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Legal maxims reflect settled principles of law to which jurists appeal when confronting new legal cases. One such maxim of Islamic criminal law stipulates that judges are to avoid imposing hudūd and other sanctions when beset by doubts as to the scope of the law or the sufficiency of the evidence (idra'ū'l-hudūd bi'l-shubahāt): the "hudūd maxim." Jurists of all periods reference this maxim widely. But whereas developed juristic works attribute it to Muhammad in the form of a prophetic report (hadīth), early jurists do not. Instead, they cite the maxim as an anonymous saying of nonspecific provenance in a form unknown to hadīth collectors of the first three centuries after Islam's advent. This difference in the jurists' citations of the maxim signals a significant shift in claims to legal authority and the asserted scope of judicial discretion, as jurists debated whether and how to resolve legal and factual doubt. While political authorities exercised increasingly wide discretion over criminal matters and used it to benefit the elite, most jurists promoted an egalitarian "jurisprudence of doubt" through insisting on criminal liability for high-status offenders and heightening claims of the authoritativeness and scope of the hudūd maxim as a hadīth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to a tradition about the stoning of a pregnant woman from Juhayna said to have voluntarily confessed to adultery before the Prophet Muhammad. In my analysis I follow the internal development of the tradition and try to uncover the earliest authorities who put it into circulation. Insofar as the tradition about the woman from Juhayna refers to external narratives, I attempt to establish a relative dating of the tradition with respect to other instances of voluntary confession to adultery found in various legal corpora. In terms of methodology I follow the method of isnād and matn analysis, which, in my view, is a useful tool for tracing the development of Muslim traditions. As appropriate, isnād analysis is supported by information derived from a number of biographical dictionaries, ranging from Ibn Sa'd (d. 230/845) to Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalāī (d. 852/1449). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Musannaf of Ibn Abī Shayba provides unparalleled access into the legal thought of the "Companions of hadīth" in 2nd/8th and early 3rd/9th century Iraq. This article consists of a quantitative analysis of 3628 narrations found in the Musannaf in the books on zakāt, divorce, and hadd crimes. It demonstrates that the Prophet Muhammad was an important authority in the Musannaf, but that he appears in only 8.7% of the narrations examined. Furthermore, it shows that the "Companions of hadīth" relied upon the legal opinions of many of the same Companions and Successors whom Joseph Schacht identified as the primary authorities for the "Companions of ra'y". It also identifies a division within the "Companions of hadīth" between those who, like Ibn Abī Shayba, categorically reject the opinions of post-Successor jurists, and others who accept them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]