New Worlds and Th eir Challenges 95ever, a diff erent matter. Th e Quran, the sacred book of the Islamic faith, did
not itself off er much guidance. But a body of law known as siyar gradually
grew up to deal with such issues. (Siyar is the plural of the Arabic word sirah,
which simply means conduct or behavior.) We must beware of thinking of
the Islamic siyar in terms of our modern conception of international law
because it was seen as a law exclusively for Muslims, not for infi dels. It was a
body of rules that instructed Muslim rulers on how they were to behave to-
ward nonbelievers. In modern parlance, it would be characterized as the
Muslim law of foreign relations, rather than as international law per se.
Since siyar was seen as part of Islamic law, it followed that it must, in prin-
ciple at least, fl ow from the same sources as Muslim law generally. In prac-
tice, however, that was not really the case, since the traditional sources of
Islamic law had too little to off er in the way of substantive rules of conduct.
Siyar was therefore, to a large extent, separate from other branches of Mus-
lim law, being derived largely from custom and from reason rather than
from the prescriptions of the Quran or practices of the Prophet Muhammad
(which were, and still are, the two principal sources of Islamic law).
Th e earliest writing on siyar was in the middle of the eighth century, by
Abd al- Rahman al- Awza’i, who lived in Syria but of whom otherwise noth-
ing is known. He wrote a book— apparently the fi rst ever— on the subject of
the laws of war. Although it has not survived as written, its substance is
known. It dealt with a number of discrete, specifi c topics of a practical na-
ture, with the greatest attention given to the treatment of enemies and the
division of the spoils of battle. Th e fi rst exposition of siyar as a whole, how-
ever, appears to have been accorded by the Hanafi te school of Muslim juris-
prudence, which grew up in Iraq in the late eighth and early ninth centu-
ries. One of the leading early fi gures of this school, a certain Abu Yusuf,
wrote a Book on Taxation (Kitab al- Kharaj) , which contained a treatment of
legal rules on foreign relations between states. It is said that the book was
written at the request of Caliph Haroun al- Rashid.
Much more signifi cant was a work written a few years later, just aft er the
turn of the ninth century, by Abu Allah Muhammad ibn al- Hasan ibn Far-
qad al- Shaybani—usually known simply as Sheikh al- Shaybani. A native of
Iraq, he studied law under Abu Hanifa (the nominal found er of the Hanafi te
School) himself, continuing his studies, aft er Abu Hanifa’s death, under
Abu Yusuf. He appears also to have studied for a time under al- Awza’i. In