorded comments on hadith, concluding that formal criticism of transmitters (al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl) began in the generation after him: Constructive Critics, 140-143.

Sufyān al-Thawrī's Agreements and Disagreements with Other Jurisprudents
Hans-Peter Raddatz stressed al-Thawrī's closeness to certain jurisprudents outside Kufa, saying that Sufyān "repeatedly met with al-Awzāʿī and their common disciple Abū Isḥāḳ al-Fazārī (186/801), who later transmitted a selection of their legal statements in al-Ṭabarī's Ik̲ h̲ tilāf al-fuḳahāʾ."39 This is true but seems to concern only an account by al-  Islamic law and cites how leading jurisprudents had classified this or that work in roughly chronological order, which often means that Sufyān al-Thawrī comes first. Al-Marwazī's term aṣḥābal-ra ʾy clearly refers to Abū Ḥanīfa and his two leading disciples, Abū Yūsuf and Muḥammad al-Shaybānī. For example, shaykh aṣḥābal-ra ʾy is sometimes contrasted with his ṣāḥibayn (169-70, 219, 292) or with Yaʿqūb (i.e. Abū Yūsuf; 547-8). Sometimes they agree; for example, of a woman separated from her husband because he has turned out to be impotent, "Sufyān and aṣḥābal-ra ʾy said that she gets the whole bride price and must observe a waiting period. Al-Shāfiʿī said she gets half the bride price and need not observe a waiting period" (234). Sometimes they disagree; for example, Sufyān said, "If a mukātab (a slave with a contract of manumission by self-purchase) has rendered half or a third (of his value), I find it preferable that he not be returned (to slavery) on account of what he has produced. But there are some who say that if he is unable (to pay), he is returned." Mālik, aṣḥābal-ra ʾy, al-Shāfiʿī, Aḥmad, and others of our fellows have said that he is a slave so long as he is obliged (to pay) a dirham. When he is unable (to pay), he is returned to slavery (499-500).
We cannot test the assertion of Ṣāliḥ b. Mihrān (Isfahani cl., d. 210s/826-35), "The Jāmiʿ of Sufyān over which the people have fought with one another does not disagree with Abū Ḥanīfa save concerning fifteen questions."45 However, this graph of agreements and disagreements does make it impossible to assert that Sufyān systematically opposed Abū Ḥanīfa. It also makes it difficult to maintain that al-Thawrī and al-Awzāʿī together represented a super-regional school. It makes it easy to see why al-Shāfiʿī should not have singled out al-Thawrī as a Kufan with better ideas than al-Shaybānī and the other followers of Abū Ḥanīfa. A fifth/eleventh-century source quotes al-Shāfiʿī as saying, "Don't you wonder at Sufyān al-Thawrī? He relates hadith from the trustworthy, Generally, Ibn al-Mundhir is less useful to the present purpose than al-Marwazī, partly because of his orientation toward determining correct rules rather than documenting disagreement. He notably stresses agreement over disagreement, is more forward with his own opinions, and less systematically reviews the opinions of those jurisprudents he does name. For example, al-Thawrī permitted the purchase of grapes and grape juice from a maker of wine along with al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, while Aḥmad and Isḥāq (Ibn Rāhawayh) disapproved. We hear that ʿAṭāʾ (Ibn Abī Rabāḥ, Meccan, d. 114/732-3?) was quoted both ways. We do not hear what aṣḥāb al-ra ʾy, Mālik, and al-Shāfiʿī said.47 He also mentions al-Thawrī somewhat less often -about a quarter of the time, according to the index to a recent edition. In consequence, my sounding of Ibn al-Mundhir is not based on a random sample, rather on choosing every seventh item in the index under Sufyān al-Thawrī, making a total sample 46 Khalīlī,Irshād,137. 47 Ibn al-Mundhir, Ishrāf, VI, 138. Given Ibn al-Mundhir's special emphasis on agreement, preponderant agreement with all three others comes as no surprise. The graph does show that the greatest preponderance of agreement is with Abū Ḥanīfa. Ibn Abī Laylā, by the way, comes up too seldom for even equally meaningful comparisons. For what it is worth, however, Ibn al-Mundhir records ten instances of agreement and ten of disagreement between Ibn Abī Laylā and al-Thawrī. This tends against any supposition that al-Thawrī adhered to a Kufan faction led by Ibn Abī Laylā and Ibn Shubruma opposed to Abū Ḥanīfa and his disciples.
Yet a third survey of agreement and disagreement is al-Jaṣṣāṣ al-Rāzī (d. 370/ 981), MukhtaṣarIkhtilāfal-ʿulamāʾ, apparently an abridgement of a work by Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933). The following graph (Figure 4) is based on a random sample of 300 questions (on a majority of which al-Ṭaḥāwī reports no opinion from al-Thawrī): 48 The edition and its index are both flawed, but presumably not systematically such as to interfere with my purpose here. The index every now and then cites an item number where al-Thawrī's opinion does not appear; e.g., 3376, 3799. Although they are covered in the index, item numbers 3775-825 are missing at Ishrāf, VI, 203.
(d. 168/785), and the Medinese Mālik b. Anas.59 He looks less like an adherent of a Thawri school of law than an eclectic collector of hadith, at a time when the caliphs were shifting from recruiting qadis in Medina to recruiting them in Kufa.60 I would add Muḥammad b. Masrūq, qadi for Egypt from 177/793 to 184/800-1. Al-Kindī (d. 350/961?) does not connect him with any school, but he appears in the Ḥanafi biographical dictionary of Ibn Abī l-Wafāʾ (d. 775/1373). According to Ibn Ḥajar, he learnt jurisprudence from (tafaqqaha bi-) both Abū Ḥanīfa and al-Thawrī, making him another example of ambiguity as loyalties shifted from regions to persons.61 Another is the famous Baghdadi renunciant Bishr al-Ḥāfī (d. 227/841), described by Ibn Ḥibbān (d. 354/965) as "Thawrī of madhhab as to both jurisprudence and scrupulosity ( fīl-fiqh wa-l-waraʿjamīʿan)".62 With Ḥamdūn al-Qaṣṣār, his example suggests that al-Thawrī's reputation for renunciant piety (he is the most-quoted source of renunciant sayings and stories in Ibn al-Mubārak, al-Zuhd, and the subject of a long chapter in Abū Nuʿaym [d. 430/1038], Ḥilyatal-awliyāʾ) made him an attractive predecessor for later renunciants to claim.63 Another example is apparently the Nishapuran al-Julūdī (d. 368/979), described as a Sufi and disciple to the disciples of Abū Ḥafṣ al-Naysābūrī (chief of the Malāmatiyya in his time) as well as an unreliable transmitter of Muslim's Ṣaḥīḥ.64 Al-Thawrī comes up a number of times in reviews of African jurisprudents, apparently once again reflecting eclecticism, not identification with any school of his. ʿAlī b.  was the first to introduce the Muwaṭṭa ʾ of Mālik and the Jāmiʿ of Sufyān al-Thawrī to Africa.65 Al-Buhlūl b. Rāshid (d. 183/799-800?) mainly followed the doctrine of Mālik but wrote down 10,000 problems from Abū Ḥanīfa in his Studienreisen and often 59 Raddatz,Stellung,109,citing Ibn Ḥajar,Lisān,IV,20,but cf. Dhahabī,Siyar,IX,517,and idem,  Of those in this second list, al-Muʿāfā b. ʿImrān is exceptional in being a prominent traditionist but not mentioned by al-Mizzī among those who related hadith in the Six Books from al-Thawrī. The large proportion of Yemenis among transmitters of al-Jāmiʿal-kabīr agrees with the prominence of Yemeni shaykhs in al-Mizzī's list as a whole. There is little evidence here of a special following in Kufa as the local opposition to the Ḥanafiyya. The most one might say is that al-Ḥusayn b. Ḥafṣ presumably brought to Isfahan the materials out of which grew the Thawri school of law there, which al-Maqdisī says was formerly prevalent.

Conclusion
To sum up, across the third/ninth century Sufyān al-Thawrī acquired the reputation of resolutely advocating hadith against ra ʾy and opposing Abū Ḥanīfa. Stories of his travels outside Kufa have led some modern scholars to see him as an advocate of a super-regional school, distinguished from the nascent Ḥanafi school particularly in its hostility to the Abbasid dynasty. However, the record of his hadith transmission, both where he collected hadith preserved in the great third/ninth-century collections and where those hadith reports were transmitted from him, strongly connects him with Kufa. Surveys of juridical agreements and disagreements from Muḥammad b. Naṣr al-Marwazī, Ibn al-Mundhir, and al-Ṭaḥāwī as preserved by al-Jaṣṣāṣ al-Rāzī all present al-Thawrī separately from Abū Ḥanīfa and his disciples. Al-Marwazī and al-Ṭaḥāwī both make him out to have usually disagreed with al-Awzāʿī, Ibn al-Mundhir (less significantly) to have agreed. Al-Marwazī makes out that he usually disagreed with al-Shāfiʿī but Ibn al-Mundhir and al-Ṭaḥāwī that he usually agreed. Al-Marwazī, Ibn al-Mundhir, and al-Ṭaḥāwī all make out that al-Thawrī most often agreed with Abū Ḥanīfa and by much the widest margin. (Moreover, as observed, the documented incidence of al-Thawrī's disagreement with Abū Ḥanīfa is comparable to the incidence of Abū Yūsuf's.) There are scattered references to a Thawri school of law in the two centuries after him, but it was evidently weak, never characterized by the writing of epitomes, commentaries, or biographical dictionaries such as characterized the four enduring Sunni schools of law (also the Ẓāhiri school, which endured in books but died out in the fifth/eleventh century as a series of teachers and students). In all, al-Thawrī is to be characterized as an adherent of the second/ eighth-century Kufan school of law. Like other adherents of a regional school, he sometimes advocated ideas of his own against the majority but more often opposed the adherents of the other regional schools. His juridical positions are closer to those of the later Ḥanafi school than to those of any other.