Toward the end of his life, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), the hadith expert, jurist, and paragon of Sunni piety, received a sick visit from a group of people, among them an older man with dyed hair. Upon seeing the man, Aḥmad declared, "How it delights me to see an old man with dyed hair!" Then he mentioned someone who was not present and asked, "Why does he not dye [his hair]?" The visitors answered, "He is ashamed." Aḥmad exclaimed in exasperation, "God be praised; [it is] a tradition from

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... Prophet!"1 On another occasion Aḥmad catalogued the hair-dyeing practices of hadith scholars whom he personally knew: of the sixty-nine scholars he mentioned, forty-eight dyed their hair and twenty-one did not.2 Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal was by no means the only hadith scholar with a keen interest in hair dyeing: ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 211/827) transmitted numerous hadith reports from his teacher Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 153/770) on the topic, and a generation after Aḥmad, Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) dedicated more than sixty pages of his Tahdhīb al-āthār to citing and discussing reports relating to male hair dyeing (khiḍāb, ikhtiḍāb, ṣibāgh).3 (By "hair dyeing" we should understand, throughout this paper, the dyeing of grey or white hairs both on the head and in the beard.) This paper argues that the considerable volume of discussion in early hadith literature on the issue of men dyeing their hair can grant us significant insight into the logic of early Muslim identity and norm formation. The first to address 1 Abū Bakr al-Khallāl, al-Wuqūf wa-l-tarajjul min al-Jāmiʿ li-masāʾil Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, ed. Sayyid Kasrawī Ḥasan (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), 131. 2 Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Masāʾil al-Imām Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, riwāya Ibn Abī al-Faḍl Ṣāliḥ, ed. Faḍl al-Raḥmān Dīn Muḥammad, 3 vols. (Delhi: al-Dār al-ʿIlmiyya, 1988), 2:374-381 (man kāna yakhḍab min al-muḥaddithīn). 3 Maʿmar b. Rāshid, al-Jāmiʿ, vols. 11 and 12 of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī's al-Muṣannaf, ed. Ḥabīb al-Raḥmān al-Aʿẓamī (Simlak: al-Majlis al-ʿIlmī, 1970-1972), 11:153-156; Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Tahdhīb al-āthār: al-Juzʾ al-mafqūd, ed. ʿAlī Riḍā (Damascus: Dār al-