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A Hadith Collection and a Legal Method, Two Centuries Apart

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A Hadith Collection and a Legal Method, Two Centuries Apart

Ibadi Islam's own account of how its scholarship formed runs through three names in sequence. Jabir ibn Zayd, the school's founding figure, was active in Basra in the seventh century. His student Abu Ubayda Muslim ibn Abi Karima carried the teaching forward after him, and Abu Ubayda's own student, al-Rabi ibn Habib al-Farahidi, produced the eighth century compilation that became the Musnad bearing his name, the hadith collection still used by Ibadi communities in Oman and North Africa today. That line settled which prophetic reports the school would treat as authoritative, and it did so early, within roughly two generations of Jabir ibn Zayd himself.

What that line did not yet do was build a developed legal method out of those reports. That came about two centuries later, in Oman, from a different kind of scholar working a different kind of problem, not what the Prophet's companions had said, which was already settled, but how a jurist should reason from what they had said to a ruling on a new question. Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Baraka al-Bahlawi, an Omani jurist who died in the late tenth century, wrote the book that did this, Kitab al-Jami', alongside a contemporary, al-Kudami, whose own al-Mu'tabar covered similar ground. Ibn Baraka's contribution was to make prophetic tradition itself the stated foundation of both jurisprudence and scriptural interpretation together, giving Omani Ibadi law a systematic method rather than only a settled source. The hadith and the method arrived two centuries apart, from two different kinds of scholarship doing two different jobs.

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Sources
Tracing the History of Ibadi Law and Jurisprudence: A State of Art (Islamic Law Blog)
Ersilia Francesca, Islamic Law Blog, Program in Islamic Law, Harvard Law School, 2020View the Source
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