Muḥammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī

The clan relation is not merely genealogical. A report of Jubayr b. Muṭʿim in the collections has the Prophet ﷺ say that Banū Hāshim and Banū al-Muṭṭalib are one thing, interlacing his fingers, because the two clans had entered the ravine together during the boycott while their other ʿAbd-Manāf cousins had not. The consequence for al-Shāfiʿī personally is sharp. In his school the share of the khums reserved for the Prophet's ﷺ kin belongs to both clans — so he is inside the entitled class — and correspondingly zakāt is forbidden to Banū al-Muṭṭalib as well as Banū Hāshim, where Mālik, Abū Ḥanīfa and the majority restrict the prohibition to Banū Hāshim. On his own school's rule he could not receive zakāt, which is worth holding beside the reports of his childhood poverty.

His mother is disputed, and both positions sit pages apart in al-Bayhaqī's own book. One report, from a descendant through al-Shāfiʿī's own daughter — family testimony — says simply that she was Azdī, Yemeni; she is usually named Fāṭima bint ʿAbd Allāh al-Azdiyya. The other makes her Fāṭima, a descendant of al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, and comes attached to a boast: "I know of no Hāshimī whose mother was also Hāshimī except ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, then al-Shāfiʿī." That report is transmitted in two mutually inconsistent forms, which is a red flag, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī judged it anomalous while al-Subkī retained it. Chaumont, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, nevertheless thinks it "merits consideration for the extent to which it could partially account for the attitude of al-Shāfiʿī at the time of his miḥna" — which is a reason to keep it on the page rather than resolve it.

His father Idrīs died when he was an infant — where and how is not securely attested — and his mother took him to Makka at two. The poverty is his own first-person report and it is early: "When I left the school I used to pick up potsherds, parchment scraps, palm-stalks and camels' shoulder-blades and write hadith on them; and I would go to the government offices and beg the backs of their sheets… until my mother had two large jars which I filled with shoulder-blades, potsherds and palm-stalks full of hadith." And, later: "None has prospered in knowledge except one who sought it in poverty — I used to find the price of paper hard to come by."

He is said to have memorised the Qurʾān at seven and the Muwaṭṭaʾ at ten. The figure of nine days for memorising the Muwaṭṭaʾ could not be verified: al-Bayhaqī's text says only "in a few days," and Ibn Abī Ḥātim has him say he had memorised it before he arrived.

Then the desert, and here the substance and the quantification part company. What al-Bayhaqī actually preserves, from al-Rabīʿ from al-Shāfiʿī, is: "I went out from Mecca and attached myself to Hudhayl in the desert, learning their speech and adopting their idiom — they were the most eloquent of the Arabs — and I stayed with them a period, travelling when they travelled and camping when they camped. When I returned to Mecca I began to recite poems and recount the battle-days of the Arabs." The earliest wording gives no number of years. The seventeen-year figure that circulates could not be found in any classical source, is absent from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, from Khadduri and from Abū Zahra — and is chronologically impossible, since he reached Mālik at thirteen or fourteen and Mālik died when he was twenty-nine.

That he really did master Hudhalī poetry is another matter, and it is vouched for by the literary authorities rather than the pious ones. Al-Aṣmaʿī: "I corrected the poems of Hudhayl with a young man of Quraysh at Mecca called Muḥammad b. Idrīs." Al-Zubayr b. Bakkār: his uncle Muṣʿab took the poems, the battles and the days of Hudhayl from "a youth of Quraysh whose like in eloquence I never saw." And Muṣʿab himself preserves the line that gives the whole thing away: al-Shāfiʿī recited the poems to him from memory, then said, "Do not tell the hadith-scholars this, for they will not tolerate it."

He held an administrative post in the Yemen, at or including Najrān, obtained through family patronage — his mother pawned a house to equip him — and by his own account he made enemies by refusing to be flattered: "the governor, when he came to them, they would flatter; and they wanted the same of me and found nothing in me for it."

The denunciation is preserved in his own words, and the name in it is not the one usually printed. "There was there one of Hārūn's commanders called Ḥammād al-Barbarī, and he wrote to him warning him about the ʿAlids and mentioning me, saying: with him is a man called Muḥammad b. Idrīs who does with his tongue what a fighter cannot do with his sword — if you have any need in the Ḥijāz, carry them off from it." A second, independent line, through al-Buwayṭī, repeats it in flatly administrative terms: "if you have any need with us, beware of Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, for he has got the upper hand over what is in my charge." The hostile governor named "Muṭarrif b. Māzin" in much English writing could not be verified in any source consulted.

He was taken across the desert to al-Raqqa — not left even to trim his hair and nails, one report says — and brought before Hārūn al-Rashīd. His own account of the night is grim and specific: they were brought in ten at a time, most of the night gone, each man stood up one by one, the caliph speaking from behind a curtain and ordering necks struck, "until it came to me." He asked to speak, and made an argument about kinship: "you are the sons of al-ʿAbbās, they are the sons of ʿAlī, and we are the Banū al-Muṭṭalib; you see us as your brothers, they see us as their slaves."

How he got out is where the sources split, and the split is doctrinally motivated. One tradition credits the strength of his own argument. The other credits Muḥammad al-Shaybānī, who testified that he was a known student of the law and that the charge was not his affair — and al-Bayhaqī places that intercession after he had been thrown into prison. Chaumont treats the intercession as historical and labels the self-rescue the hagiographic version, and the structural argument is on his side: al-Shaybānī was the qāḍī of al-Raqqa in exactly those years. Madelung, writing the entry on the ʿAlid Yaḥyā ibn ʿAbd Allāh with no interest in Shāfiʿī apologetics, records that al-Rashīd convened scholars to invalidate Yaḥyā's safe-conduct and that al-Shaybānī declared it valid and inviolable — for which the caliph hit him on the head with an inkstand.

Chaumont does not treat the charge as a pretext. He accepts that al-Shāfiʿī "compromised himself by joining the partisans of the Ḥasanid Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd Allāh," and Madelung, independently, dates al-Shāfiʿī's study with Yaḥyā to about 174/790 and calls him one of his supporters.

He left Iraq in 198/814 and settled at Fusṭāṭ, teaching in the mosque of ʿAmr. Chaumont's explanation for the move is worth preferring to the pious ones: "it seems probable that it was in fact the isolation imposed on him, in the Ḥijāz, by the predominance of the disciples of Mālik and, in Baghdad, by that of the disciples of al-Shaybānī, which persuaded him to attempt the foundation of a school elsewhere." There is also a source-based alternative in al-Bayhaqī: offered a judgeship, he said he had no need of it and asked instead to be given the kinsmen's share of the khums in Egypt and to go there, and the caliph wrote for him.

Egypt did not welcome him for long. The Mālikī Banū ʿAbd al-Ḥakam received him at first, apparently as one of Mālik's students; Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Ḥakam was among his most fervent disciples before writing a refutation of him and returning to the Mālikīs. Chaumont's summary is blunt: the Egyptian Mālikīs "sought without success to have him banished by the authorities. The life of al-Shāfiʿī was clearly that of an undesirable." Al-Bayhaqī preserves Ashhab praying in prostration, "O God, kill al-Shāfiʿī, for if You spare him Mālik's school will be effaced," and al-Kindī preserves a judge shouting after him in the street that he had entered a town whose affair was one and split it.

It is in those six years that the distinction the school runs on was made. The doctrine developed before Egypt is the qadīm, the old; what he taught in Fusṭāṭ is the jadīd, the new; and the school retained only the new. The old survives through two Baghdadis, al-Zaʿfarānī and al-Karābīsī, the first reckoned the more reliable; the new through al-Rabīʿ, al-Buwayṭī and al-Muzanī. The default rule is that the new prevails. The number of exceptions is often printed as seventeen; that figure could not be traced. Al-Nawawī's own wording is "about twenty or more," and SeekersGuidance notes that the number is itself disputed and has been put lower.

The corpus survives because of three Egyptians, and they were not interchangeable.

Al-Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān al-Murādī (d. 270/884) is the one al-Shāfiʿī called "the transmitter of my books," and nearly two hundred scholars travelled to him for them. He was reputedly slow to grasp the law, which may be why he wrote so carefully; his own abridgement failed against al-Muzanī's. Al-Buwayṭī (d. 231/846) he called "my tongue" and is said to have named his successor; he was arrested in the inquisition over the createdness of the Qurʾān, taken to Baghdad, and died in chains. Al-Muzanī (d. 264/878) he called "the one who makes my doctrine triumph," and his Mukhtaṣar became the base text of the school — though al-Rāfiʿī later faulted him for departing from his teacher so often that his singular positions fall outside the school.

And Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, in Baghdad after 195. The relationship is treated at length on the next page, because what it actually was is one of the more instructive disputes in this whole section — and because the Encyclopaedia of Islam notes, drily, that "despite the abundance in the biographies of anecdotes linking the two, it does not seem that they were well acquainted."

His corpus is the largest of the four and the best documented, and it has been contested harder than any of the others — twice, sixty years apart, and from opposite directions.

In 1934 the Egyptian scholar Zakī Mubārak published a book in Cairo whose title translates as "Correcting the ugliest error in the history of Islamic legislation: Kitāb al-Umm was not written by al-Shāfiʿī." His arguments were that the book has no preface, that its chapters do not proceed on a single pattern, that it contains dialogue, that al-Rabīʿ glosses it, that it carries internal cross-references, and that it contains a will dated Shaʿbān 203 when al-Shāfiʿī died in 204. Aḥmad Shākir and Aḥmad Ṣaqr answered him.

In 1993 Norman Calder arrived at strikingly similar conclusions by a different route, dating al-Umm to the end of the third century and the Risāla to around the year 300 — a century after al-Shāfiʿī's death. Ahmed El Shamsy answered in 2012 from the external evidence, and the answer is largely bibliographical: accurate third-century quotations, contents-lists, and abridgements by named students who died in 231 and 264. The specific late datings have essentially no defenders now. The general insight that early legal texts passed through school redaction and are not autographs is widely retained, and Melchert remains sceptical of the optimistic reading in either direction.

What the catalogue below tries to do is show why the optimistic reading is reasonable: the corpus carries a differentiated transmission apparatus that distinguishes what al-Rabīʿ heard from what he copied, and marks his own additions. Whoever assembled it was not smoothing anything over.