EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 173opted any principle of foreign law.”^47 Christian communities in the Caliph-
ate continued to regulate their internal affairs according to Roman law;^48 but
Muslims took their law from the Qurʾān, eked out by the growing body of
sayings attributed to the Prophet and other early figures. yet in the Umayyad
and early Abbasid Caliphates, religious scholars had not yet gained their later
stranglehold on legal authority. Arguments, unfortunately very speculative,
have recently been adduced, that under Hārūn al- Rashīd (786–803) a code
of imperial law closely modeled on the Corpus of civil law was formulated,
and remained effective for the half- century that also saw the flourishing of
the philosophical translation project, until it was suppressed thanks to the
efforts of the same religious circles that resisted rational theolog y and
Muʿtazilism.^49 Whatever the outcome of this debate, it remains probable
that elements of Roman law entered the early Muslim world through Syriac
and Jewish intermediaries and the continuity of legal practice;^50 while a need
for a corpus of secular or imperial law, known by the Greek name qānūn, was
felt in later Muslim states, notably by the Ottomans.
Rabbinic Judaism
Jewish law demands attention in its own right.^51 Like Roman law, it began
with a few brisk imperatives inscribed on tablets. But we need not deal here
with the emergence of the Torah and the rest of the Jewish scriptural canon,
still not quite complete c. 100 CE. The historian of the First Millennium is
concerned with the rabbis, who slowly come into focus as a separate group
during the second century, some time after the Jewish temple was destroyed
in 70 CE and its priests dispersed.^52 The business of scriptural and legal com-
mentary in Hebrew for which the rabbis were proverbial entered its most
vigorous phase in third- century Palestine. The rabbis specialized in harmo-
nizing discrepant scriptural texts and adducing them (they were not always
ideally explicit) in support of rulings on religious, ethical, and social matters,
for example Sabbath observance. In other words, they were engaged simulta-
47 J. Schacht, An introduction to Islamic law (Oxford 1964) 20–21.
48 W. Selb, Orientalisches Kirchenrecht 1 (Vienna 1981) 213–16.
49 B. Jokisch, Islamic imperial law: Harun al- Rashid’s codification project (Berlin 2007); cf. the re-
views by R. Peters, Journal of the American Oriental Society 129 (2009) 529–31; M. Tillier, Revue des
mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 125 (2009), http://remmm.revues.org/6111.
50 A. S. Ahmedov, “On question of influence of Roman law on Islamic law,” Diritto@storia 8
(2009), http://www.dirittoestoria.it; Jokisch, Islamic imperial law [6:49] 61–62, on possible relations between
Roman and Jewish law.
51 S. T. Katz (ed.), The Cambridge history of Judaism 4 (Cambridge 2006) chaps. 12–14, 26–27,
33–35.
52 For a general account of this process up to the sixth century, see H. Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The
rabbinic movement in Palestine, 100–400 C.E. (New york 2012) 38–63, 77–83, 151–67.