has come in its place an entirely different law. So Abu Hanifa would contend that he was following the divine legislation of the Qur'an, while his adversaries contended that he was only following his own opinion.

But if, on the one hand, he was thus limited from equity to legal fiction, on another he developed a new principle of even greater freedom. Reference has already been made to the changes which were of necessity involved in the new conditions of the countries conquered by the Muslims. Often the law of the desert not only failed to apply to town and agricultural life; it was even directly mischievous. On account of this, a consideration of local conditions was early accepted as a principle, but in general terms. These were reduced to definiteness by Abu Hanifa under the formula of "holding for better" (istihsan). He would say, "The analogy in the case points to such and such a rule, but under the circumstances I hold it for better to rule thus and thus."

This method, as we shall see later, was vehemently attacked by his opponents, as was his system in general. Yet that system by its philosophical perfection—due to its theoretical origin—and perfection in detail—due to generations of practical workers—has survived all attack and can now be said to be the leading one of the four existing schools. No legal writings of Abu Hanifa have reached us, nor does he seem to have, himself, cast his system into a finished code. That was done by his immediate pupils, and especially by two, the Qadi Abu Yusuf, who died in 182, and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, who died in 189. The first was consulting lawyer and chief Qadi to the

great Khalifa Haran ar-Rashid, and, if stories can be believed, proved himself as complaisant of conscience as a court casuist need be. Innumerable are the tales afloat of his minute knowledge of legal subtleties and his fertility of device in applying them to meet the whims of his master, Harun. Some of them have found a resting place in that great mirror of mediaeval Muslim life, The Thousand and One Nights; reference may be made to Night 296. Through his influence, the school of Abu Hanifa gained an official importance which it never thereafter lost. He wrote for Harun a book which we have still, on the canon law as applied to the revenues of the state, a thorny and almost impossible subject, for the canon law makes really no provision for the necessary funds of even a simple form of government and much less for such an array of palaces and officials as had grown up around the Abbasids. His book is marked by great piety in expression and by ability of the highest kind in reconciling the irreconcilable.

But all the canon lawyers did not fall in so easily with the new ways. Many found that only in asceticism, in renunciation of the world and engaging in pious exercises was there any chance of their maintaining the old standards in a state that was for them based on oppression and robbery. One of these was Sufyan ath-Thawri, a lawyer of high repute, who narrowly missed founding a separate school of law and who died in 161. There has come down to us a correspondence between him and Harun, which, though it cannot possibly be genuine, throws much light on the disappointment of the sincerely