ISLAMIC LAW. Law (Shari`ah) in Islam has a wider appli cation than any western secular law, since it claims to regulate all the aspects of life—duty to God, to one's neighbour, to one's self. It is really a system of duties, ethical, legal, religious, and governs not only the private life of the pious Muslim, but also fixes the laws of marriage, divorce and inheritance, as well as the criminal law. Its historical development began with Muhammad sitting as judge in Medina ; his decisions followed, at one time, the usages of the Arab and Jewish tribes of Medina; at another, his own personal judgment. At his death he left behind the legislative enactments embodied in the Qur'an, and the memory of his legal decisions. These were collected among the traditions (hadith), which recorded his sayings and doings, manners and customs, and his answers to questions on religious life and faith, and his deci sions in legal disputes.
The first collecting of traditions was for private purposes, and the first publication dealing with them was legal, viz. the Muwatta' of Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), a corpus juris based partly on tradi tions. Thereafter came collections of two different types, the earlier, arranged according to the companions of Muhammad, on whose authority the traditions were transmitted, e.g., the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal; the other, called Musannaf (classified), containing traditions arranged in chapters according to their sub ject matter. That of Bukhari is the most famous, and is arranged to give a traditional basis for a complete system of canon law ; another is that of Muslim ibn al-Ijajjaj, who paid less attention to legal aspects and more to minute accuracy.
Another element which came into the development was Roman law, which the Muslim jurist found at work in the conquered Roman provinces and in law courts. Many principles of Muslim
law can be traced to the Roman codes, and it was plainly in fluenced by the liberty involved in the Responsa prudentium of Roman lawyers, and by the broad conception of the law of nature in the Edict of the Praetor.
During the Umayyad dynasty, the public life of the state was no longer so religious as it had been while Medina was still the capital, and though law was still needed, 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, no longer living in contact with reality; they regarded any system of government which did not simply repro duce the patriarchal form of Medina, as a thing with which no religious man could have aught to do.
The rise of the eAbbasids brought a change, in that they had promised a return to the old religious attitudes. But in substance they were much as the Umayyads, and though the state was out wardly on a pious footing, and the religious sentiment of the people was respected, the old, absolute religious 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.
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.