Children Should Hear and Be Heard: Hadith Attendance Registers and the Role of Children in Medieval Hadith Transmission

Attendance registers for public readings (ṭibāq or samā‘āt) are ubiquitous in medieval hadith manuscripts; their functions have, however, received little attention and have often been misunderstood in the secondary literature. The audition register was originally developed to record the attendance of adults who had heard an unvocalized text read aloud by a master and could therefore theoretically transmit the text accurately to the following generation. By the close of fourth/tenth century the hadith corpus had been canonized and was no longer thought to require the careful preservation it once had. Although no longer needed for the preservation of hadith the paradigm of oral hadith transmission was maintained as a means of transmitting religious capital and scholarly authority. The cultivation of short chains of transmission (isnāds), which was originally prized as means of avoiding mistakes in transmission, increasingly became an end in itself and replaced preservation as the primary mark of quality in hadith transmission. The attendance register was adapted to serve this aim. Drawing on a variety of both published and manuscript sources, this paper explores this presence of infants and small children in attendance registers through the case of an obscure elderly illiterate stone mason, Abū ‘Abbas al-Ḥajjār (d. 1329), who rose to fame and fortune upon having his name discovered in an attendance register for a reading of al-Bukhārī, which took place close to a century earlier when he was a small child. As a result of his discovery in this attendance register al-Hajjar became a central link in almost all latter chains of transmission from Fez to Istanbul, to Delhi.