ABSTRACT
In the ninth century Muslim jurists began to conceive of the law as a coherent body of legal norms rather than as a collection of disconnected rules. This understanding of a unified legal framework undoubtedly precipitated many of the legal disputes that contributed to the rise of schools of law. Criticism of an opponent’s position in the eighth century was increasingly expressed by appeal to principles that underpinned the legal system and to which one was committed and to which one’s opponents had, one argued, failed to adhere. Coherence of the law was expressed in the formulation of these principles, which achieved three objectives: they determined the sources from which the law was derived; they described the mechanism whereby rules might be deduced from these sources; and they delineated the parameters of who could carry out this deduction.
