CHAPTER 2

SYSTEMATIZING AND ISLAMICIZING

WE saw in Part III, Chapter 1, of this book¹ that Muhammadan law came into existence through the working of Muhammadan jurisprudence on the raw material which consisted of the popular and administrative practice of late Umaiyad times and was endorsed, modified, or rejected by the earliest lawyers. These lawyers and their successors were guided by a double aim: by the effort to systematize—an effort which we have considered in the preceding chapter—and by the tendency to 'Islamicize', to impregnate the sphere of law with religious and ethical ideas, to subject it to Islamic norms, and to incorporate it into the body of duties incumbent on every Muslim. In doing this, Muhammadan law achieved on a much wider scale and in a vastly more detailed manner what the Prophet in the Koran had tried to do for the early Islamic community of Medina.² Those two parallel and closely connected aims underlie much of the development of Muhammadan law during its formative period, as Bergsträsser has pointed out.³

The tendency to Islamicize took various forms: it made the ancient lawyers criticize Umaiyad popular and administrative practice,⁴ it made them pay attention to the (formerly disregarded) details and implications of Koranic rules,⁵ it made them attribute the 'living tradition' of their schools of law to the Prophet and his Companions,⁶ it made them take account of the rising tide of traditions ascribed to the Prophet,⁷ it provided them with part of the material considerations which entered into their systematic reasoning.⁸ Much as the ancient schools of law represented an Islamicizing movement of opposition—though of course not necessarily political opposition—to late Umaiyad practice, the traditionists and the opposition groups within the ancient schools formed a still more thoroughly Islamicizing minority which was partly successful and, when