our parallel, they are represented in Scotland by a handful of Covenanting congregations and in America by the much more numerous and powerful Reformed Presbyterian Church.

It is a significant fact that with the lifting of the Umayyad pressure and the encouragement of legal studies—such as it was—by the Abbasids, definite and recognized schools of law began to form. What had so long been in process in secret became public, and its results crystallized under certain prominent teachers. We will now take up these schools in the order of the death dates of their founders; we will establish their principles and trace their histories. We shall find the same conceptions recurring again and again which have already been brought out, Qur'an, tradition (hadith), agreement (ijma), opinion (ra'y), analogy (qiyas), local usage (urf), preference (istihsan), in the teeth of the written law—till at length, when the battle is over, the sources will have limited themselves to the four which have survived to the present day—Qur'an, tradition, agreement, analogy. And, similarly, of the six schools to be mentioned, four only will remain to the present time, but these of equal rank and validity in the eyes of the Believers.

The Abbasids came to power in the year of the Hijra 132, and in 150 died Abu Hanifa, the first student and teacher to leave behind him a systematic body of teaching and a missionary school of pupils. He was a Persian by race, and perhaps the most distinguished example of the rule that Muslim scientists and thinkers might write in Arabic but were seldom

of Arab blood. He does not seem to have held office as a judge or to have practised law at all. He was, rather, an academic student, a speculative or philosophical jurist we might call him. His system of law; therefore, was not based upon the exigencies of experience; it did not arise from an attempt to meet actual cases. We might say of it, rather, but in a good sense, that it was a system of casuistry, an attempt to build up on scientific principles a set of rules which would answer every conceivable question of law. In the hands of some of his pupils, when applied to actual facts, it tended to develop into casuistry in a bad sense; but no charge of perverting justice for his own advantage seems to have been brought against Abu Hanifa himself. His chief instruments in constructing his system were opinion and analogy. He leaned little upon traditions of the usage of Muhammad, but preferred to take the Qur'anic texts and develop from them his details. But the doing of this compelled him to modify simple opinion—equivalent to equity as we have seen—and limit it to analogy of some written statute (nass). He could hardly forsake a plain res indicata of Muhammad, and follow his own otherwise unsupported views, but he might choose to do so if he could base it on analogy from the Qur'an. Thus, he came to use what was practically legal fiction. It is the application of an old law in some sense or way that was never dreamt of by the first imposer of the law, and which may, in fact, run directly counter to the purpose of the law. The fiction is that it is the original law that is being observed, while, as a matter of fact, there