Este artículo aplica la crítica del isnad y el matn a las tradiciones relacionadas con el castigo del adúltero confeso en el Islam. Ante todo, intenta seguir la pista de las tradiciones relevantes hasta su fuente más temprana que es, en opinión del autor, Ibn ¿hihab al-Zuhri. A continuación, el artículo trata de averiguar los posibles contenidos de esta primera versión, que aparentemente carecía de referencias al nombre personal del adúltero o de alguna comprobación en cuanto a su estado mental (...) e ihsan. Se examina el papel de ¿Abd al-Razzaq al-San¿ani en la elaboración del matn y se analizan en detalle algunas versiones posteriores, tanto regionales como personales, del hadit original. En su parte final, el artículo estudia el requisito de la necesidad de una confesión cuádruple por parte del adúltero. El autor aporta fuentes que dan fe de una controversia entre ¿Abd al-Razzaq y Abu Dawud al-Tayalisi sobre el número de confesiones necesarias para la imposición de raym. (shrink)

During the past century of oriental studies, the question of when and where Muslim traditions came to be propped up with validating lines of transmission has attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention, for its bearing on the key issue of the historicity of ḥadīth. In this essay, I review the existing theories about the origin of the isnād, which alternate between the lifetime of the Prophet’s Companions and the end of the second century AH/c. 816 CE. Based on a (...) hitherto largely overlooked tradition and two general methodological premises, I associate the inception of corroborative attribution to past authorities in legal and theological ḥadīth with the aftermath of al-Mukhtār b. Abī ʿUbayd al-Thaqafī’s revolt in Kūfa. Over the course of the second/eighth century, the isnād institution spread out across the major centers of learning in the caliphate and entered the field of historical reports. Such geographical and typological unevenness of the isnād’s evolution gave rise to conflicting theories about its chronology. (shrink)

ʿAbd al-Bāqī b. Qāniʿ was a traditionist and evaluator of transmitters, one of the founders of the genre of biographical dictionaries devoted to the Com- panions of the Prophet. Ibn Qāniʿ has not attracted much attention from scholars— only Khalīl Qūtlāy has authored a doctoral dissertation, now published in fifteen volumes, that comprises Ibn Qāniʿ’s Muʿjam al-ṣaḥāba. In this essay I argue that Ibn Qāniʿ and his contemporaries relied on the chains of hadith transmission to extract the names of many (...) Companions. My research also shows that in the eighth/ fourteenth century at least two presently lost biographical collections associated with Ibn Qāniʿ were in circulation: Kitāb al-Wafayāt, a catalogue of death dates of hadith transmitters, and Kitāb al-Tārīkh, an annalistic collection, which included many assessments of transmitter reliability. Ibn Qāniʿ’s unsophisticated methods of hadith criticism, although in line with third/ninth- and early fourth/tenth-century scholarly developments, incurred him some criticism from later hadith scholars. (shrink)