ABSTRACT
The Umayyads stood condemned as rulers who, in their thirst for worldly power, had lost sight of the fundamental principles of the religion. Legally the same process of review led to the conclusion that the practices of the Umayyad courts had failed properly to implement the spirit of the original laws of Islam propounded in the Quran. Grouped together for this purpose in loose studious fraternities they formed, in the last decades of Umayyad rule, the early schools of law. Islamic jurisprudence thus began not as the scientific analysis of the existing practice of courts whose authority was accepted, but as the formulation of a scheme of law in opposition to that practice. From the piecemeal review of existing practice a body of Islamic doctrine was gradually formed in the early schools. It had originated in the personal reasoning, or ray, of individual scholars, but as time passed its authority was rested on firmer foundations.
