After students completed their post-graduate education, they were awarded doctorates giving them the status of "faqih" (meaning "master of law"), "mufti" (meaning "professor of legal opinions") and "mudarris" (meaning "teacher"), which were later translated into Latin as "magister", "professor" and "doctor" respectively. Madrasas issued the "ijazat attadris" in a single field, the Islamic religious law of Sharia. Other academic subjects, including the natural sciences, philosophy and literary studies, were treated "ancillary" to the study of the Sharia. The Islamic law degree in Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious madrasa, was traditionally granted without final examinations, but on the basis of the students' attentive attendance to courses. However, the postgraduate doctorate in law was only obtained after "an oral examination." In a 1999 paper, Makdisi points out that, in much the same way granting the "ijazah" degree was in the hands of professors, the same was true for the early period of the University of Bologna, where degrees were originally granted by professors. He also points out that, much like the "ijazat attadris" was confined to law, the first degrees at Bologna were also originally confined to law, before later extending to other subjects. However, several other scholars have criticized Makdisi's work. Norman Daniel, in a 1984 paper, criticized an earlier work of Makdisi for relying on similarities between the two education systems rather than citing historical evidence for a transmission. He stated that Makdisi "does not seriously consider the spontaneous recurrence of phenomena", and notes that similarities between two systems do not automatically imply that one has created the other. He further states that there is a lack of evidence for schools in the short-lived Arab settlements of France and mainland Italy, which Makdisi argues may have been links between the Islamic and European educational systems, as well as a lack of evidence of the alleged transmission of scholastic ideas between the two systems altogether. In a discussion of Makdisi's 1989 thesis, Toby Huff argued that there was never any equivalent to the bachelor's degree or doctorate in the Islamic madrasahs, owing to the lack of a faculty teaching a unified curriculum.