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Concept
Shafi'i school
Summary
The Shafi'i school (شَافِعِي, also spelled Shafei), or Madhhab al-Shāfiʿī, is one of the four major traditional schools of religious law (madhhab) in the Sunnī branch of Islam. It was founded by Muslim theologian Muḥammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", in the early 9th century.
The other three schools of Sunnī jurisprudence are Ḥanafī, Mālikī and Ḥanbalī. Like the other schools of fiqh, Shafii recognize the First Four Caliphs as the Islamic prophet Muhammad's rightful successors and relies on the Qurʾān and the "sound" books of Ḥadīths as primary sources of law. The Shafi'i school affirms the authority of both divine law-giving (the Qurʾān and the Sunnah) and human speculation regarding the Law. Where passages of Qurʾān and/or the Ḥadīths are ambiguous, the school seeks guidance of Qiyās (analogical reasoning). The Ijmā' (consensus of scholars or of the community) was "accepted but not stressed". The school rejected the dependence on local traditions as the source of legal precedent and rebuffed the Ahl al-Ra'y (personal opinion) and the Istiḥsān (juristic discretion).
The Shafii school was widely followed in the Middle East until the rise of the Ottomans and the Safavids. Traders and merchants helped to spread Shafii Islam across the Indian Ocean, as far as India and Southeast Asia. The Shafii school is now predominantly found in parts of the Hejaz and the Levant, Lower Egypt and Yemen, and among the Kurdish people, in the North Caucasus and across the Indian Ocean (Horn of Africa and the Swahili Coast in Africa and coastal South Asia and Southeast Asia).
The fundamental principle of the Shafii thought depends on the idea that "to every act performed by a believer who is subject to the Law there corresponds a statute belonging to the Revealed Law or the Shari'a". This statute is either presented as such in the Qurʾān or the Sunnah or it is possible, by means of analogical reasoning (Qiyas), to infer it from the Qurʾān or the Sunnah.
Official source
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