The rise of the Abbasids brought a change, but not a great one. They had promised a return to the old religious attitudes, and the promise was formally kept. But in substance they were as much as the Omayyads, and though the state was outwardly on a pious footing, and the religious sentiment of the people was respected, the old, absolute canon law was not restored. It was made possible for more theologians and lawyers to work with the state, but an irreconcilable party still remained, and the situation was fixed as it is to this day. It is true that the struggle to adapt such a single and detailed system to all the varying conditions, climates and times of the great empire was impossible; but the failure marked the great rent in the supposed unity of Islam between the church and the world, religion and law. Yet the Abbasids did, in their way, encourage legal studies, and under them processes and results, long pursued in private, became public. Almost within the first century of their dynasty the four legal schools, or rites, were formed and the principles established which survive to this day. The first school to take definite form was the Hanifite, founded by Abu Hanifa (d. 767), who left behind him a definite system and many enthusiastic pupils. He was a man of means, in touch with commercial, but not with practical legal life, a speculative or philosophical jurist. Being of non-Arab origin, the usage of Medina had small interest for him. He therefore used few traditions, and preferred to go back to the Koran, and extract from it by reasoning the rulings which fitted his ideas. This he called the use of analogy (_qiyas_); but, in his hands, it became practically legal fiction, the application of a law in some sense undreamed by its first imposer. But he had another, and still freer instrument. The effect of differences in local conditions had been early observed and admitted in general terms. Abu Hanifa reduced it to a subjective formula. Under such conditions he claimed the right of preference (_istihsan_) of a ruling suited to the local needs, even when the strict analogy indicated otherwise. This met and meets with vehement protest when formally stated, but the usage of Islam has practically accepted it. His system, finally, was not developed through the exigencies of actual cases, but was worked out as a system of casuistry, though in a good sense. He tried, that is, to construct a system of rules to answer any conceivable question. After his death his pupils elaborated it still further, and accepted public office. The `Abbasids adopted his school, and threw their influence on its side; its philosophic breadth and casuistic possibilities evidently commended it to them. Later, the Ottoman Turks also adopted it, and it may be said to hold now a leadership among the four legal rites. Its influence has undoubtedly tended to broaden and humanize Moslem law.