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Abstract
Ahmad ibn Hanbal's book al-Zuhd ('renunciation') is one of the largest extant collections of renunciant sayings from the first two Islamic centuries. It was assembled by his son 'Abd Allah, who contributed about half the sayings in it independently of his father. The extant text is only half or a third of the version available to Ibn Hajar in the Mamluk period. Some of what is missing can be recovered from quotations in Abu Nu'aym, Hilyat al-awliya'. It is notably dominated by data from Basra. Its contents are highly miscellaneous, but rejection of worldly goods appears to be the theme that comes up most often.
Renunciation (zuhd) is a major feature of early Islamic piety. Its values, especially fear of God and insistence on taking seriously the question of one's place in the Afterlife, apparently predominate in securely datable Islamic inscriptions of the seventh century ce, to the point that little else can be made out about the religion at that stage, such as the importance of law and the Prophet.1 Modern scholarly consensus has for some time agreed with medieval Islamic scholarship in locating the origins of Sufism, which flourished from the later ninth century, in the early renunciant movement. 2 Our principal sources for the history of renunciation are collections of stories and sayings from the ninth to eleventh centuries, among which the second largest is the Kitab al-Zuhd ("book of renunciation") attributed to Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855). The intention of this study is to sketch its extent and character.
As for Ahmad ibn Hanbal, modern biographies in Arabic have stressed his involvement in the Inquisition and the formation of Islamic law.3 Nimrod Hurvitz's more recent biography in English rightly stresses Ahmad's piety as one basis of the regard in which he was held and of the Hanbali school of law that formed after his death; however, it cites al-Zuhd very seldom, in line with its general neglect of Ahmad's activity as a collector of hadith.4
Two versions of al-Zuhd are in print, based on different manuscripts, both without a critical apparatus. The first appeared in Mecca in the mid-1930s with an introduction by one 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Qasim, who presumably also edited it on the basis of one Moroccan...