Dating the Isnad: Schacht, Juynboll, and Motzki on the Chain of Transmission

The Chain That Hangs in the Air

Imagine one sentence that has travelled thirteen centuries. At its far end stands the Prophet Muhammad; at the near end, a scholar in ninth-century Iraq writing it into a book. Between them is a ladder of names — "so-and-so told me, from so-and-so, who heard from so-and-so." That ladder is the isnad, the chain of transmission, and the report it carries is the matn, the text. For classical Muslim scholarship the ladder is the proof: if every rung is a trustworthy man who could plausibly have met the next, the report stands.

A Western historian in 1950 looked at the same ladder and asked a colder question. What if some of the rungs were nailed on afterward — added later to make a young saying look old? That single question is the whole quarrel. On one side sits the sceptical reading of Joseph Schacht and G.H.A. Juynboll, which treats the point where many chains meet as the moment a tradition was put into circulation. On the other sits Harald Motzki, who opened one of the oldest surviving collections — the Musannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani — and argued that its contents can be dated a full century earlier than the sceptics allow.