INTRODUCTION

As we have seen, the study of forbidding wrong poses a problem of documentation. It is easy enough to find formal scholastic presentations of the duty; such accounts, as will appear from later chapters, are usually to be found in works on the fundamentals of the faith (usūl al-dīn) on the Sunnī side, and in handbooks of substantive law on the Shite side. At the same time it is evident from the previous chapter that it is a relatively straightforward (though considerably more time-consuming) task to collect scattered information from biographical and historical sources bearing on the practice of the duty at a variety of times and places – items of information that caught the eye of an author, and particularly incidents which in some measure made political history. None of this material is to be despised. But what cannot be reconstructed from it is a convincing picture of the day-to-day agenda of the duty in a specific historical environment.

Fortunately there is one conspicuous exception to this: the milieu in which ḥanbalism first took shape. The early ḥanbalites were people with a taste for the concrete and specific, and a dislike for the theoretical and abstract. Much early ḥanbalite literature accordingly consists of responsa (where it does not consist simply of Prophetic traditions), and the questions that these address are often presented convincingly as ones that have arisen in everyday life and are currently on people's minds. This is particularly the case with a collection of responsa bearing on the duty of forbidding wrong.