QĀḌĪ. A qāḍī is a judge responsible for the application of Islamic positive law (fiqh). The office originated under the rule of the first Umayyad caliphs (AH 40–85/661–705 CE), when the provincial governers of the newly created Islamic empire, unable to adjudicate the many disputes that arose among Muslims living within their territories, began to delegate this function to others. In this early period of Islamic history, no body of Islamic positive law had yet come into existence, and the first qāḍīs therefore decided cases on the basis of the only guidelines available to them: Arab customary law, the laws of the conquered territories, the general precepts of the Qurʾān, and their own sense of equity. During the later Umayyad period (705–750 CE), a growing class of Muslim legal scholars, distinct from the qāḍīs, busied...