Then came the great _débâcle_. The _ancien régime_, a semi-monkish, theocratic empire, went down, and the Omayyad dynasty, kings and princes of the old Arab type, took its place (see CALIPHATE, B). The public life of the state was no longer deeply religious; the pious said that it was godless. Under these conditions law was indeed still needed; but it had to be opportunist. Its development went on, but became speculative. The study of tradition was now private, and its students were more and more the personally pious. There were, thus, two results. On the one hand, the framers of systems of canon law--as it now was--no longer lived in contact with reality; hypothetical and ideal structures were reared which could never stand the touch of the practical law-court. And on another, traditions and law, even this hypothetical law, came to take separate roads. The interest of the students of tradition became the gathering of traditions for their own sake, going no farther than a striving to regulate each detail of life by some specific, concrete, prophetic dictum. They had no use for systems that went beyond the mere registering of these dicta. The feeling also became widespread that any system of government which did not simply reproduce the patriarchal form of Medina was of the world and the devil--a thing with which no religious man could have aught to do. At every turn he would have to peril his soul. Here we must place the transition of this law with which we have hitherto dealt from being the law of the land to being in essence a variety of canon law. It was always broader than any western secular law. It regulated all the aspects of life--duty to God, to one's neighbour, to one's self. It was really a system of duties, ethical, legal, religious. It did not limit itself to defining the forbidden (_haram_); but designated actions also as required (_fard_, _wajib_), recommended (_mandub_, _mustahabb_), indifferent (_ja`iz_, _mubah_), disliked (_makruh_). It played the part of, or rendered necessary, a religious director quite as much as a lawyer. And for a time at Medina it was really the law of the land. But from the Omayyad period on it has held the position of the canon law of the Roman Church in countries that will not recognize it and yet dare not utterly reject it. It governs, in one or other of its four schools, the private lives of all pious Moslems; it regulates some semi-public relationships--e.g. marriage, divorce, inheritance; it compels respect, if not acceptance, from the state; and by its ideal standard the world, filled with righteousness by the Mahdi, will be ruled in the Moslem millennium.