It is evident that here we have to do with an impossible man and school, and so the Muslim world found. Most said roundly that it was illegal to permit a Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same grounds that objection to circumstantial evidence will throw out a man now as juror. If they had been using modern language, they would have said that it was because he was a hopeless crank. Yet the Zahirite school lasted for centuries and drew long consequences, historical and theological, for which there is no space here. It never held rank as an acknowledged school of Muslim law. We now come to the last of the four schools, and it, strange as its origin was, need not detain us long. The Zahirite reaction had failed through its very extremeness. It was left to a dead man and a devoted Shafi‘ite to head the last attack upon the school of his master. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was a theologian of the first rank; he made no claim to be a constructive lawyer. His _Musnad_ has already been dealt with. It is an immense collection of some thirty thousand traditions, but these are not even arranged for legal purposes. He suffered terribly for the orthodox faith in the rationalist persecution under the Khalifa al-Ma’mun, and his sufferings gained him the position of a saint. But he never dreamed of forming a school, least of all in opposition to his master, ash-Shafi‘i. He died in 241, and after his death his disciples drew together and the fourth school was founded. It was simply reactionary and did not make progress in any way. It minimized agreement and analogy and tended toward literal interpretation. As might be expected from its origin, its history has been one of violence, of persecution and counter-persecution, of insurrection and riot. Again and again the streets of Baghdad ran blood from its excesses. It has now the smallest following of the four surviving schools. [Sidenote: PRINCIPLES OF UNITY AND VARIETY]