226 THE KORANIC ELEMENT

the Iraqians countered it with the claim that Koran ii. 234 had been [partly] repealed by lxv. 4, a statement which they put into the mouth of Ibn Mas‘ūd.¹ The Medinese produced a counter-tradition according to which the Successor Abū Salama b. ‘Abdalraḥmān disagreed with Ibn ‘Abbās, and had his opinion confirmed not only by Abū Huraira but by Umm Salama, a widow of the Prophet. She quoted a precedent of the Prophet himself who allowed a widow called Subai‘a to re-marry after giving birth and before completing an ‘idda of four months and ten days.² The tradition on the Prophet and Subai‘a was also extracted from this context, provided with the family isnād Hishām b. ‘Urwa—his father, and quoted as an independent locus probans. Finally, it was claimed against the unsuccessful refinement, that Ibn ‘Abbās himself accepted the Subai‘a tradition as valid, or that his disciples ‘Ikrima, ‘Aṭā’, Ṭāwūs, and others did so.³

As regards the problem of the effects of conversion on marriage, we shall have occasion to notice a gradual movement of doctrine away from the Koranic regulation.⁴

We now come to the numerous cases where norms derived from the Koran were introduced into legal doctrine at a secondary stage. We have already discussed the obligatory gift from husband to wife in the case of divorce, the problem of where the divorced wife ought to live, and the legal consequences of the offer of divorce; the maxim that spoils belong to the killer, and the policy of not laying waste the enemy country; the oath of the plaintiff in confirmation of the evidence of one witness, the inadmissibility of written documents as evidence, and the evidence of minors.⁵ Here are two further examples.

When a man died before consummating his marriage and without fixing a donatio propter nuptias (ṣadāq) for his wife, the earliest decision, based on systematic reasoning (ra'y), was to give the wife the right to the average ṣadāq which a woman of her standing might expect; this decision is attested for Iraq.