Tabari's history on occasion reaches back to one 'Ali, "Ibn al-Madini". That means his ancestry was of the Madinas: Ctesiphon and Seleucia. The Mada'in would lose its status to Kufa and then to Baghdad.
As of 2022 we now have a critical study. Our 'Ali is considered a coward and/or a crook in Salafi circles, starting from Ibn Hanbal's time. Everybody else has tried to give him a fair shake.
'Ali lived in the wrong time, AH 161–234/ AD 778–849; for the places he taught. He was no Umayyad fanboi and never visited Syria. He straddled instead pre-Hanbal Sunnism and Ja'farid Shi'ism. The consensus enforced by the Caliphs was that the Quran was created like any other Revelation including the Torah and Gospel, however flawed and incomplete the latter might be. Ibn Hanbal taught otherwise. Ibn Hanbal would have the legal profession in the Deuteronomy-to-Montesquieu stream. More the former inasmuch as the Quran was the new Torah except more so.
Since I do not believe the Quran coëxisted with the Lord, nor was revealed by Him in its present form: I am most on the side of the earlier Caliphs and, therefore, of this 'Ali. If we want Law as separate from Executive, which I do, then the Quran is not where I should start. Just to lay out mine own biases here.
So I feel for 'Ali, between tyranny... and bigotry. He could see that the ahl al-hadith was going toward the Hanbalite direction. It appears he redoubled his efforts on critiquing the Hadith as a corpus: 'Ilal, they call it, or jarh wa-ta'dil. Yahya bin Ma'in is his clear successor.
I suspect Bukhari was similar. They say he too didn't like the preëxistence theory. He carried Ibn Hanbal's ahadith (which Ibn al-Madini didn't), because Ibn Hanbal actually was very good at the Hadith; but not his theology / coranology. Bukhari wanted a hadith-focused Sunnism that didn't have to be Hanbalist.
BACKDATE 10/27
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