110 • 8 ISLAMIC CIVILIZATIONcentury had passed, the isnads helped eliminate those falsely ascribed to
Muhammad. What if the isnads, too, were fabrications? To weed out ha-
diths with false isnads, the early ulama became experts on the life of the
Prophet, his family, his companions, and the first generation of Muslims. If
it could be proved that one link in the chain of transmitters was weak be¬
cause the person at issue was a liar or could not have known the previous
transmitter, then the hadith itself was suspect. After a century of dedicated
labor by many scholars, there emerged several authoritative collections of
hadiths—six for Sunni Muslims and several others for the Shi'i sects. They
are still being used by Muslims today.
Meanwhile, some scholars formulated the Shari'a itself. This they did by
writing books that compiled the laws of Islam for reference and guidance.
Because of the many changes that had occurred in the umma since the
Prophet's lifetime, the Quran and hadith compilations could not, most
ulama thought, cover every conceivable problem. Thus they adopted rea¬
soning by analogy, or comparing a new situation with one for which legisla¬
tion already existed. Because the Quran forbids Muslims to drink wine, the
ulama reasoned that all liquors having the same effect as wine should also
be banned. Frequently, too, Muslim scholars relied on the consensus of the
umma to settle hard legal points. This does not mean that they polled every
Muslim from Cordoba to Samarqand. Rather, consensus meant that which
could be agreed upon by those who had studied the law. Thanks to this
practice, many rules from older societies were incorporated into the Shari'a.
Accordingly, the laws of Islam could cover the lives of people far removed
from conditions known to Muhammad: a sailor in the Indian Ocean, a rice
farmer in the marshes of lower Iraq, or a Turkish horse nomad in Transoxi-
ana. In addition, the Shari'a incorporated decisions that had been made by
reputable judges in difficult or contested cases, much as legal precedents
helped to shape Anglo-Saxon law. The resort to judicial opinion, frequent
during the Arab conquests, later became rare. Whenever they could, Mus¬
lim legists relied on the Quran and the sunna.
Sunni Legal Systems
The compilation of the Shari'a into authoritative books was, at least for
the Sunni majority, completed by the late ninth century. Several "rites" or
systems of Sunni legal thought (madhhabs, a term hard to translate into
English) resulted, of which four have survived: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and
Hanbali. The Hanafi rite is the largest of the four. It grew up in Iraq under
Abbasid patronage and drew heavily on consensus and judicial reasoning