In the case of civil law matters were rather different. The civil law is necessarily based on the social and economic structure of the community, and in the acquired provinces this was so different from that prevailing in Arabia that it was necessarily forced on the attention of the Arabs. Moreover, in primitive Islam, the line was not clearly drawn between the canon law and the civil law. Inheritance, the taking of pledges, and such like matters, were to the Arabs subject to the direction and sanction of the law of God as revealed by his Prophet. Thus, for example, Sura 4, one of the later Madinian revelations, contains a statement of the law relating to guardianship, inheritance, marriage, and kindred topics, according to the social conditions prevailing at Madina. But in the Greek and Persian dominions the conquering Arab had to deal with more complex conditions for which the revealed law made no provision, although what it did contain so far touched the subject that it could not be treated regardless of revelation. It seemed impossible to disregard the revealed precepts and substitute an alien legislation, although this has been done in the modern Ottoman Empire, but not without many and grave protests; in the first century it would have been intolerable, for every disaffected faction would have used it to break up the Muslim state which was only held together by the prestige of the Prophetical tradition. We may well suppose that the `Umayyads would have had no reluctance to try the experiment, but it was too dangerous. The only alternative was to expand the sacred law so as to include new requirements, and in the `Umayyad period this was done by the addition of a vast number of fictitious traditions professing to relate what the Prophet had said and done in conditions in which he had never been placed. In describing these traditions as “fictitious,” it is not necessarily implied that they were fraudulent, although many were so, showing an obvious motive in increasing the privileges and rights of the dominant faction or asserting the tribal pre-eminence of the Quraysh, etc. But more often they are “fictitious” in the sense of legal fictions rightly correcting the actual law in the interests of equity. When entirely new conditions arose, the question would be asked, “How would the Prophet have acted in this case?” The early companions of the Prophet, educated in the same environment as he had been educated, and confident that their outlook was essentially the same as his, had no hesitation in stating what he would have done or said, and their statement was almost certainly correct: but they worded their evidence, or it was afterwards worded for them, as a statement of what the Prophet actually had done or said. And, later again, in a subsequent generation, when new problems arose, no difficulty was felt in accepting the supposition that the Prophet would have admitted the reasonable and just solution which the Roman jurists proposed.