The Fakh ed Din and the Fakh esh Sheriat of
Abu Hanifeh, the doctor intrusted with this duty, was a first attempt to
put into reasoned form the floating tradition of the faithful, and to
make a digest of existing legal practice. He and his contemporaries
examined into and put in order the accumulated wealth of authority on
which the law rested, and, taking this and rejecting that saying of the
Fathers of Islam, founded on them a school of teaching which has ever
since been the basis of Mohammedan jurisprudence.
Abu Hanifeh's code, however, does not appear to have been intended, at
the time it was drawn up, to be the absolute and final expression of all
lawful practice for the faithful. It included a vast amount of tradition
of which either no use was made by its compiler, or which stood in such
contradiction with itself that a contrary interpretation of it to his
could with equal logic be deduced. Abu Hanifeh quoted and argued rather
than determined; and as long as the Arabian mind continued to be supreme
in Islam the process of reasoning development continued.
The Hanefite code was supplemented by later doctors, Malek, Esh Shafy,
and Ibn Hanbal, and even by others whose teaching has been since
repudiated, all in the avowed intention of suiting the law still
further to the progressive needs of the faithful, and all following the
received process of selecting and interpreting and reasoning from
tradition.
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