188 LEGAL MAXIMS IN TRADITIONS

Case, used to demand the oath from the plaintiff if he doubted his good faith (Tr. I, 9, [82], 116).

All these are traces of the common tendency to impose a safeguard on the exclusive use of the evidence of witnesses as legal proof;¹ this tendency can be dated in the first half of the second century, and the legal maxim superseded it to a great extent, but not completely. The passage Koran v. 106 f. does not belong here; it reflects an earlier stage in which the 'witnesses' were concerned not so much with giving evidence as with affirming by oath the truth of the claims of their party, as compurgators. This stage had been superseded, and the function of witnesses restricted to the giving of evidence, before the question of a safeguard arose.²

As regards the restriction of legal proof to the evidence of witnesses and the denial of validity to written documents, it must go back to the first century.³ This feature contradicts an explicit ruling of the Koran (ii. 282) which obviously endorsed the current practice of putting contracts into writing, and this practice did persist during the first century and later, and had to be accommodated with legal theory.⁴ Nothing definite is known about the origin of this feature.

To sum up: legal maxims are rough and ready statements of doctrine in the form of slogans, sometimes rhyming or alliterating. They are not uniform as to provenance and period, and some important ones are rather late. But as a rule they are earlier than traditions, and they gradually take on the form of traditions. They date, generally speaking, from the time of the first primitive systematization of Muhammadan law in the first half of the second century A.H., but often represent a secondary stage of doctrine and practice. Some maxims express counter-doctrines and unsuccessful opinions, but if sufficiently well attested, they were harmonized with the prevailing doctrine. Also the traditionists used them occasionally, in the form of traditions, for voicing their point of view. Numerous maxims originated in Iraq, and they were sometimes taken over by the