Introduction

This chapter centres on Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī's (d. 124/742) statement, ‘We were averse to writing down knowledge until these rulers forced us to (accept) it, and therefore we thought it best not to forbid it to any Muslim.’ I argue that the tradition comprises two conceptual layers, bearing on specific historical settings from the late Umayyad and the early ʿAbbāsid periods. The oldest layer, which I designate ‘the scriptural concern’, originally included the phrase ‘We were averse to kitāb (scripture)’ as a negative response to the redaction of the Qurʾān carried out in the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (r. 65–86/685–705). The nub of the more recent ‘equalitarian concern’ at the matn's end is the struggle of the non-Arab Muslims (mawālī) in the second half of the second century AH (767–816 CE) for an equal right with the Arabs to acquire knowledge of Tradition.

In a short but instructive report (hereinafter, ‘the coercion tradition’), the renowned hadith collector Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) declares:

In modern scholarship, al-Zuhrī's words have been conventionally interpreted as expressing his discontent with an Umayyad initiative to record Tradition (kitāb al-ʿilm). In a study of the coercion tradition by means of isnād-cum-matn analysis, I developed the argument that, either partly or in full, it goes back to the first half of the second century AH (718–68 CE), and that clause 1 originally read, kunnā nakrahu al-kitāb (‘we were averse to kitāb’). Insofar as the word kitāb connotes ‘holy writ’, I suspected that in its earliest form the clause implied a ‘scriptural concern’ that later transmitters glossed over in three different ways. Most of them substituted for the word kitāb the iḍāfah-compound kitāb al-ʿilm (‘writing down knowledge’); a few transformed the same word into the semantically straightforward kitābah (‘writing’) or replaced it with the obfuscating accusative pronouns -hu and -hā; that is, nakrahuhu/hā (‘we were averse to it’).