arison 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.

Unfortunately, about the eleventh century of our era, a new and
unfortunate influence began to make itself felt in the counsels of the
Arabian Ulema, which little by little gaining ground, succeeded at last
in stopping the flow of intellectual progress at the fountain head. The
Tartar, who then first makes his appearance in Mohammedan politics,
though strong in arms, was slow to understand. He had no habit