THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL REASONING 275

As we know that the doctrine of the Medinese was largely dependent on and secondary to that of the Iraqians,¹ we may assume the same of the development of technical legal thought for Medina. The sources available happen to be less abundant for this particular aspect of ancient Medinese doctrine, but we are able to see that legal reasoning in Medina in the ancient period was essentially of the same character as that found in Iraq though, on the whole, more primitive.

The ancient schools of law do not hesitate to adduce against one another arguments which they reject as inconclusive when they find them used against themselves.² They often interpret traditions in a more natural way, and more in keeping with their sometimes only vaguely expressed intentions, than Shāfi'ī who, having cut himself loose from the 'living tradition', can ruthlessly apply systematic reasoning which is often no more than a logical sleight-of-hand.³ The attitude of the ancient schools of law and, after them, of Shāfi'ī to legal traditions⁴ is a significant example of how a perfectly natural and reasonably consistent approach to legal problems became, by an historical process, involved in a mass of seeming inconsistencies, and how Shāfi'ī replaced it by a novel and severely consistent theory of his own. It is typical of the degree of systematic reasoning reached by the ancient schools of law, that they reject traditions or dispose of them by interpretation, for reasons of systematic consistency.⁵

Shāfi'ī has preserved long quotations which show the authentic reasoning of ancient Iraqians.⁶ In Ikh. 383 we find rather clumsy, but straightforward systematic reasoning. Ikh. 385 ff. shows Iraqian legal reasoning at its best; the Iraqian opponent certainly gets the better of the systematic argument. But the primitive and rigidly formal systematic reasoning of the Iraqian in Ikh. 395 ff. soon breaks down and is easily refuted by Shāfi'ī. A similar kind of argument in Ikh. 398, inconclusive in itself, shows the desire to 'understand' as the basis of legal thought, the same desire which is voiced in Medina by Mālik in Muw. iii. 184.