ABSTRACT
The U$iil, finally, offer a means of stabilising the relationship between the legal opinions of the 'modern jurists' and the concept of an unchanging legal tradition as embodied in the concept of taqlid and the literary genre of mutun. At the level of the U$111, all the questions discussed in this essay boil down to the relationship between isti/:lsiin and qiyiis - both of them equally acceptable within the framework of the legal tradition of Islamic law. Islamic law, in my opinion, should he studied by comparing the development of the different layers of the legal literature and defining their interrelationship. It seems to me that such a way of studying Islamic law would allow us to see wide-ranging changes at certain levels of the legal literature and it should also allow us to understand the functioning of Islamic law as a tradition in change and one of the ways in which Near Eastern society reconciled its awareness of change with its preservation of a normative tradition.
