Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf: The Book Before the Canon

Two Riders on the Road to Sanaa

Around the year 199 AH, two young scholars from Baghdad set out on the long road to Sanaa in Yemen. One was Ahmad ibn Hanbal, future imam of the Hanbali school. The other was Yahya ibn Ma'in, soon to be the most feared narrator-critic of his generation. They were travelling to sit before one man: Abd al-Razzaq ibn Hammam al-San'ani, pupil of Ma'mar ibn Rashid — the man whom al-Dhahabi's Siyar A'lam al-Nubala' introduces as the great hafiz, the scholar of Yemen.

The book he left behind, the Musannaf, contains roughly twenty-one thousand reports in its printed edition. Its author died in 211 AH. At that moment al-Bukhari was a teenager who had not yet written a line of his Sahih, and Muslim was a small child. The Musannaf is therefore a surviving window onto the hadith corpus before the canonical collections existed.