Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/85

 though these deal rather with ritual and the description of the unseen world and serve to show how readily Islam absorbed elements with which it was in contact. So far as the actual needs of the civil law are concerned, the chief source was the Roman law, and these needs fill a very large part of the traditions.

It was not until the close of the 'Umayyad period that the Muslims began to develop a scientific jurisprudence and to make a critical examination and codification of the traditions. In the case of jurisprudence there were at first two schools, a Syrian and a Persian. The Syrian school formulated its system under the leadership of al-Awza'i (d. 157), and for some time it prevailed over all parts of the Muslim world which had been parts of the Byzantine Empire. The Persian school owed its origin to Abu Hanifa (d. 150) and, as the seat of government was removed to 'Iraq by the 'Abbasids and Abu Hanifa's system was enforced by his pupil Abu Yusuf (d. 182) who was chief Qadi under the Khalif Harunu r-Rashid, it had a tremendous advantage over the Syrian school. It became the official system of the 'Abbasid courts and still holds its own through Central Asia, North India, and wherever the Turkish element prevails, whilst the Syrian system has become extinct. Abu Hanifa's system represents a serious and moderate revision of the methods which had already come into use as extending the discipline of Islam to the needs of a complex and advanced civilization. Under the 'Umayyads the jurists had