But the extreme traditionists were little satisfied with this compromise. They objected to analogy and they objected to agreement; nothing but the pure law of God and the Prophet would satisfy them. And their numbers were undoubtedly large. The common people always heard traditions gladly, and it was easy to turn to ridicule the subtleties of the professional lawyers. How much simpler, it struck the average mind, it would be to follow some clear and unambiguous saying of the Prophet; then one could feel secure. This desire of the plain man to take traditions and interpret them strictly and literally was met by the school of Da’ud az-Zahiri, David the literalist. He was born three or four years before the death of ash-Shafi‘i, which occurred in 204. He was trained as a Shafi‘ite and that, too, of the narrower, more traditional type; but it was not traditional enough for him. So he had to cut himself loose and form a school of his own. He rejected utterly analogy; he limited agreement, as a source, to the agreement of the immediate Companions of Muhammad, and in this he has been followed by the Wahhabites alone among moderns; he limited himself to Qur’an and prophetic usage. In another point also, he diverged. Ash-Shafi‘i had evidently exercised a very great personal influence upon his followers. All looked up to him and were prepared to swear to his words. So there grew up a tendency for a scholar to take a thing upon the word of his master. “Ash-Shafi‘i taught so; I am a Shafi‘ite and I hold so.” This, too, Da’ud utterly rejected. The scholar must examine the proofs for himself and form his own opinion. But he had another peculiarity, and one which gained him the name of literalist. Everything, Qur’an and tradition, must be taken in the most exact sense, however absurd it might be. Of course, to have gone an inch beyond the very first meaning of the words would have been to stray in the direction of analogy. Yet, as fate would have it, to analogy, more or less, he had in the end to come. The inexorable law that the limited cannot bound the unlimited was proved again. “Analogy is like carrion,” confessed a very much earlier traditionist, “when there is nothing else you eat it.” Da’ud tried to make his meal more palatable by a change in name. He called it a proof (_dalil_) instead of a source (_asl_); but what difference of idea he involved in that it is hard to determine. This brought him to the doctrine of cause, already mentioned. Were we at liberty to seek the cause of a divine word or action and lead our “proof” from that? If the cause was directly stated, then Da’ud held that we must regard it as having been the cause in this case; but we were not at liberty, he added, to look for it, or on it, as cause in any other case.