It will, therefore, be well for the student to work through the sketch of a code of Muslim law which is inserted in Appendix I. One has been chosen which belongs to the school of ash-Shafi‘i because of its general accessibility. It should be remembered that what is given is the merest table of contents. The standard Arabic commentary on the book extends to eight hundred and eleven closely printed quarto pages. Even a mere reading of this table of contents, however, will show in how different a sphere of thought from ours Muslim law moves and lives. But we must return to the beginning of things, to the egg from which this tremendous system was hatched. The mother-city of Islam was the little town of Yathrib, called Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madina, ever since the Hijra or Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of the Christian era. Here the first Muslim state was founded, and the germinal principles of Muslim jurisprudence fixed. Both state and jurisprudence were the result of the inter-working of the same highly complicated causes. The ferments in the case may be classified and described as follows: First, in the town itself before the appearance of Muhammad on its little stage—little, but so momentous for the future—there were two parties, often at war, oftener at peace. There was a genuine Arab element and there was a large settlement of Jews. To the Arabs any conception of law was utterly foreign. An Arab tribe has no constitution; its system is one of individualism; the single man is a sovereign and no writ can lie against him; the tribe can cast him forth from its midst; it cannot otherwise coerce him. So stands the case now in the desert, and so it was then. Some slight hold there might be on the tribe through the fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab, always a somewhat cynical sceptic, that hold was of the slightest. Further, the avenging of a broken oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath; if he did not care to right his client, no one else would interfere. There was customary law, undoubtedly, but it was protected by no sanction and enforced by no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it, well; if not, neither had anything to fear but the anger of his opponent. That law of custom we shall find again appearing in the system of Islam, but there it will be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God working through the authority of the state. The Jewish element was in a different case. They may have been Jewish immigrants, they may have been Jewish proselytes—many Arab tribes, we know, had gone over bodily to Judaism—but their lives were ruled and guided by Jewish law. To the primitive and divine legislation on Sinai there was an immense accretion by legal fiction and by usage; the Roman codes had left their mark and the customary law of the desert as well. All this was working in the life of the town when Muhammad and his little band of fugitives from Mecca entered it.