Abu Dawud al-Sijistani

The Sunan of Abu Dawud is arranged by legal topic, purification, prayer, marriage, sale, punishment, and it selects for what a jurist needs rather than for what a critic will certify. A letter attributed to him and addressed to the scholars of Mecca explains the principle: he gathered what people were actually arguing from, kept nothing he considered abandoned by everyone, and where a report was weak he said so rather than dropping it, so that a reader could see the whole of the material a legal position rested on and judge it.

That decision makes the book a different kind of document from a collection assembled by the strictest chain criteria. It preserves reports the sterner compilers excluded, and it preserves them labelled, which means it records not only what was transmitted but what a ninth century lawyer thought was usable. Ancient legal practice is visible in it in a way a purely critical collection cannot show. He worked in Basra, travelled the standard circuit of Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria, Egypt and Khurasan to collect, and the book was recognised early enough that it was being taught within his own lifetime.

The arrangement itself carries information. Chapters exist for the topics a jurist has to decide and not for the topics a theologian would raise, so the shape of the book is a map of what ninth century legal practice actually covered, from the details of ablution through marriage and sale to the division of spoils. Reading the table of contents is a quick way of seeing what a Muslim court in that period expected to be asked about.

The six books, of which this is one, were not chosen by any council or authority. The grouping emerged over the following centuries as scholars came to treat the same set as the standard reference collections, and even then the sixth place was disputed. Nothing about the process resembles the fixing of a scriptural canon, and the difference matters for reading the atlas correctly.

In Sunni Islam the Quran is scripture and is one text. A hadith collection is a compilation of reports, each carrying its own chain of transmitters and each open to being graded, and a report can sit inside a canonical collection and still be assessed as weak by the very scholars who use the book. The apparatus of criticism runs on the chain rather than on the content: who transmitted from whom, whether they overlapped, whether they were reliable, whether the chain is unbroken. Shia collections are different books gathered by different criteria, so the phrase the six books describes one tradition rather than Islam as a whole. Abu Dawud is a good place to see the machinery because he annotated it, and his grading notes are part of what has been transmitted alongside the reports.

The ranking inside the set is itself a piece of history. The collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim came to be treated as the two soundest, the remaining four as valuable but not of that grade, and the sixth place was contested for a long time between Ibn Majah, the Muwatta of Malik and other candidates. Different regions settled it differently before the present list became conventional, which is a reminder that a canon here is a scholarly habit that hardened rather than a decision somebody made.