This volume, part of a series on Makers of the Muslim World, provides an account of the life and thought of Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafiʿi (d. 820), the eponym of the Shafiʿi madhhab, one of the four well-known traditions of legal study that have survived until the present in Sunni Islam. Drawing on the available primary sources as well as important recent studies by Joseph Lowry, Mohyddin Yahia, Ahmed El-Shamsy, Christopher Melchert, and others, the work provides a readable narrative of al-Shafiʿi's life that attempts to flesh out his character and to provide an overview of his larger ideas in a form accessible to a general audience. Al-Shafiʿi's biography is presented in the first two chapters, and his thought is discussed in the next three chapters. The sixth chapter discusses al-Shafiʿi's legacy and the construction of his image in later history. The work also includes suggestions for further reading, a bibliography, and an index.
The broad outlines of al-Shafiʿi's life are well known, though certain parts of his biography are uncertain. He was raised in the Hijaz, where he studied with leading scholars in Mecca, including Malik b. Anas. He served as a judge for some time in Yemen, but was implicated in an ʿAlid revolt and taken to Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, as a captive. After being released, he studied, or at least had significant scholarly exchanges, with Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Shaybani (d. 805). He returned to teach in Mecca, then traveled once again to Iraq around 810. In about 814, he left for Egypt, traveling in the retinue of ʿAbd Allah, the son of ʿAbbas b. Musa, the new governor of the province, and soon established himself in Fustat—then the capital—as a prominent professor of law. He died in Fustat in 820, leaving behind a number of dedicated disciples who preserved his works and methods.
The chapters on al-Shafiʿi's legal theory draw particularly on the recent studies of Joseph Lowry and Ahmed al-Shamsi. The author agrees with them against the skeptics Norman Calder and Wael Hallaq that the Risala and Kitab al-Umm are both integral texts authored by al-Shafiʿi and that the form we have them in was established in the 9th century, something that has been established by citations of those works in other early works on hadith, law, and legal theory by Ibn Qutaybah (d. 885), Muhammad b. Nasr al-Marwazi (d. 930), Abu Bakr b. al-Mundhir (d. 930), and others, as well as by the abridgements of al-Shafiʿi's works by al-Buwayti (d. 846) and al-Muzani (d. 878). In the Risala and his other works on legal theory such as Jimaʿ al-ʿIlm and Ikhtilaf al-Hadith, al-Shafiʿi stresses the importance of the Sunna (literally, the condoned, time-honored practice) for the elaboration of the law, restricting its meaning to the Practice of the Prophet, and insisting that it is preserved in hadith reports alone, not in the practice of the people of Medina, as the Malikis assert, or in the opinions of the Companions. In addition, Sunna is equated with the Qurʾanic term al-ḥikma, which occurs in tandem with the Qurʾan. The analysis of the Risala follows that of Lowry, on the whole, going against earlier scholarship by stating that al-Shafiʿi did not present a theory of Islamic legal hermeneutics based on four sources—the Qurʾan, the Sunna, consensus, and ijtihād—but rather that he presents the sources as two, the Qurʾan and the Sunna. He restricts consensus to a minor role, and he allows ijtihād only in cases in which the direct evidence is insufficient to lead to a ruling. He allows qiyās, or legal analogy, only if strict and convincing comparison can be made. Instead, the organization of the work is based on the five modes of bayān, God's exposition of the law to the believers. The first mode occurs when the Qurʾan alone presents a ruling; the second, when the Qurʾan presents a sufficient statement but the Sunna adds detail; the third, when the Sunna clarifies or elaborates on a ruling given in summary form in the Qurʾan; the fourth, when the Sunna presents a ruling independently; and the fifth, when the jurist must use inference and legal interpretation sanctioned by and based on the Qurʾan and the Sunna. Al-Shafiʿi's jurisprudence might therefore be characterized as a two-source theory in which the two sources interact in the ways just outlined and never contradict each other. In order to explain apparent contradictions, al-Shafiʿi employs a number of hermeneutical devices, many of which are familiar from later texts of legal theory: abrogation; a distinction regarding the scope of a ruling—to whom it applies—as a general (ʿāmm) or specific (khāṣṣ) injunction; a distinction regarding ambiguous or undifferentiated (mujmal) and unambiguous (naṣṣ) rulings, and so on.
The discussion of Kitab al-Umm stresses that al-Shafiʿi carefully parsed the legal prooftexts from the Qurʾan and the Sunna, addressed the many variables that might affect legal rulings, striving for comprehensive coverage of the possibilities that might arise, and in many cases set out to prove his position rather than merely assert it. The chapters of al-Umm on the points of law, as well as his other shorter treatises on contested points of law, reveal an environment in which debate and disputation were prevalent modes of discourse and scholarship. Debate was clearly a major concern of al-Shafiʿi, and he modifies his arguments according to the immediate opponent. He rejected istiḥsān (juristic preference), in which a jurist would deviate from an expected ruling for considerations outside the strict scope of legal analogy. His oeuvre as a whole also shows that he adhered to a literalist or “plain sense” interpretation of scriptural prooftexts whenever possible, interpreting Q 4:43 and 5:6 as requiring one to perform one's ablutions again after touching a woman, because the verb lāmasa (touch) in the verse means just that, and not “to touch in a lustful manner” or “to have intercourse” as Malik and Abu Hanifah had argued (pp. 91–92).
The work does not address how understandings of al-Shafiʿi have developed over time, with the exception of recent debates. Acknowledgement, explicit critique, or revision of Schacht's groundbreaking work is deficient. Detailed explanations and revisions of Schacht's results, based on subsequent scholarship, showing which have been upheld and which have been called into question, would have been useful to the reader. The work gives only a brief sketch of the rise and expansion of the Shafiʿi madhhab—discussed by Heinz Halm in some detail. A more substantial discussion would have been desirable, given the many outstanding questions about the rise of the legal madhhabs as institutions, something with which the several subsequent generations of al-Shafiʿi's students were intimately involved. For example, the book accepts Christopher Melchert's conclusion that Ibn al-Surayj founded the Shafiʿi madhhab without attribution or discussion of the idea. It also reports that the Shafiʿi madhhab is represented in Indonesia and Malaysia (p. 95) but does not explain how it got there.
The book contains a few technical errors. The statement that al-Shafiʿi is a nickname of sorts meaning “the intercessor” (p. 2) is incorrect; while it is certainly etymologically related to the word shafiʿ “intercessor,” it derives instead from the given name of Muhammad b. Idris’ ancestor, Shafiʿ b. Saʾib, a member of the Quraysh tribe. Al-Shafiʿi's view of the excellence of the Companions is reported as follows: “Abu Bakr, and ʿUmar, and ʿUthman, and ʿAli” (p. 17). Instead, it should read, “Abu Bakr (is highest in merit), then ʿUmar, then ʿUthman, then ʿAli.” The text reports that Ibn Surayj debated with the Hanafi jurist ʿIsa b. Aban (p. 94), a chronological impossibility, since ʿIsa b. Aban died between 220/835 and 230/845, while Ibn Surayj (d. 918) was not born until 863. Instead, Ibn al-Nadim reports in the Fihrist that Ibn Surayj wrote refutations of al-Shaybani and ʿIsa b. Aban. The statement that the madrasa of al-Shafiʿi, built by Saladin, was Egypt's first such institution (p. 103) is not true. At least eight Sunni madrasas were built in Egypt during the Fatimid period (i.e., before 1171). The Maliki and Shafiʿi judges of Alexandria, Ahmad b. ʿAbd al-Majid Ibn Hadid and Abu al-Husayn Yahya b. al-Mufarrij al-Maqdisi, both had madrasas built in Alexandria ca. 1100. Ridwan ibn al-Walakhshi, a Sunni vizier of the Fatimids, founded the Maliki Hafiziyyah Madrasa in 1137–38, and al-ʿAdil ibn Salar, another Sunni vizier of the Fatimids, founded the Shafiʿi ʿAdiliyya Madrasa in 1151, both in Alexandria, and these were the premier madrasas in Egypt for decades before Saladin built the mausoleum-madrasa of al- Shafiʿi in Fustat in 1176–80 (see Stephennie Mulder, “The Mausoleum of Imam al-Shafiʿi,” Muqarnas 23 [2006]: 15–46). There are a few transliteration errors such as al-Mutallib, al-Mutallibi (pp. 2,3,68) for al-Muttalib, al-Muttalib.
The books in this series are designed for a wider audience and so lack some of the critical apparatus that one might expect in works devoted to leading figures of Islamic intellectual history. Diacritics are not used, and footnotes are minimal, so that it is often unclear what the source for a particular piece of information, anecdote, or interpretation of the evidence is. The style in this particular work is too colloquial in a number of passages: “Shafiʿi sweated the small stuff” (p. 115) may not make much sense to audiences a few decades from now. The author explains that it is not her intent to resolve the outstanding problems and conflicting accounts relating to al-Shafiʿi's life-story through thorough investigation (pp. xv–xvi). Overall, it is decidedly better than Aisha Musa's recent work on al-Shafiʿi (Hadith as Scripture: Discussions on the Authority of Prophetic Traditions in Islam [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008]), a translation and analysis of al-Shafiʿi's treatise Jimaʿ al-ʿIlm that shows little interest in explaining the work in its historical context. It provides an accessible and up-to-date introduction to al-Shafiʿi's life and thought, but does not attempt to go beyond current scholarship, something that should be possible in the coming decades because of the discovery and publication of relevant early works such as the Mukhtasar of al-Buwayti and because of the heightened interest in Islamic legal theory over the past two decades.
