In the 1930s and 1940s, Egyptian and Syrian jurists embarked on projects to revive and reform Islamic law. These jurists were not always trained in traditional religious institutions. Many jurists were trained in European-style law schools such as the French School of Law of Cairo. As a result of the creation of these schools, a generation of legal thinkers appeared who were versed in Islamic and European law and also in other fields of modern social science. Reformist jurists wrote about law but also debated with European academics over questions of legal philosophy and history. Such debates provide a window on the state of jurists’ social-scientific thinking and research methodologies. Reformist jurists of Cairo and Damascus were eager to study Islamic law and legal history by utilizing methods and sensibilities acquired through their European-style educations. There were, however, points where the jurists refused to follow in the footsteps of European mentors. An example was in the their rejection of a European argument that Islamic law had been influenced by Roman law during its foundational period in the 8th-10th centuries. Arab jurists rejected this argument and derided the methods used to make it. Their discussions of the question provide insight into how jurists of the period thought about history and conceived of historical research methods. This paper discusses a series of academic articles written by Egyptian and European jurists, from the early 1930s, on the question of Roman law’s influence on Islamic law. The paper will discuss what these articles reveal about the ideological mindset and the methodological capabilities of early-century Islamic legal thinkers. For example, I discuss how the jurists differed with European historians over the meaning of “evidence.” I discuss how they differed with European historians over the place of polemic in historical writing. And, I discuss how jurists proposed that certain research questions were “off-limits” for historical inquiry. The paper follows a three-step progression. It introduces the educational and intellectual background of the revivalist jurists. It introduces the debate on Roman and Islamic law and the articles in-question. Finally, it comments on the articles, focusing on the aspects mentioned above. The central argument of the paper is that revivalist jurists of the interwar period fashioned themselves as jurists and historians, while they also crafted a methodology for research in legal history that borrowed from European methods but also differed from European methods.