Shafi‘i school


The Shafi‘i madhhab is one of the four schools of Islamic law in Sunni Islam. It was founded by the Arab scholar Muhammad ibn Idris Al-Shafi‘i, a pupil of Malik, in the early 9th century. The school "rejecting provincial dependence on traditional community practice" as the source of legal precedent, and "argued for the unquestioning acceptance of the Hadith" as "the major basis for legal and religious judgments".
The other three schools of Sunni jurisprudence are Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali.
Like the other schools of fiqh, Shafi‘i relies predominantly on the Quran and the Hadiths for Sharia. Where passages of Quran and Hadiths are ambiguous, the school first seeks religious law guidance from Ijma – the consensus of Islamic Scholars. If there was no consensus, the Shafi‘i school relies on qiyās next as a source..
The Shafi‘i school was widely followed in the early history of Islam, but the Ottoman Empire favored the Hanafi school when it became the dominant Sunni Muslim power. One of the many differences between the Shafi‘i and Hanafi schools is that the Shafi‘i school does not consider Istihsan as an acceptable source of religious law because it amounts to "human legislation" of Islamic law.
The Shafi‘i school is now predominantly found in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, eastern Egypt, the Swahili coast, Hijaz, Yemen, Kurdish regions of the Middle East, Dagestan, Chechen and Ingush regions of the Caucasus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Kerala and some other coastal regions in India, Singapore, Myanmar, Thailand, Brunei, and the Philippines.

Principles

The Shafi‘i school of thought regards five sources of jurisprudence as having binding authority. In hierarchical order, these are: the Quran, the hadiths—that is, sayings, customs and practices of Muhammad—the ijmā', the individual opinions of Sahaba with preference to one closest to the issue as ijtihad, and finally qiyas. Although al-Shafi‘i's legal methodology rejected custom or local practice as a constitutive source of law, this did not mean that he or his followers denied any elasticity in the Shariah. The Shafi‘i school also rejects two sources of Sharia that are accepted in other major schools of Islam—Istihsan and Istislah. The jurisprudence principle of Istihsan and Istislah admitted religious laws that had no textual basis in either the Quran or Hadiths, but were based on the opinions of Islamic scholars as promoting the interest of Islam and its universalization goals. The Shafi‘i school rejected these two principles, stating that these methods rely on subjective human opinions, and have potential for corruption and adjustment to political context and time.
The foundational text for the Shafi‘i school is Al-Risala by the founder of the school, Al-Shafi‘i. It outlines the principles of Shafi‘i fiqh as well as the derived jurisprudence. Al-Risala became an influential book to other Sunni Islam fiqhs as well, as the oldest surviving Arabic work on Islamic legal theory.

History

Imam ash-Shafi'i was reportedly a teacher of the Sunni Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and a student of Imam Malik ibn Anas, who was a student of the Shi'ite Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, like Imam Abu Hanifah. Thus all of the four great Imams of Sunni Fiqh are connected to Imam Ja'far from the Bayt of Muhammad, whether directly or indirectly.
The Shafi‘i madhhab was spread by Al-Shafi‘i students in Cairo, Mecca and Baghdad. It became widely accepted in early history of Islam. The chief representative of the Iraqi school was Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, whilst in Khorasan, the Shafi‘i school was spread by al-Juwayni and al-Iraqi. These two branches merged around Ibn al-Salah and his father. The Shafi‘i jurisprudence was adopted as the official law during the Great Seljuq Empire, Zengid dynasty, Ayyubid dynasty and later the Mamluk Sultanate, where it saw its widest application. It was also adopted by the Kathiri state in Hadhramawt and most of rule of the Sharif of Mecca.
With the establishment and expansion of Ottoman Empire in West Asia and Turkic Sultanates in Central and South Asia, Shafi‘i school was replaced with Hanafi school, in part because Hanafites allowed Istihsan that allowed the rulers flexibility in interpreting the religious law to their administrative preferences. The Sultanates along the littoral regions of the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula adhered to the Shafi‘i school and were the primary drivers of its maritime military expansion into many Asian and East African coastal regions of the Indian Ocean, particularly from the 12th through the 18th century.

Demographics

The Shafi‘i school is presently predominant in the following parts of the Muslim world:
Shafi‘i school is the second largest school of Sunni madhhabs by number of adherents, states Saeed in his 2008 book. However, a UNC publication considers the Maliki school as second largest, and the Hanafi madhhab the largest, with Shafi‘i as third largest. The demographic data by each fiqh, for each nation, is unavailable and the relative demographic size are estimates.

Notable Shafi‘is

In Hadith:
In Tafsir:
In Fiqh:
In Arabic language studies:
In Aqidah:
In Sufism
In history
Statesmen