Islam. 49Their problem was that the Quran contains very little legisla-
tion, and what laws there were had been designed for a much
simpler society. So some of the jurists began to collect "news"
or "reports" (ahadith; singular: hadith) about the Prophet and
his companions to find out how they had behaved in a given
situation. Others took the customary practice (sunnah) of
Muslims in their city as a starting point, and tried to trace it
back to one of the companions who had settled there in the
early days. Thus, they believed, they would gain true ilm, a
knowledge of what was right and how to behave. Abu Hanifah
became the greatest legal expert of the Umayyad period, and
founded a school (madhhab) of jurisprudence which Muslims
still follow today. He wrote little himself, but his disciples
preserved his teachings for posterity, while later jurists, who
developed slightly different theories, founded new madhhabs.
Islamic historiography emerged from the same kind of dis-
cussion circles. In order to evolve a solution to their current
difficulties, Muslims were finding that they had to look back to
the period of the Prophet and the rashidun. Should the caliph
be a member of the tribe of Quraysh, or was a descendant of
one of the ansar acceptable? Had Muhammad expressed any
view about this? What arrangements had Muhammad made
about the succession? What had actually happened after the
murder of Uthman? Historians such as Muhammad ibn Ishaq
(d. 767) started to collect ahadith which explained some of the
passages of the Quran by relating them to the historical cir-
cumstances in which the Prophet had received a particular rev-
elation. Ibn Ishaq wrote a detailed biography (sirah) of the
Prophet Muhammad, which stressed the virtue of the ansar
and the iniquity of the Meccans who had opposed Muham-
mad. He clearly inclined to the Shii position that it was not fit-
ting that Muslims should be ruled by the descendants of Abu
Sufyan. History had thus become a religious activity that justi-
fied a principled opposition to the regime.