Thus it finally came to pass that a considerable portion of the Roman civil law was embodied in the traditions of Islam (cf. Santillana: _Code civil et commerciel tunisien._ Tunis, 1899, etc.) It is not to be supposed that Arab governors and judges studied the Roman code, they simply accepted its provisions as they found them in force in Syria and Egypt, and thus learned its general principles from the usage of the civil courts already existing. In many places material is found in the traditions which can be traced to Zoroastrian, Jewish, and even Buddhist sources, 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 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