Al-Shafi'i (767-820)

In a few dates

The early milestones of this chronology — precocious memorizations, fatwa authorization, the trial narrative — rest on classical Muslim biographical tradition and remain unverifiable in the sense of historical criticism: they are presented here as such.

A birth in Gaza, a childhood of noble poverty in Mecca

Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i was born in 150 AH (767) in Gaza, Palestine — some biographers place his birth more precisely in Ascalon, a neighboring town, before a very early move to Gaza^[16]. On his father's side he belonged to the clan of Banu al-Muttalib, a branch of the Quraysh tribe directly cousin to the Banu Hashim from which the Prophet Muhammad came and from which the Abbasid caliphs themselves descended — a tribal kinship that earned him real social prestige, without sparing him a poor childhood^[17]. His father died in Syria while he was still a child; his mother, whose origins went back to Yemen, feared that distance from the family cradle would dilute the memory of this noble ancestry and brought the young boy back to Mecca, where she raised him alone and in very modest material conditions^[18].

This material poverty remained, in Muslim biographical memory, a striking trait of his childhood: according to the tradition reported by the biographers, his mother could not afford to buy him paper, so the child wrote his lessons on pieces of bone, especially shoulder blades which he collected and kept in a jar^[19]. Despite this indigence, the child showed, according to biographical tradition, an extraordinary memory: he is said to have memorized the entire Qur'an by the age of seven, then, three years later, the whole of Malik ibn Anas's Muwatta — a voluminous collection of law and prophetic tradition which he had obtained in Mecca even before meeting its author^[20].

The Meccan prodigy: poetry, archery and first fatwas

His first teacher was Muslim ibn Khalid al-Zanji, qadi (judge) of Mecca, under whose authority he studied law and hadith during his adolescence^[21]. Al-Shafi'i also spent part of his youth among the Bedouin tribes of the desert, especially with the Hudhayl, renowned for the purity of their classical Arabic — a sojourn to which biographical tradition attributes the remarkable eloquence that would later serve him before the caliph himself^[22]. This period also left a lasting mark on him for poetry and archery, two disciplines associated with Arab tribal aristocracy; he remained all his life a recognized poet, whose posthumous collection, the Diwan, gathers verses of moral and spiritual wisdom still recited today^[23]. At fifteen, his Meccan teacher is said to have issued him, according to the same tradition, the formal authorization to deliver legal opinions (fatwas) — an early and rare recognition of his competence^[24].

Among the verses tradition attributes to him — on the effort required for any elevation, like the diver who risks his life for pearls, or on true knowledge distinguished from mere memorization — none could be verified here against a critical edition of the collection: they are therefore presented as a paraphrase of themes traditionally attached to his name, not as established quotations^[25].

A decade in Medina under Malik ibn Anas

At a date biographers place variously — thirteen years old according to some accounts, about twenty according to others — al-Shafi'i left Mecca for Medina, where the greatest living jurist in the entire Muslim world then taught: Malik ibn Anas^[26]. According to the medieval biographer Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi, the young man had already obtained and memorized the Muwatta before even arriving in Medina; once there, he never ceased soliciting Malik's permission to recite it to him from memory in his presence, which he finally obtained^[27].

Malik, impressed by his young student's memory, learning and intelligence, accepted him into his closest circle^[28]. Al-Shafi'i thus remained in training in Medina for several years, until his teacher's death in 179 AH (795) — a master-disciple bond so strong that, even after distancing himself on several points of method, al-Shafi'i never ceased designating Malik as "the teacher" (al-mu'allim) and showing him the deepest respect^[29]. By the time of Malik's death, al-Shafi'i already had, in his contemporaries' eyes, the reputation of a brilliant jurist.

The governorship of Najran and the trial for Alid sedition

At about thirty, al-Shafi'i obtained an administrative post in Najran, Yemen, under the authority of the Yemeni governor of the time^[30]. There he showed himself, according to biographical tradition, an administrator of uncommon integrity and justice — to the point of drawing the hostility of local rivals jealous of his moral rigor^[31]. These adversaries accused him before the central power of having assisted Alid partisans in revolt against the Abbasid caliphate — an extremely grave accusation, punishable by death, at a time when Shiite uprisings against Baghdad were numerous and severely repressed^[32].

In 187 AH (803), al-Shafi'i was, according to the biographical accounts, arrested, chained and brought to Raqqa before Caliph Harun al-Rashid to be tried alongside other defendants in the same case^[33]. According to the biographical sources, several of the co-defendants were executed, but al-Shafi'i escaped capital punishment thanks to the force of his own defense before the caliph^[34] — some accounts adding that the Hanafi jurist Muhammad al-Shaybani, then present at court and already influential with the authorities, intervened in his favor by presenting him as a well-known and respected scholar of sacred law, not a political agitator^[35].

Baghdad: the decisive encounter with Muhammad al-Shaybani

This ordeal had a decisive consequence: it brought al-Shafi'i into close contact with Muhammad al-Shaybani (d. 189 AH/805), one of the principal disciples of Abu Hanifa and the great living representative of the Iraqi school of law. Biographical tradition holds that this traumatic episode convinced al-Shafi'i to devote the rest of his career to the study of law rather than to any form of administrative or political service^[36]. He then became al-Shaybani's student in Baghdad, later describing all he drew from him as "a camel's load of learning"^[37].

It was in this Baghdadi context that al-Shafi'i worked out his first personal legal synthesis, later known as the old doctrine (al-madhhab al-qadim), influenced both by Abu Hanifa's teaching transmitted by al-Shaybani and by Malik's received in Medina^[38]. He did not, however, content himself with passively assimilating Hanafi teaching: he actively took part in legal jousts with al-Shaybani's disciples, vigorously defending the Malikite school's positions there, to the point that some Hanafi partisans complained to al-Shaybani himself about the criticisms addressed to them by this young Hijazi scholar^[39]. A formal debate is said to have pitted the two men against each other over their differences of method; the biographical sources remain divided on its outcome^[40].

Mecca, then back to Baghdad: the maturing of a method

Around 189 AH (804), al-Shafi'i left Baghdad to return to Mecca, where he taught in the Sacred Mosque and left a deep impression on many law students — among them the future founder of the Hanbali school, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, then a young man^[41]. It was during this Meccan period that his legal reasoning truly began to mature: he came to recognize the real force of certain Hanafi arguments while more clearly identifying the weaknesses proper to the Malikite and Hanafi methods taken in isolation^[42].

During his second Baghdadi stay (195-199 AH/810-814), his stature as a jurist had become sufficient to allow him to establish a genuinely independent line of legal thought; biographical tradition reports that Caliph al-Ma'mun — who came to the throne in 198 AH (813), succeeding al-Amin — then offered him the office of qadi (judge), which he declined — faithful in this to the same reluctance Malik ibn Anas had shown before him toward the Abbasid authorities' solicitations^[43].

What is usul al-fiqh? A science of sources before a science of rules

Before al-Shafi'i, Muslim jurists already applied varied methods of reasoning — reliance on the Prophet's traditions, use of reasoned personal opinion (ra'y), consideration of local practice — but no work had yet formulated, systematically and with argument, the very rules governing legal reasoning. This second-degree effort — a reflection on method rather than one more collection of rules — is what is called in Arabic usul al-fiqh, literally "the roots of law," as opposed to fiqh itself, which designates the concrete rules deduced from these roots. Al-Shafi'i is unanimously credited, by Muslim tradition as by academic Orientalism, with having written the first systematic treatise devoted exclusively to this question of method: his Risala^[44].

The Risala: Islam's first treatise on legal methodology

Its full title, Kitab al-Risala fi Usul al-Fiqh ("The Book of the Epistle on the foundations of law"), designates a work which biographical tradition traces to a request addressed to al-Shafi'i by a great traditionist of Basra, 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Mahdi, eager to obtain a rigorous explanation of the respective legal scope of the Qur'an and the Sunna — an account modern specialists, however, judge unverifiable in the current state of the sources^[45]. The work consists of fifteen sections dealing, among other things, with the clear declaration of the revealed text, the nature of legal knowledge, the authority of the Qur'an, prophetic obligations, abrogation, prophetic traditions, consensus, analogical reasoning, personal opinion, discretionary juristic preference and licit disagreement among scholars^[46].

The hierarchy of sources: Qur'an, Sunna, consensus, analogy

Posterity has retained from the Risala an ordered hierarchy of four sources of Muslim law:

One point calls for a plain explanation here: saying that the Sunna occupies, in al-Shafi'i's thought, an authority "almost equal" to the Qur'an does not mean he places the Prophet's word above Revelation itself, but that he absolutely refuses to set aside an authenticated prophetic tradition in the name of a reading of the Qur'an that would contradict it: for him, it is the Sunna which specifies, explicates and sometimes restricts the scope of a Qur'anic verse, and not the reverse — "the Prophet's command is the command of God Almighty," he writes in substance^[47]. This insistence had a lasting linguistic and doctrinal effect: under his pen, the word Sunna, which previously designated any form of ancient tribal or communal custom, came to mean almost exclusively the Sunna of the Prophet himself — what the Orientalist John Burton called al-Shafi'i's "principal achievement"^[48].

Contemporary scholarly debate, however, qualifies the classical "four sources" presentation: the Orientalist Joseph Lowry, in his in-depth study of the Risala, showed that the text itself, taken literally, truly recognizes only two sources in full right — the Qur'an and authenticated prophetic tradition — ijma' and qiyas appearing there not as independent sources but as tools for applying and understanding the first two; it is the later legal tradition that froze the presentation into four sources on equal footing^[49]. This point of academic nuance takes nothing away from the treatise's initial ambition: to fix, once and for all, what may legitimately count as a foundation of law and what may not.

Against free opinion and against local practice: a method narrowed to the text

The great polemical originality of the Risala lies in its refusing equally the two great methodological temptations of its time. On one side, it opposes the broad use Iraqi jurists of Abu Hanifa's school made of ra'y (reasoned personal opinion) and istihsan (discretionary juristic preference), which al-Shafi'i judged insufficiently anchored in the revealed text^[50]. On the other, it directly contests the central doctrine of his own teacher Malik ibn Anas, the living practice of the Medinans ('amal ahl al-Madina), which al-Shafi'i deemed too particularist — proper to a single city, however venerable — to found a universal legal method, valid for the entire Muslim world^[51]. Between reasoning judged too free on one side and local custom judged too particular on the other, al-Shafi'i proposes a third way: all analogical reasoning must rest, condition by condition, on a case already decided explicitly by the Qur'an or by an authenticated hadith — never on the jurist's intuition alone nor on the usage of a single city, however holy^[52].

Ahmad ibn Hanbal, his student in Baghdad and then in Mecca, is said to have later summed up, according to biographical tradition, his teacher's contribution to the entire Muslim community in a formula of praise comparing al-Shafi'i, for Muslims, to the sun for the earth and to health for the body. This formula, widely handed down in the Manaqib al-Shafi'i collections including al-Bayhaqi's, is presented here in paraphrase: its exact primary reference (work, part, page) could not be located and is therefore not asserted^[53].

The mosque of 'Amr ibn al-'As and the support of Sayyida Nafisa

In 199 AH (814-815), for reasons biographers describe as uncertain — most likely linked to the intellectual and social pressures exerted on him by the dominant Malikite and Hanafi circles of the Hijaz and Baghdad — al-Shafi'i left Iraq for good for Egypt^[54]. There, teaching in the venerable mosque of 'Amr ibn al-'As in Fustat, his teaching produced its deepest impact: his principal disciples were Egyptian, and Shafi'ism became there, in the following centuries, Malikism's great rival for legal supremacy in Egypt^[55].

Biographical tradition reports that al-Shafi'i received in Egypt the support of an eminent figure of the Prophet's descendants, Sayyida Nafisa, great-granddaughter of Hasan ibn 'Ali, who contributed financially to supporting his studies and to whom he dictated several of his latest works^[56]. Nafisa had married Ishaq al-Mu'tamin, son of Ja'far al-Sadiq — the same spiritual teacher who had, according to tradition, taught Abu Hanifa as well as Malik ibn Anas: according to this genealogical account, the four great founding imams of the Sunni schools would thus all be linked, directly or indirectly, to the Prophet's household through Ja'far al-Sadiq^[57]. This tradition, passed on by several classical biographers, must be received as an account of genealogical piety rather than as a chain of filiation strictly verifiable in the sense of modern historical criticism.

Revising one's own doctrine: a rare intellectual rigor

What distinguishes al-Shafi'i's Egyptian sojourn from every other stage of his career is that there he himself revised, publicly and in writing, a significant number of his earlier legal positions. Later legal tradition thus distinguishes his old doctrine (al-madhhab al-qadim), worked out in Baghdad and handed down notably by Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Abu Thawr, from his new doctrine (al-madhhab al-jadid), worked out in Egypt in contact with the teaching of the great Egyptian traditionist al-Layth ibn Sa'd — who died before al-Shafi'i could meet him, but whose school kept handing down a method of hadith analysis which perceptibly refined the aging teacher's thought^[58]. It was in Egypt that al-Shafi'i wrote the definitive, preserved version of his Risala, as well as most of the texts gathered in the Kitab al-Umm^[59].

This capacity to correct his own system publicly, without fear of losing authority, has remained in Muslim memory a distinctive sign of intellectual probity: far from being an admission of weakness, the avowed revision of the old doctrine in favor of the new was understood by Shafi'i tradition as proof that al-Shafi'i placed fidelity to the text above fidelity to his own earlier system^[60].

The Kitab al-Umm and the circle of Egyptian disciples

Al-Shafi'i did not himself write out the whole of his works: according to all his biographers, several of his closest disciples wrote down what he dictated, then read it back to him aloud so that he could correct and clarify his thought — a process which explains the collective genesis of the texts handed down under his name^[61]. Three Egyptian disciples principally ensured the preservation and spread of his new doctrine: Isma'il al-Muzani (d. 264 AH/878), author of an abridgment (Mukhtasar) which became one of the reference texts of the entire later Shafi'i school; Yusuf al-Buwayti (d. 231 AH/846), who succeeded him at the head of his teaching circle in Cairo; and al-Rabi' al-Muradi (d. 270 AH/884), principal transmitter of the Kitab al-Umm as it has come down to us^[62].

In all, tradition attributes to al-Shafi'i more than a hundred works, only a fraction of which has come down to us with certainty: besides the Risala and the Kitab al-Umm, he is credited with a Musnad of hadiths, a treatise on divergences between prophetic traditions (Ikhtilaf al-Hadith), a collection entitled al-Sunan al-Ma'thur, a work on the formation of consensus (Jima' al-'Ilm) and his poetic collection, the Diwan^[63].

Distrust of speculative theology

On the theological plane, al-Shafi'i placed himself resolutely on the side of the traditionists of his time, hostile to Mu'tazilite i'tizal and, more broadly, to any form of speculative theology (kalam) importing into reflection on God categories borrowed from Greek philosophy^[64]. His defiance of this discipline remained famous for the severity of the formula attributed to him by Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi in his Manaqib al-Shafi'i: committing every sin — with the exception of associating equals with God — would, in substance, still be better than devoting oneself to kalam. As the work could not be consulted directly, this formula is presented here in paraphrase, not as an established quotation^[65].

The judgment of his peers and the title of "renewer"

The most often reported judgment on al-Shafi'i's fidelity to prophetic tradition remains that of his own disciple Ahmad ibn Hanbal, to whom Shafi'i biographical tradition attributes a strong eulogy: no scholar of his time would have erred less than he, nor followed the Sunna of the Prophet more closely. As the exact primary reference of this formula (work, part, page) could not be located, it is presented here in paraphrase, not as an established quotation^[66].

Several centuries later, the Indian reformer Shah Wali Allah al-Dihlawi (18th century) would designate al-Shafi'i as the mujaddid — the "renewer" — of the second century of the Hijra, an honorific distinction reserved, in Sunni tradition, for the greatest regenerating figures of each century^[67].

Death in Fustat and the question of a violent death

Al-Shafi'i died in Fustat on 30 Rajab 204 AH (January 20, 820), at an age the sources place between fifty-two and fifty-four depending on the birth date retained^[68]. A biographical tradition reports that he may have succumbed to injuries inflicted by partisans of a Malikite disciple named Fityan, in retaliation for a public victory al-Shafi'i had won in a formal debate^[69]. The great traditionist Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, however, expressed serious doubts about the reliability of this account, judging it to come from a source he himself described as unreliable^[70]. Biographers agree in any case that al-Shafi'i suffered, in the last years of his life, from a painful intestinal illness accompanied by hemorrhoids, which considerably weakened him — so that the exact and immediate cause of his death remains, in the current state of the sources, uncertain^[71].

The Cairo burial place and its mausoleum

He was buried in the funerary vault of the Banu 'Abd al-Hakam family, in the Cairo necropolis near the Muqattam, today known as the City of the Dead^[72]. A monumental dome was raised over his tomb in 608 AH (1211-1212) by the Ayyubid prince al-Malik al-Kamil — then viceroy of Egypt for his father al-'Adil, before becoming sultan in 1218 — on the occasion of the burial of his own mother beside the jurist; a first structure already existed on the site, with the madrasa founded by Saladin and a carved wooden cenotaph dated 1178-1179^[73]. Al-Shafi'i's mausoleum remains today one of the great places of popular pilgrimage in Islamic Cairo, where visitors still come, according to local custom, to present their requests for justice^[74].

The table of the four great Sunni schools

The following table places the Shafi'i school among the four great Sunni schools of law, three of whose four founders are linked by a direct teacher-to-student relationship over three successive generations.

A worldwide spread of several hundred million followers

The Shafi'i school met its greatest success in Egypt, where it durably rivaled Malikism, before spreading, carried by trade and pilgrimage networks, to far more distant regions. It dominates today in Lower Egypt, Yemen, the whole Horn of Africa (Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Muslim regions of Ethiopia), Southeast Asia — most particularly Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, where it is the very largely majority rite — among part of the Kurdish populations of Iraq, Syria and Turkey, on the Indian coastline (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka), as well as in Sri Lanka and the Maldives^[75]. No census breaking down Muslims by legal school exists, so no overall figure or percentage can be put forward reliably: the estimates sometimes cited, on the order of several hundred million followers, shift and are not consensual, and are not taken up here^[76]. The Shafi'i school nonetheless remains one of the most followed schools of the Sunni world, dominant in several of the regions cited.

The great later commentators of the school

The Shafi'i school produced, over the following centuries, several of the greatest figures of all classical Islamic thought: the theologian and mystic al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the great hadith compiler and exegete al-Nawawi (1233-1277), the encyclopedist al-Suyuti (1445-1505), as well as the commentators al-Bayhaqi, al-Mawardi and Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, the last being precisely the one who cast doubt on the account of a violent death of al-Shafi'i mentioned above^[77]. This exceptional intellectual posterity explains why the Shafi'i school, although today geographically dominant over a narrower area than the Hanafi school, retains considerable doctrinal and academic weight across the Sunni world.

The father of the science of Muslim law

Beyond the school alone that bears his name, al-Shafi'i remains, in Muslim memory as in academic Orientalism, the figure who moved Islamic law from the status of a collection of disparate rules to that of a methodologically founded science. The Islamologist John Burton credits him not only with having founded the science of fiqh in Islam, but with having established its very importance for religion as a whole: where his contemporaries and predecessors set out to define Islam as a social and historical phenomenon, al-Shafi'i sought to define a revealed Law^[78]. It is also to the success of his method that the Islamologist Joseph Schacht attributes the shift of the Muslim community's attention, in the following generations, from traditions attributed to the Companions alone toward only those ahadith explicitly going back to the Prophet himself^[79].

A Catholic view on the Sunna, reason and the authority of the text

The case of al-Shafi'i invites, from the strict standpoint of a Catholic encyclopedia, a substantive remark on the nature of the doctrinal authority he seeks to found. The Catholic Church looks with real respect on the intellectual effort represented by building a rigorous method for interpreting a text held to be revealed: the Second Vatican Council invites Catholics to esteem, in Muslims, their worship of the one God, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth^[80]. Al-Shafi'i's very approach — refusing both the uncontrolled personal opinion of the Hanafi jurists and the local Medinan custom defended by Malik, in favor of strict anchoring in the revealed text and in a verified chain of transmission — presents a striking, and instructive, analogy with the Catholic requirement of fidelity to the sacred text against any purely subjective interpretation.

But this analogy stops precisely where the decisive question of the authority that rules in the last resort begins. Al-Shafi'i wanted, by his method, to put an end to the arbitrariness of free reasoning and the dispersion of local customs; yet the paradox of his enterprise is that his own synthesis, however rigorous, did not put an end to the plurality of competing legal schools but on the contrary added its own way — the third in chronological order of foundation, become one of the four recognized — alongside those of Abu Hanifa and Malik, soon joined by that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. This is where the contrast with Catholicism is sharpest: the Catholic Church never entrusts the authentic and definitive interpretation of Revelation to the mere internal coherence of a textual and analogical method, however rigorous, nor to the legitimate plurality of several competing schools of qualified jurists (mujtahid) — it entrusts it to a living Magisterium, exercised in continuity with the Apostles and assisted, according to its faith, by the Holy Spirit's assistance so as not to err on points defined as belonging to the deposit of faith^[81]. Where classical Sunni Islam, including in its most methodical and most textual form — al-Shafi'i's own —, assumes and legitimizes a plurality of equally valid legal ways, the Church affirms on the contrary the existence of a single organ of authentic interpretation, precisely to avoid the doctrinal dispersion that even the greatest systematizer of Muslim law never managed to overcome by the sole force of his method. Readers wishing to go deeper into the doctrinal question of Islam and the Catholic position on it will find a complete treatment in the Islam and the Catholic response dossier.

• Muhammad (c. 570-632) — the founder of Islam, whose teaching structures al-Shafi'i's entire legal method
• Malik ibn Anas (711-795) — al-Shafi'i's Medinan teacher, founder of the Maliki school
• Abu Hanifa (699-767) — the founder, at Kufa, of the Hanafi school, whose disciple Muhammad al-Shaybani was al-Shafi'i's second teacher in Baghdad
• Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855) — student of al-Shafi'i in Baghdad and in Mecca, future founder of the Hanbali school
• Averroes (1126-1198) — Maliki qadi before becoming the great commentator of Aristotle, another great figure of medieval Maliki law
• Islam and the Catholic response — the overall doctrinal dossier on Islam and the Church's position