“I placed nothing in my compilation, the Jāmiʿ, except what is sound, and I omitted many authentic reports because they were too lengthy.”

Al-Bukhārī’s choice not to adduce al-Shāfiʿī as an authority, then, was not prompted by any consideration that would suggest weakness on al-Shāfiʿī’s part; rather, he was able to dispense with him because he already possessed isnāds higher than al-Shāfiʿī’s. The earliest teachers of al-Shāfiʿī were Mālik, al-Darāwardī, Dāwūd al-ʿAṭṭār, and Ibn ʿUyaynah. Al-Bukhārī never met al-Shāfiʿī, but he did meet men older than al-Shāfiʿī—such as ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Mūsā and Abū ʿĀṣim—who had themselves narrated from the Successors. Moreover, several transmitters related to him directly from al-Shāfiʿī’s own teachers. For that reason he deemed it unnecessary to transmit from a man who narrates from al-Shāfiʿī, who in turn narrates from Mālik.

If someone objects, “Yet al-Bukhārī transmitted a report through al-Musnadī, from Muʿāwiyah ibn ʿAmr, from al-Fazārī, from Mālik; there is no doubt al-Bukhārī heard this tradition from Mālik’s pupils, and it is found in the Muwaṭṭaʾ—does this not undermine your position?”

We reply: He never relates a report with a lower chain when he possesses it with a higher one, except for a reason he finds in that higher version. To cite a lower chain when a higher one is available, with no particular benefit and not for the sake of corroboration in disputed matters, is something that simply does not occur in the Ṣaḥīḥ.

As for the report transmitted through al-Fazārī, it contains an explanatory detail of the tradition that is missing elsewhere, and al-Fazārī strengthened it by explicitly stating that he had heard it directly.

Al-Khaṭīb then traced that report through several routes and said: “In certain narrations al-Bukhārī follows the precise wording of the report and is meticulous about it. We have examined the narrations of al-Shāfiʿī included in his own writings and have not found a single hadith that meets al-Bukhārī’s criteria in which al-Shāfiʿī provides a singular report or is unique in conveying a meaning of the type we have just described.

“The same explanation applies to Muslim’s omission of him, for Muslim perceived what al-Bukhārī had perceived in this regard.

“As for Abū Dāwūd, he recorded more than one hadith from al-Shāfiʿī in his Sunan, and al-Tirmidhī, Ibn Khuzaymah, and Ibn Abī Ḥātim did likewise.”