long examinations before the officials of al-Ma'mun and al-Mu'tasim, he contented himself with repeating either the words of the Qur'an which for him were proofs or such traditions as he accepted. Any approach to drawing a consequence he utterly rejected. When they argued before him, he kept silence.

What, then, we may ask, was the net result of this incident? for it was nothing more. The Mu'tazilites dropped back into their former position, but under changed conditions. The sympathy of the populace was further from them than ever. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, saint and ascetic, was the idol of the masses; and he, in their eyes, had maintained single-handed the honor of the Word of God. For his persecutors there was nothing but hatred. And after he had passed away, the conflict was taken up with still fiercer bitterness by the school of law founded by his pupils. They continued to maintain his principles of Qur'an and tradition long after the Mu'tazilites themselves had practically vanished from the scene, and all that was left for them to contend against was the modified system of scholastic theology which is now the orthodox theology of Islam. With these reactionary Hanbalites we shall have to deal later.

The Mu'tazilites, on their side, having seen the shipwreck of their hopes and the growing storm of popular disfavor, seem to have turned again to their scholastic studies. They became more and more theologians affecting a narrower circle, and less and less educators of the world at large. Their system became more metaphysical and their conclusions more unintelligible to the plain man. The fate which has

fallen on all continued efforts of the Muslim mind was coming upon them. Beggarly speculations and barren hypotheses, combats of words over names, sapped them of life and reality. What the ill-fated friendship of al-Ma'mun had begun was carried on and out by the closed circle of Muslim thought. They separated into schools, one at al-Basra and another at Baghdad. At Baghdad the point especially developed was the old question, What is a thing (shay)? They defined a thing, practically, as a concept that could be known and of which something could be said. Existence (wujud) did not matter. It was only a quality which could be there or not. With it, the thing was an entity (mawjud) ; without it, a non-entity (ma'dum), but still a thing with all equipment of substance (jawhar) and accident (arad), genus and species. The bearing of this was especially upon the doctrine of creation. Practically, by God's adding a single quality, things entered the sphere of existence and were for us. Here, then, is evidently an approach to a doctrine of pre-existent matter. At al-Basra the relation of God to His qualities was especially discussed, and there it came to be pretty nearly a family dispute between al-Jubba'i (d. 303) and his son Abu Hashim. Orthodox Islam held that God has qualities, existent, eternal, added to His essence; thus, He knows, for example, by such a quality of knowledge. The students of Greek philosophy and the Shi'ites denied this and said that God knew by His essence. We have seen already Mu'tazilite views as to this point. Abu Hudhayl held that these qualities were God's essence and not in it. Thus, He knew