in the exact sense, a manual or code; rather a collection of materials for a code with remarks by the collector. He gives the traditions which seem to him of juristic importance—about seventeen hundred in all—arranged according to subject, and follows up each section, when necessary, with remarks upon the usage of al-Madina, and upon his own view of the matter. When he cannot find either tradition or usage, he evidently feels himself of sufficient authority to follow his own opinion, and lay down on that basis a binding rule. This, however, as we have seen, is very different from allowing other people, outsiders to al-Madina, to do the same thing. The school founded by Malik ibn Anas on these principles is one of the surviving four. As that of Abu Hanifa spread eastward, so that of Malik spread westward, and for a time crushed out all others. The firm grip which it has especially gained in western North Africa may be due to the influence of the Idrisids whose founder had to flee from al-Madina when Malik was in the height of his reputation there, and also to hatred of the Abbasids who championed the school of Abu Haifa.

But now we pass from simple development to development through conflict. Open conflict, so far as there had been any, had covered points of detail; for example, the kind of opinion professed by Abu Hanifa, on the one hand, and by Malik, on the other. One of the chiefest of the pupils of Abu Hanifa, the Muhammad ibn al-Hasan already mentioned, spent three years in study with Malik at al-Madina and found no difficulty in thus combining his schools.

The conflict of the future was to be different and to touch the very basis of things. The muttering of the coming storm had been heard for long, but it was now to burst. Exact dates we cannot give, but the reaction must have been progressing in the latter part of the life of Malik ibn Anas.

The distinction drawn above between traditionists and lawyers will be remembered, and the promise of future collision which always has come between historical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical students of systems of jurisprudence. The one side points to the absurdities, crudities, and inadequacies of a system based upon tradition and developing by usage; the other says that we are not wise enough to rewrite the laws of our ancestors. These urge a necessity; those retort an inability. Add to this a belief on the part of the traditionists that they were defending a divine institution and the situation is complete as it now lay in Islam. The extreme right said that law should be based on Qur'an and tradition only; the extreme left, that it was better to leave untrustworthy and obscure traditions and work out a system of rules by logic and the necessities of the case. To and fro between these two extremes swayed the conflict to which we now come.

In that conflict three names stand out: ash-Shafi'i who died in 204, Ahmad ibn Hanbal who died in 241 and Da'ud az-Zahiri who died in 270. Strangely enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi'i, struck the mediating note and the other two diverged further and further from the via media thus shown toward a blank traditionism.