Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/244

 important theologian which it produced. Rejecting the four recognised and orthodox schools of canon law, and discarding even the rigid system of Ibn Hanbal as not strict enough, he became an adherent of the school founded by Da'ud az-Zahiri (d. 270), which has never been admitted as on the same footing as the other four, and now is totally extinct. In the teaching of that school Qur'an and tradition were taken in their strictest and most literal sense; any sort of deduction by analogy was forbidden; "it is evident that here we have to do with an impossible man and school, and so the Muslim world found. Most said roundly that it was illegal to appoint a Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same grounds that objection to circumstantial evidence will throw out a man now as juror. If they had been using modern language, they would have said that it was because he was a hopeless crank." (Macdonald: Muslim Theology, p. 110). This was the system which Ibn Hazm now introduced into Spain, and it was one calculated to appeal to the stern puritan strain which undoubtedly exists in the Iberian character. The novel point was that Ibn Hazm applied the principles and methods of jurisprudence to theology proper. Like Da'ud he entirely rejected the principles of analogy and taqlid, that is, the following of authority in the sense of accepting the dictum of a known teacher. As this undermined all existing systems, and required every man to study Qur'an and tradition for himself, it did not receive the approval