precepts of Sharia were passed down directly from the Islamic prophet Muhammad without "historical development" and the emergence of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) also goes back to the lifetime of Muhammad. In this view, his companions and followers took what he did and approved of as a model (sunnah) and transmitted this information to the succeeding generations in the form of hadith. These reports led first to informal discussion and then systematic legal thought, articulated with greatest success in the eighth and ninth centuries by the master jurists Abu Hanifah, Malik ibn Anas, Al-Shafi‘i, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who are viewed as the founders of the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʿi, and Hanbali legal schools (madhhabs) of Sunni jurisprudence. Modern historians have presented alternative theories of the formation of fiqh. At first Western scholars accepted the general outlines of the traditionalist account. In the late 19th century, an influential revisionist hypothesis was advanced by Ignac Goldziher and elaborated by Joseph Schacht in the mid-20th century. Schacht and other scholars argued that having conquered much more populous agricultural and urban societies with already existing laws and legal needs, the initial Muslim efforts to formulate legal norms regarded the Quran and Muhammad's hadiths as just one source of law, with jurist personal opinions, the legal practice of conquered peoples, and the decrees and decisions of the caliphs also being valid sources. According to this theory, most canonical hadiths did not originate with Muhammad but were actually created at a later date, despite the efforts of hadith scholars to weed out fabrications. After it became accepted that legal norms must be formally grounded in scriptural sources, proponents of rules of jurisprudence supported by the hadith would extend the chains of transmission of the hadith back to Muhammad's companions. In his view, the real architect of Islamic jurisprudence was Al-Shafi‘i (d. 820 CE/204 AH), who formulated this idea (that legal norms must be formally grounded in scriptural sources) and other elements of classical legal theory in his work al-risala, but who was preceded by a body of Islamic law not based on primacy of Muhammad's hadiths. While the origin of hadith remains a subject of scholarly controversy, this theory (of Goldziher and Schacht) has given rise to objections, and modern historians generally adopt more cautious, intermediate positions, and it is generally accepted that early Islamic jurisprudence developed out of a combination of administrative and popular practices shaped