Sunan Abu Dawud

The sunan genre differs from the jami by its focus. Where a comprehensive collection like al-Bukhari's ranges across belief, history and Quranic commentary, a sunan work confines itself to the traditions from which legal rulings are derived, ordered by the chapters of jurisprudence so that a working jurist can find the evidence for a question of ablution or inheritance where he expects it.

Abu Dawud's is the model of the genre. He reported that he had gathered half a million traditions and selected about 4,800 for the book, concentrating on reports that jurists had actually used, and he took a deliberately inclusive line at the margin: a tradition with a recognised weakness might still be recorded if nothing stronger existed on the point, because, as he explained, a weak tradition of the Prophet was dearer to him on a question of practice than the unsupported opinion of men. What keeps this from being laxity is his transparency. Throughout the book he appends brief verdicts, noting that a chain is broken, a transmitter contested or a wording anomalous, and where he is silent, he says in his letter to the Meccans, the tradition is at least serviceable. That letter, a short methodological treatise in its own right, survives and is studied as one of the earliest author's statements of editorial standards in the hadith literature.

Abu Dawud Sulayman ibn al-Ashath was born in 817 CE in Sijistan, the region straddling present-day eastern Iran and Afghanistan, and made the scholar's circuit of his age: Khurasan, Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and Egypt, hearing traditions from the generation of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, with whom he studied and whose respect for him the biographers record. He settled finally in Basra, tradition says at the request of the governor, who wanted the city, ruined by the Zanj rebellion, rebuilt around a great teacher. He died there in 889 CE. His Sunan won its standing quickly. Jurists of every school found the book indispensable precisely because it was organised for their work and honest about its materials, and within a few generations it was being named with the two Sahihs among the collections a scholar must master.

Commentaries accumulated around it, from al-Khattabi's Maalim al-Sunan in the tenth century, often counted the first true hadith commentary, to the vast modern Awn al-Mabud. When the six books hardened into a canon in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sunan Abu Dawud's place in the four Sunan beside al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa'i and Ibn Majah was never in doubt, and the traditions it preserves remain load-bearing across Islamic law, from the details of prayer to the ethics of rulers.