there was a large settlement of Jews. To the Arabs any conception of law was utterly foreign. An Arab tribe has no constitution; its system is one of individualism; the single man is a sovereign and no writ can lie against him; the tribe can cast him forth from its midst; it cannot otherwise coerce him. So stands the case now in the desert, and so it was then. Some slight hold there might be on the tribe through the fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab, always a somewhat cynical sceptic, that hold was of the slightest. Further, the avenging of a broken oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath; if he did not care to right his client, no one else would interfere. There was customary law, undoubtedly, but it was protected by no sanction and enforced by no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it, well; if not, neither had anything to fear but the anger of his opponent. That law of custom we shall find again appearing in the system of Islam, but there it will be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God working through the authority of the state. The Jewish element was in a different case. They may have been Jewish immigrants, they may have been Jewish proselytes—many Arab tribes, we know, had gone over bodily to Judaism—but their lives were ruled and guided by Jewish law. To the primitive and divine legislation on Sinai there was an immense accretion by legal fiction and by usage; the Roman codes had left their mark and the customary law of the desert as well. All this was working in the life of the town when Muhammad and his little band of fugitives from Mecca, entered it. Being Meccans,

they must have brought with them the more developed legal ideas of that trading centre; but these were of comparatively little account in the scale. The new and dominating element was the personality of Muhammad himself. His contribution was legislation pure and simple, the only legislation that has ever been in Islam. Till his death, ten years later, he ruled his community as an absolute monarch, as a prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and judged the people. He had no need of a code, for his own will was enough. He followed the customary law of the town, as it has been described above, when it suited him, and when he judged that it was best. If not, he left it and there was a revelation. So the legislative part of the Qur'an grew out of such scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of the squabbles and questions of the townsfolk of al-Madina. The system was one of pure opportunism; but of what body of legislation can that not be said? Of course, on the one hand, not all decisions were backed by a revelation, and Muhammad seems, on the other, to have made a few attempts to deal systematically with certain standing and constantly recurring problems—such, for example, as the conflicting claims of heirs in an estate, and the whole complicated question of divorce—but in general, the position holds that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand to mouth. He did not draw up any twelve tables or ten commandments, or code, or digest; he was there and the people could come and ask him questions when they chose, and that was enough. The conception of a rounded and complete system which will