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116

SPRENGER'S SOURCES

system. But the prejudice against them lasted so long that, even before the end of the second century, we meet with aspersions cast on authors who made use of manuscripts wanting the stamp of oral tradition. With just severity Sprenger comments on the childish pedantry which for two whole centuries clung by the absurd. paradox that memory was a more trustworthy authority than the pen. Yet this much excuse may be urged, that without an oral attestation at each step in the tradition, there would have been absolutely no guarantee whatever against forgery and interpolation. 

Even when books came into vogue, the collection of a Master was freely subject to alteration at the hands of his pupil, who, performing as it were the functions of an editor, selected or omitted passages at pleasure, and even added (but always with his name) new matter of his own, and sometimes collections of fresh traditions from other sources. The work, notwithstanding these alterations, was still known under the Master's name. It is thus that we find different versions of such compilations, as that of Bokhâri, to vary both in the number of the traditions and in the subject-matter. It is also sometimes not easy to trace the original work from which quotations are made. Tabari; for example, who composed his annals almost entirely of extracts copied verbatim from previous collections, makes little mention of the Author from whom he borrows: it is the name of some obscure Sheikh under whom he read the work which, under the pedantic rules of tradition, figures as his authority; the name of the real author (Ibn Ishâc, for instance) occurring in the middle of the long string of vouchers, as a mere link in the transmission. When he had read a collection under more than one Sheikh, he makes a parade of his learning by quoting now under the name of one, and now of another. And to carry the system to the extreme of absurdity, where he had read only part of a work with a Master, he quotes the part he had not so read under the fiction of a letter from his Sheikh; letters being admissible as evidence, but not a manuscript or book!

Towards the end of the second century, a crowd of systematic Collectors of tradition sprang up with the view of fixing the Sunnie 

           

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