Imam Al-Shafi\'i in Islamic Jurisprudence

¶ … Imam al-Shafi'i in Islamic Jurisprudence

It is important to the doctrine of Islam that the religion be inextricably woven into the fabric of Muslim life. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, there is no separation between civil and religious life, public or private life and religious life. In order for Islam to successfully achieve its goals in the life of Muslims, it must be woven into the fabric of every aspect of Muslim life, especially the legal and court system. Of course the issue of how to incorporate the faith-based doctrine into law must have been a question asked by those who followed the Prophet Muhammad early on in the Islamic tradition. Promulgating law by which to conduct oneself religiously and civilly, and where the prevailing authority would be the religious authority that would be endowed with the power to set punishments and sentence individuals who broke the laws, is a meticulous and difficult task. One of the earliest architects of Islamic jurisprudence is Imam al-Sharf'i, whose role in Islamic jurisprudence is visible in Islamic law today. This paper examines Shafi'i's role in promulgating Islamic law.

Hadith

Michael Copperson (2000), in his book Classical Arabic: The Heirs of the Prophet in the Age of al-Mamun, talks at length about the way in which Islam was conveyed to Muslims by human to human recitation and transmission until the death of Muhammad. When he died, the Prophet Muhammad left no successor, no written document (like the Bible) by which to guide Muslims. His followers realized that the "Truth" had to continue to be delivered to Muslims. However, they were concerned with the notion of the continuance of the human to human conveyance taking on forms, or values, other than that which had been delivered as the direct word from God to Muhammad, and, in turn to Muslims (Copperson, 2000). Thus, it was decided by Muhammad's followers that the cure was to query the followers, those who were closest to the Prophet, and who had first-hand knowledge of the thoughts and statements made by the Prophet that were the delivery to Muhammad the Word of Truth, of God. The Hadith is the biographical collection of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (Copperson, 2000).

The problem is, of course, that it is perhaps impossible for self-interest to be extricated from "the Truth." Certainly as the collection of the Prophet's teachings was being conducted by examination of those individuals closest to the Prophet, there must have been some surrender to their own ideas or interpretations of what the Prophet said. This is, Copperson says, he refers to the biographical collection of Islamic doctrine as "Hadith," and the individuals collecting the information as "Hadith scholars (2000)."

Those individuals whom Copperson refers to as Hadith scholars include amongst them al-Shafi'i, who has long been viewed as one of the architects of Islamic jurisprudence.

Imam al-Shafi'i

Malise Ruthven (2000), in his book Islam in the World, writes that Imam al-Shafi'i has long stood out as the greatest scholar and systemitizer of Islam. Ruthven says that Shafi'i left a mark on Islam that followed the Prophet Muhammad, and Umar (the single most powerful Muslim after the Prophet). Islam is a legalistic faith, Ruthven says, and this is why it became important for the promulgating of an Islamic law that would be parallel to the civil law, and one which would be administered by experts, like Imam al-Shafi'i according to the strict interpretations of Hadith. To this extent, Shafi'i established one of the three schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Ruthven, 2000). It was Shafi'i who promulgated laws that gave clarification to rules of inheritance by making certain that heirs under Islam took precedence over the legal rights of heirs under Arabic civil law (Ruthven, 2000). In this way, the Prophet's law became normative in the religious and civil lives of Muslims.

Copperson says:

For some scholars, however, even al-Shafi'i was an innovator. The leading representative of the rigorist school, Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (164-241/780-855), declared that analogy and consensus, even as last resorts, had no place in the law. Rather, the Qur-n and the sunna - transmitted in the form of Had-th by specialists like himself - were the only acceptable guides to belief and action:

Religion consists solely of the Book of God and genuine reports of practice transmitted on the authority of trustworthy persons. [Such reports must] relate information that is authentic, believable, and generally known. They must confirm one another. They must go back as far as the Prophet (may God bless and save him), his Companions (may God be pleased with them), the next generation, the generation after that, or to members of subsequent generations who are acknowledged leaders (a imma) worthy of emulation. [These leaders] cleave to originary practice (sunna) and cling to the remnant thereof. They perpetrate no innovations, inspire no mistrust, and provoke no dissension. They are not proponents of analogical reasoning (qiy-s) or of personal judgement (ra y). Analogy is invalid in matters of religion, and personal judgement is even worse. Advocates of ra y and qiy-s in religion are misguided innovators, except when there is a precedent (athar) for [their verdict] in [the verdicts of] past authorities (2000, p. 108)."

There are many today who hold that Islamic law, the Hadith, is ad hoc law (Ruthven, 2000). Ad hoc, because it relies upon the testimony by way of examination of those people closest to the prophet, and there is no way to verify that it was in fact what the Prophet Muhammad received from God, because the Prophet did not create a written diary of those Truths that he received from God. It is the problem of Hadith that most theologians and others take umbrage with. This aside, weaving Islam into the civil legal system was in ensured that the Hadith would survive was Islamic doctrine.

A al-Shafi'i had the support of the most prominent Baghdadi dissident Ibn Hanbal, who rejected the use of ra y and qiyas in support of al-Shafi'i's treatise on jurisprudence (Copperson, 2000). However, there are some scholars today who hold that al-Shafi'i's theories were not as tangential to Islamic jurisprudence as has long been held (Ruthven, 2000). Ruthven writes:

Though considered by Schacht and others the 'master architect' of the Islamic theory known as usul al figqh (the roots of understanding of jurisprudence) recent scholarship has shown that this image of Shafi'i is a later creation. According to Hallaq, there is ample evidence to show that even as late as the third/ninth century, legal theory as we know it, and as we assume it to have issued from Shafi'i's work, had not yet come into existence. In Hallaq's view it was Shafi'i's followers scuh as Ibn Suraij (d 918) and his younger contemporaries who raised the Shafi'ite school to prominence, developing the synthesis of revealed sources and rational discourse associated with his name (Ruthven, 2000, p. 133)."

This does not mean that al-Shafi'i's legalese was not architect; it means only that Shafi'i's supporters found his views, his Hadith, to be so credible as to give him credit for that by lending their support to his "biography." In this way, the jurisprudence of Shafi'i is perhaps even more significant in that he was able to gather, maintain and sustain a following of support for his Islamic jurisprudence which is reflected in Islamic law today.

Ruthven says:

This does not mean, however, that Shaffi's reputation as the true founder of Islamic legal theory is entirely undeserved. His most celebrated work, the Risala (epistle) may indeed 'represent the first attempt at synthesizing the disciplined exercise of human reasoning and the complete assimilation of revelation as the basis of the law'.

Although the arguments dividing the rationalists and their traditionalist opponents persisted for at least a century after his death, the method he pioneered for reconciling rationality and tradition (the products, respectively, of human reason and the divinely revealed knowledge transmitted through the Quran and the Prophet's sunna) was eventually adopted by the great majority of scholars and jurists in the Sunni mainstream (2000, p.133)."