In tracing the development of Muslim jurisprudence few of the difficulties are encountered which surrounded Sir Henry Maine when he first examined the origins and history of European law. We do not need to push our researches back to the primitive family, nor to work our way through periods of centuries guided by the merest fragments of documents and hints of usage. Our subject was born in the light of history; it ran its course in a couple of hundred years and has left at every important point authoritative evidences of its whence, its how, and its whither. Our difficulties are different, but sufficiently great. Shortly, they are two. The mass of material is overpowering; the strangeness of the ideas involved is perplexing. The wealth of material will become plain, to some extent at least, as the history is traced; but for the strangeness of the contents, of the arrangement and the atmosphere of these codes some preparation must be given from the outset. How, indeed, can we meet a legal code which knows no distinction of personal or public, of civil or criminal law; which prescribes and describes the use of the toothpick and decides when a wedding invitation may be declined, which enters into the minutest and most unsavory details of family life and lays down rules of religious retreat? Is it by some subtle connection of thought that the chapter on oaths and vows follows immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter on bankruptcy and composition? One thing, at least, is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most absolute sense, fits the old definition, and is the science of all things, human and divine. It tells what we must render to Cæsar and what to God, what to ourselves, and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic definition of rendering to each man his due it utterly shatters. While Muslim theology defines everything that a man shall _believe_ of things in heaven and in earth and beneath the earth—and this is no flat rhetoric—Muslim law prescribes everything that a man shall _do_ to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in terms of duty. Nothing can escape the narrow meshes of its net. One of the greatest legists of Islam never ate a watermelon because he could not find that the usage of the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a canonical method of doing so. [Sidenote: SCOPE OF MUSLIM LAW]