The distinction drawn above between traditionists and lawyers will be remembered, and the promise of future collision which always has come between historical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical students of systems of jurisprudence. The one side points to the absurdities, crudities, and inadequacies of a system based upon tradition and developing by usage; the other says that we are not wise enough to rewrite the laws of our ancestors. These urge a necessity; those retort an inability. Add to this a belief on the part of the traditionists that they were defending a divine institution and the situation is complete as it now lay in Islam. The extreme right said that law should be based on Qur’an and tradition only; the extreme left, that it was better to leave untrustworthy and obscure traditions and work out a system of rules by logic and the necessities of the case. To and fro between these two extremes swayed the conflict to which we now come. In that conflict three names stand out: ash-Shafi‘i who died in 204, Ahmad ibn Hanbal who died in 241 and Da’ud az-Zahiri who died in 270. Strangely enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi‘i, struck the mediating note and the other two diverged further and further from the via media thus shown toward a blank traditionism. Ash-Shafi‘i is without question one of the greatest figures in the history of law. Perhaps he had not the originality and keenness of Abu Hanifa; but he had a balance of mind and temper, a clear vision and full grasp of means and ends that enabled him to say what proved to be the last word in the matter. After him came attempts to tear down; but they failed. The fabric of the Muslim canon law stood firm. There is a tradition from the Prophet that he promised that with the end of every century would come a restorer of the faith of his people. At the end of the first century was the pious Khalifa, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, who by some accident strayed in among the Umayyads. At the end of the second came ash-Shafi‘i. His work was to mediate and systematize and bore especially on the sources from which rules of law might be drawn. His position on the positive side may be stated as one of great reverence for tradition. “If you ever find a tradition from the Prophet saying one thing,” he is reported to have said, “and a decision from me saying another thing, follow the tradition.” An absolutely authentic—according to Muslim rules of evidence—and clear tradition from the Prophet he regarded as of equally divine authority with a passage in the Qur’an. Both were inspired utterances, if slightly different in form; the Qur’an was verbally inspired; such traditions were inspired as to their content. And if such a tradition contradicted a Qur’anic passage and came after it in time, then the written law of the Qur’an was abrogated by the oral law of the tradition. But this involved grave difficulties. The speculative jurists had defended their position from the beginning by pointing to