1. The believing Muslim, in so far as custom did not maintain its dominion over him, had at first the Word of God and the example of His Prophet as his rule of conduct and opinion. After the Prophet’s death, the Sunna of Mohammed was followed, in cases where the Koran gave no information,—that is to say, men acted and decided, as Mohammed had decided or acted, according to the Tradition of his Companions. But from the time of the conquest of countries in possession of an old civilization, demands which were altogether new were made of Islam. Instead of the simple conditions of Arab life, usages and institutions were met with there, in regard to which the Sacred Law gave no precise direction, and to meet which no tradition or interpretation of tradition presented itself. Every day added thus to the number of individual cases which had not been provided for, and yet about which one had to come to a decision, whether according to custom, or his own sense of right. In the old-Roman provinces, Syria and Mesopotamia, Roman law must have long continued to exercise an important influence. Those jurists who attributed to their own opinion (Raʼy, opinio) alongside of the Koran and Sunna, a subsidiary authority to determine the law, were called ‘Adherents of the Raʼy’. One of them, Abu Hanifa of Kufa († 767), the founder of the Hanifite School, became specially famous. But even in Medina, before the appearance of the school of Malik (715–795), as well as in that school, a harmless though restricted deference was at first paid to the Raʼy. By slow degrees, however, and in the course of opposing a Raʼy which was becoming a pretext for much arbitrariness, the view gained ground, that in everything the Tradition (hadith) respecting the Sunna of the Prophet was to be followed. Thereupon traditions were collected from all quarters, and explained—and in large numbers even forged—; and a system of criteria to determine their genuineness was formed, which, however, laid more stress upon the external evidence and the appropriateness of the traditionary material than upon consistency and historic truth. As a consequence of this development, the ‘people of the Raʼy’, who were chiefly located in Iraq (Babylonia), were now confronted by the ‘Adherents of the Tradition’, or the Medina school. Even Shafii (767–820), the founder of the third school of Law, who in general held to the Sunna, was numbered with the partisans of Tradition, in contradistinction no doubt to Abu Hanifa.