Being Meccans, they must have brought with them the more developed legal ideas of that trading centre; but these were of comparatively little account in the scale. The new and dominating element was the personality of Muhammad himself. His contribution was legislation pure and simple, the only legislation that has ever been in Islam. Till his death, ten years later, he ruled his community as an absolute monarch, as a prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and judged the people. He had no need of a code, for his own will was enough. He followed the customary law of the town, as it has been described above, when it suited him, and when he judged that it was best. If not, he left it and there was a revelation. So the legislative part of the Qur’an grew out of such scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of the squabbles and questions of the townsfolk of al-Madina. The system was one of pure opportunism; but of what body of legislation can that not be said? Of course, on the one hand, not all decisions were backed by a revelation, and Muhammad seems, on the other, to have made a few attempts to deal systematically with certain standing and constantly recurring problems—such, for example, as the conflicting claims of heirs in an estate, and the whole complicated question of divorce—but in general, the position holds that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand to mouth. He did not draw up any twelve tables or ten commandments, or code, or digest; he was there and the people could come and ask him questions when they chose, and that was enough. The conception of a rounded and complete system which will meet any case and to which all cases must be adjusted by legal fiction or equity, the conception which we owe to the genius and experience of the Roman lawyers, was foreign to his thought. From time to time he got into difficulties. A revelation proved too wide or too narrow, or left out some important possibility. Then there came another to supplement or correct, or even to set the first quite aside—Muhammad had no scruples about progressive revelation as applied to himself. Thus, through these interpretive acts, as we may call them, many flat contradictions have come into the Qur’an and have proved the delight of generations of Muslim jurisconsults. [Sidenote: MUHAMMAD AS A LEGISLATOR]