In Part 1, we saw why the story of a pitched “war” between ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth remains attractive: it gives us a clean origin story for uṣūl al-fiqh and a heroic role for al-Shāfiʿī. In Part 2, we complicated that polarity by revisiting Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855). Even the archetypal traditionist reasons by extending Prophetic precedent to new cases—often by a practical, text-anchored analogy.
This installment turns to Christopher Melchert’s influential article, “Traditionist-Jurisprudents and the Framing of Islamic Law.” Melchert offers a subtler alternative to Hallaq. Rather than a decisive “Great Synthesis,” he describes a gradual convergence: ahl al-raʾy becomes more ḥadīth-grounded; ahl al-ḥadīth becomes more juristically sophisticated. That’s an advance.
But even here, I think we can push further: Melchert still overstates how far apart the two camps were at the outset. When we read the legal and doctrinal evidence closely, the differences look less like opposites and more like degrees—and sometimes differences of genre, audience, and scholarly performance rather than method.
A major strength of Melchert’s account is his conceptual move: he treats ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-ḥadīth as ideal types, not tightly bounded guilds. That matters, because early juristic life was not organized by enforceable party membership. Scholars studied with many teachers, moved across regions, and argued strategically depending on setting.
Melchert is also right to observe that contemporaries sometimes speak as if there were two recognizable tendencies. He cites figures like Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and later authors who frame juridical disagreement as a struggle over method. The key question is not whether the labels existed, but what they actually capture about legal practice.
Melchert’s first major marker of divergence is that early Ḥanafī works (especially “internal” didactic texts) often cite the opinions of Abū Ḥanīfa and his circle without regularly supplying Prophetic reports.
But this can be explained without positing a stark methodological divide.
If a work is internal, didactic, and school-forming, its function is to transmit doctrine, not to litigate every proof-text. Students learning a school’s positions do not require a courtroom-style evidentiary apparatus on every line. A doctrinal primer is not a polemical disputation.
You highlight something crucial: Ḥanafīs often insisted that acceptable ḥadīth—especially in matters of broad communal need—must be widespread and known among jurists. If so, constantly quoting such reports can be redundant. The legal point is not “we have no ḥadīth,” but “the proof is already public and embedded in juristic knowledge.”
So the contrast “they rarely cite ḥadīth” can exaggerate what is often a contrast in presentation, not necessarily in underlying legal reasoning.
A second marker of divergence, for Melchert, is that early Ḥanafī citations sometimes include incomplete isnāds, while traditionist jurists tend to cite full chains.
But as you point out, even traditionists do not always cite full chains in every context. The formality of isnād presentation shifts with compilation type, audience, and purpose. If Aḥmad can relate ḥadīth casually without isnād in one setting and with full isnād in another, then the same variability among Ḥanafīs cannot by itself demonstrate a categorical divide.
You also note something especially telling: Ḥanafī jurists like al-Shaybānī can and do criticize a report precisely because it is mursal or not properly ascribed—showing that continuity of transmission mattered to them, and that they were capable of full isnād practice when the stakes required it.
In other words: this looks like a difference of degree, and sometimes a difference of circumstance, not a difference of kind.
Melchert’s third difference is the strongest: he argues that early Ḥanafīs do not perform ḥadīth criticism in the traditionist sense (chain comparison to evaluate consistency in transmission), even if they use critical vocabulary like thiqa.
Your counterexample is decisive: al-Shaybānī’s discussion of conflicting tashahhud reports shows him comparing transmissions from the same authority, identifying error (awham), and privileging the corroborated transmission. That is functionally very close to the basic practice Melchert associates with the traditionists.
So if early Ḥanafīs can do isnād comparison when resolving contradictions, the claim that they lack criticism “like the ahl al-ḥadīth” becomes too blunt. Again: proximity appears earlier than the convergence story suggests.
Melchert also describes an ahl al-ḥadīth tendency to let contradictions stand rather than resolve them by preference—especially when harmonization is not available within transmitted materials. This is plausible as a disposition: caution toward speculative resolution.
But here too, evidence from Aḥmad complicates the picture. Your example from ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad’s questions—where Aḥmad proposes interpreting general/specific Qurʾānic texts through the Sunna and then selecting what “has parallels” (ashbah) in prophetic material—shows that Aḥmad did not merely suspend judgment. He offers a method.
That method presupposes:
Those are not the tools of someone simply refusing to define the law. They are the tools of an early jurist practicing proto-legal theory.
Melchert improved the conversation by trading Hallaq’s dramatic dialectic for a spectrum and a slow convergence. But if the starting point is already closer than he assumes, then “convergence” is less a dramatic process of two alien methods becoming one—and more a story of shared juristic habits taking different emphases, then becoming more formalized and self-conscious over time.
Which raises the larger question: if they were already proximate, what exactly changed in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries? What converged—and what never did?
That’s the focus of Part 4.
In Part 4, we zoom out and state the thesis directly: the early divide was real but not binary. We then show that even after “convergence,” some Ḥanafī criteria for evaluating ḥadīth—especially internal indicators (al-inqiṭāʿ al-bāṭin), taʿummu bihi al-balwā, and non-contradiction with general legal precepts—remain major points of tension with traditionist approaches. The end result is not a “Great Synthesis,” but an enduring pluralism with overlapping methods.
