This study aims to reveal the history of the development of Islamic law according to the orientalists. This study uses the Library Research method with a juridical analysis approach to obtain accurate results from various books written by oreantists. The results of this study indicate that Schacht and Goldziher stated that from the time of the Prophet until the first century of hijrah, Islamic law as we know it today has not been formed. Although the Qur'an has laid the foundations of family law, inheritance and ritual worship, so that in many cases, legal practice in early Islam has deviated from the literal provisions of the Qur'an. But what distinguishes the two originalist thinking. Goldziher prefers to compare the methods of hadith criticism used by orthodox Muslim hadith experts with the "modern" hadith criticism method, where a hadith that is said to be authentic by classical Muslim methods, its authenticity is doubted by the "modern" hadith criticism method, while Schacth considers that the classical schools focuses more on the study of hadith as a source of law and tends to ignore the Koran as the main source in the study of Islamic law, in contrast to the two orientalists James Norman argues that human reason is the most authoritative source of law to regulate social life, not sourced from the Koran. and hadith as in the concept of Islamic law, the concept of Islamic law according to Norman James is no longer relevant to be applied to modern society.