The reactionary character of Spanish Islam is well illustrated by _Ibn Hazm_ (d. 456 A.H.), the first 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 of the canonists, who, in Spain as elsewhere, were the followers of recognised schools, such as that of Abu Hanifa and the other orthodox systems, and it was not until a full century afterwards that he gained any number of adherents. In theology he admitted the Ash`arite doctrine of _mukhalafa_, the difference of God from all created beings, so that human attributes could not be applied to him in the same sense as they were used of men; but he carried this a stage further, and opposed the Ash`arites, who, though admitting the difference, had then argued about the attributes of God as though they described God’s nature, when the very fact of difference deprives them of any meaning intelligible to us. As in the Qur´an ninety-nine descriptive titles are applied to God we may lawfully employ them, but we neither know what they imply nor can we argue anything from them. The same method is applied to the treatment of the anthropomorphical expressions which are applied to God in the Qur´an; we may use those expressions, but we have not the slightest idea of what they may indicate, save that we know they do not mean what they would mean as used of men. In ethics the only distinction between good and evil is based on God’s will, and our only knowledge of that distinction is obtained from revelation. If God forbids theft it is wrong only because