Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/86

 supplemented any deficiencies in the law by their own opinion (ra'y) which meant the application of the judgment of a man trained under the Roman law as to what was just and fair. In that early period no derogatory sense was attached to "opinion" which rested on the theory that the intellect could intuitively perceive what is right and just, thus assuming that there is an objective standard of right and wrong capable of apprehension by philosophical enquiry, a theory which shows the influence of Greek ideas embodied in the Civil Code. But the 'Abbasid period experienced an orthodox reaction which tended to limit freedom in using speculative opinion, and Abu Hanifa shows this limitation. In his system weight was attached to every positive statement of the Qur'an which could be taken as bearing upon the civil law, only to a slight extent did he avail himself of the evidence of tradition, to a much larger extent he employs qiyas or "analogy," which means that a new condition is judged by comparison with some older one already treated in the Qur'an, and he also employed what he called istihsan, "the preferable," that is to say, what seemed to be equitable and right even when it diverged from the logical conclusion which could be deduced from the revealed law. Only in this latter case did he admit what can be described as "opinion," and this is strictly limited to the adoption of a course necessary to avoid an obvious injustice. As thus stated, Abu Hanifa's system was broader, milder, and more reasonable than any other