Abū Yūsuf’s Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Formative Period of the Ḥanafī School

In this essay, I address the longstanding debate on attributing legal texts to formative-period authors by focusing on the transmission of one early text: Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā, attributed to Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798), and its reception by one early jurist: Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933). I argue that al-Ṭaḥāwī’s written work attests to the existence of multiple independent transmissions of Abū Yūsuf’s text and that these transmissions confirm the attribution of the text to Abū Yūsuf. I then reflect on the formative-period written materials consulted by al-Ṭaḥāwī and his contemporaries, arguing that their access to material from a period in which oral transmission was predominant gave them a unique standing in the eyes of classical-era jurists. Finally, I reflect on the role of digests (mukhtaṣars), particularly those of al-Ṭaḥāwī and al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037), in sealing the movement from orality in the formative period to fixed written texts in the classical period.