Abstract
According to the view current among Western scholars of Islam, the number of reliable legal traditions going back to Ibn Shihab az-Zuhri is very small. This view has been challenged in this article. A source-critical study of the early sources now available shows that the number of texts that can be attributed to al-Zuhri is much larger than usually thought. On the basis of the numerous legal texts that al-Zuhi's students transmitted in their compilations, a detailed picture of his jurisprudence can be drawn. But what is more, the state of development which Islamic jurisprudence had reached in the first quarter of the second century A.H. can be reconstructed, and partly even the preliminary stages of the first century
