Islamic law’s origins trace only to about a century after the Prophet’s death

Evidence

In The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1950), he demonstrated that the end of the eighth century was a watershed in the development of Islamic law. As Patricia Crone put it, in Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (1987), Schacht’s book ‘is a work of fundamental importance. It showed that the beginnings of Islamic law cannot be traced further back in the Islamic tradition than to about a century after the Prophet’s death, and this strengthened the a priori case in favour of the view that foreign elements entered the Shar’ia.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates about the reliability of oral tradition and textual dating found in biblical and other religious historical studies.