Kecia Ali - Imam Shafii: Scholar and Saint (Makers of the Muslim World)

Biographies are full of verifiable facts, but they are also full of things that arent there:absences, gaps, missing evidence, knowledge or information that has been passed from person to person, losing credibility or shifting shape along the way. Biographies, like lives, are made up of contested objects relics, testimonies, versions, correspondences, the unverifiable.

Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolfs Nose

That biography is a species of fiction-making is a truth so old that only a willed cultural amnesia can make it new.

Marjorie Garber in Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, eds,
The Seductions of Biography

V incent Cornell introduced me to Shafii and his Risala in a graduate seminar in 1997; it was not love at first page. But when I was invited to contribute a biography to this series, I recklessly proposed Shafii, whose writings on positive law had entranced me in my research on marriage and about whose life I knew almost nothing. Since then, Emad Adly, Jonathan Brockopp, Ahmed El Shamsy, Kevin Jaques, Joseph Lowry, Christopher Melchert, Kevin Reinhart, and David Vishanoff have discussed Shafiis ideas and writings and tangled life story with me, suggested important sources, and shared forthcoming publications. The bibliography imperfectly indicates my numerous debts to them. Patricia Crone, Anver Emon, and Oneworlds anonymous reader provided thorough and thoughtful comments on the entire manuscript, and saved me from mistakes and misjudgments. Oneworlds Paul Boone shepherded the project through numerous delays and Sophie Richmond provided meticulous copyediting. None of these people bears any blame for remaining errors, of which I hope there are few, or inadequacies, of which I am sure there are many. I also owe thanks to my research assistant Matthew Pierce, who hunted down obscure Orientalist publications and put order to towering piles of photocopies; Emine Fetvaci, who provided a wonderful illustration; and Mara Worle and Amr Ragy, who hosted me during a visit to Cairo where I visited Shafiis tomb. In addition to drawing my attention to a useful article, Malik Khan of the Islamic Center of Boston Wayland invited me to speak to the congregation during Ramadan 2007 about Shafiis thought. It is to the members of that community, engaged in a collective struggle to live according to Gods plan and disagreeing, sometimes profoundly, over what that entails that this book is dedicated.

H ow should Muslims live? In accordance with Gods law. How can one know Gods law? First and foremost through the Quran. But the Quran, though expansive, is not exhaustive. People need supplementary guidance. The most widely accepted source for additional guidance is the Prophet Muhammads model or sunna. Beyond his role as a conduit for Gods speech, Muhammads conduct as a man and as leader of an exemplary community carries weight. Within a couple of centuries of his death, reports about his words and deeds, known as hadith, came to play a vital role in preaching, moral instruction, scriptural commentary, and most significant for purposes of this story lawmaking. The central role of prophetic sunna in legal theory is in large part due to the work of Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii. Shafii lived from 150/767 to 204/820, when Islamic law was in its formative stages. He was preoccupied with the question of how to derive rules for conduct from Gods communication to humanity. The now-besieged notion of the partnership of Quran and sunna, which structured Sunni thinking for more than a millennium, largely derives from his intellectual labor. One must understand his ideas and their impact to understand Islamic law.

Until recently, conventional wisdom has held that Shafiis Risala or Epistle, a treatise on legal theory, offered a solution to the dichotomous thinking that plagued his contemporaries. According to this view they were hopelessly divided between traditionalists and partisans of opinion. The former, often identified with Medina, were intent on strictly applying precedent of the Prophet or his Companions, those Muslims who had known him personally. The latter, associated with Iraq, were advocates of reasoned opinion or ray, and allowed individual discretion in judgment a surefire path to interpretive chaos, in the view of some. Neither position was tenable, given competing needs to establish predictable rules that respected religious sources while also responding to changing conditions of life in the rapidly expanding Abbasid Empire. Shafii the