Was al-Shafii the Master Architect of Islamic Jurisprudence?

Abstract

During the last three or four decades, modern scholarship has increasingly come to recognize Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi c i (d. 820) as having played a most central role in the early development of Islamic jurisprudence. It was Joseph Schacht who, more than anyone else, demonstrated Shafi c i's remarkable success in anchoring the entire edifice of the law not only in the Qur'an, which by his time was taken for granted, but mainly, and more importantly, in the traditions of the Prophet. 1 Shafi c i's prominent status has been further bolstered by the fact that he was the first Muslim jurist ever to articulate his legal theory in writing, in what has commonly become known as al-Risala. 2 Schacht's portentous findings, coupled with the high esteem in which Shafi c i is held in medieval and modern Islam, have led Islamicists to believe that Shafi c i was the "father of Muslim jurisprudence" and the founder of the science of legal theory, properly called usiil al-fiqh. 3 His Risala is thought to have become "a model for both jurists and theologians who wrote on the subject." 4 And although it is acknowledged that later theory further elaborated the themes of ShafiTs treatise and sometimes even modified them, the origination of legal theory nonetheless remains his achievement. The medieval dictum that "Shafi c i is to usiil al-fiqh what Aristotle was to logic" is still as valid as when it first appeared. 5 This being the state of our knowledge, there appears to be little reason to question the purported fact that since its inception in the work of Shafi c i, usiil al-fiqh, as we now know it, became, in an unwavering continuity, the standard legal methodology of Sunni Islam. There is even less reason to question the 9th century, chronologically so close to Shafi c i, as an era that was dominated by the influential ShafiStes who were zealously safeguarding the teachings of their master. True, there were some tendencies in legal thought-such as the Zahiriyya-that diverged from the mainstream jurisprudence as expressed in the legacy of Shafi c i, but these soon dropped altogether out of the scene and, consequently, they are thought to be rather marginal. Thus, the continuity between ShafN's theory and classical usiil al-fiqh would seem to represent a natural development, especially in that it tallies with our

The <i>Miḥna</i> of Imām al-Shāfi‘ī

“…Indeed, (Hallaq 1993) pointed out through the close examination of manāqib and biographical sources that "Shafi'i's prominent status has been further bolstered by the fact that he was the first Muslim jurist ever to articulate his legal theory in writing, in what has commonly become known as al-Risāla." However, he goes on to say that this book "and the theory that it embodied had very little if any effect during the 9th century; and that the image of Shafi'i as the founder of uṣūl al-fiqh was a later creation".…”

“…Moreover, according to Hallaq, his image "as the founder of this discipline began to grow only from the beginning the 10th century." As such, we have to pay attention that evaluations of al-Shāfi'ī have changed to some extent (Hallaq 1993, The Miḥna of Imām al-Shāfi'ī 587-599;Shāfi'ī 1961). For example, Chaumont considers al-Shāfi'ī as "the eponym, rather than the founder, of the Shāfi'ī school (madhhab)" (Chaumont 1995, 181).…”

Clarifying Islamic perspectives on leadership

“…Any talk of Islamic or Muslim leadership without reference to the texts, and ultimately to the character, actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, lack verstehen (Weber, 1978,pp. 8-9, 57), in the sense that they do not engage with the meaning structures recognised by Muslims throughout history (Hallaq, 1993). This is the key to clarifying our understanding of leadership in the Muslim world.…”

Bridging the Gap

“…3 In a 1993 article Wael Hallaq used the observation that al-Shāfiʿī's work differs in important respects from later works to deny the existence of a genealogical relationship between the Risāla and the classical genre of legal theory. 4 He argued instead that the Risāla is primarily a theoretical work whose aim is to establish the authority of hadith, while the discipline of legal theory concerns itself with theorizing the relationship between reason and revelation. His search in Ibn al-Nadīm's Fihrist for early works with the word uṣūl in the title having been unsuccessful, Hallaq concluded that there is no evidence of legal-theoretical literature before the generation of Ibn Surayj, a full century later.…”