them how they were to act.  Revelation continued, nevertheless, to be the groundwork of their reasoning, and the teaching of their great leader the justification of each new development of law as the cases requiring it arose.  The Koran was cited wherever it was possible to find a citation, and where these failed tradition was called in.  The companions of the Prophet were in the first instance consulted, and their recollections of his sayings and doings quoted freely; while afterwards, when these too were gone, the companions of the companions took their place, and became in their turn cited.

Thus by a subtle process of comparison and reasoning, worked out through many generations, the Mohammedan law as we see it was gradually built up, until in the third century of Islam it was embodied by order of the Caliph into a written code.  The Fakh ed Din and the Fakh esh Sheriat of Abu Hanifeh, the doctor intrusted with this duty, was a first attempt to put into reasoned form the floating tradition of the faithful, and to make a digest of existing legal practice.  He and his contemporaries examined into and put in order the accumulated wealth of authority on which the law rested, and, taking this and rejecting that saying of the Fathers of Islam, founded on them a school of teaching which has ever since been the basis of Mohammedan jurisprudence.

Abu Hanifeh’s code, however, does not appear to have been intended, at the time it was drawn up, to be the absolute and final expression of all lawful practice for the faithful.  It included a vast amount of tradition of which either no use was made by its compiler, or which stood in such contradiction with itself that a contrary interpretation of it to his could with equal logic be deduced.  Abu Hanifeh quoted and argued rather than determined; and as long as the Arabian mind continued to be supreme in Islam the process of reasoning development continued.

The Hanefite code was supplemented by later doctors, Malek, Esh Shafy, and Ibn Hanbal, and even by others whose teaching has been since repudiated, all in the avowed intention of suiting the law still further to the progressive needs of the faithful, and all following the received process of selecting and interpreting and reasoning from tradition.  These codes were, for the then existing conditions of life, admirable; and even now, wherever those conditions have remained unaltered, are amply sufficient for the purposes of good government and the regulation of social conduct.  They would, nevertheless, have been but halting places in the march of Mohammedan legislation, had the destinies of Islam remained permanently in the hands of its first founders.