Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam Read Online Free PDF Page B

al- S agh i r. 44 In the latter category are the Kit a b al- H ujja, a polemic against “the people of Medina,” of whom Malik was the most prominent repre- sentative, and a recension of Malik’s Muwa tt a © , known as the Muwa tt a © of Shaybani (Muwatta © Shayb a n i ), which compares the views of Malik, with whom Shaybani studied for several years, to those of Abu Hanifa, his later teacher. 45 Abu Yusuf, whose Kit a b al- A th a r compiles juristic opinions in a manner like the Mu s annaf, also has attributed to him a similar text comparing the doctrines of Abu Hanifa to those of his Ku- fan rival Ibn Abi Layla (Ikhtil a f Ab i H an i fa wa Ibn Ab i Layl a ). 46
    The importance of networks of scholarship can be even more clearly seen in the career of Shafi ' i, whose Umm I discussed earlier. Shafi ' i is a crucial figure in early Islamic jurisprudence, remembered primarily for his contribution to legal theory. Though Noel Coulson exaggerates when he calls him “the deus ex machina of his time,” Shafi ' i contributed signally to the compromise legal methodology that ultimately allowed Sunni scholars to integrate both prophetic traditions and various tech- niques of reasoning, including analogy. 47 After early study with impor- tant Meccan scholars, Shafi ' i spent time learning from Malik in Me- dina. He then traveled to Iraq, where he studied and debated with Shaybani. After a period of study—and a return to Mecca, where he led a teaching circle—Shafi ' i taught in Baghdad and composed works of
    jurisprudence. Shafi ' i draws from both Maliki and Hanafi traditions, here synthesizing, there rejecting his predecessors in developing his distinctive doctrines and increasingly systematic rationales for them. Toward the end of his life, he settled in Egypt, where he revised his works and taught additional students, who in turn taught others; the Kit a b al-Umm, compiled and polished after his death, and chiefly trans- mitted by al-Rabi ' ibn Sulayman al-Muradi (d. 270/884), represents his mature doctrines. 48 A more independently minded student, Isma ' il b. Yahya al-Muzani (d. 264/877–878), composed a widely circulated abridge- ment (Mukhta s ar) of the Umm. 49 Modern editions of the Umm are printed with this Mukhta s ar as well as several shorter treatises on particular legal-methodological issues or jurisprudential disagreements. These notably include Ikhtil a f al- ® Iraqiyayn, which records Shafi ' i’s responses to Abu Yusuf’s record of the “disagreement of the two Iraqis”—that is, Abu Hanifa and Ibn Abi Layla.
    This brief sketch of the relationships between a handful of formative-era jurists hardly does justice to their overlapping connec- tions or the broader networks of which they formed part. In the eighth and ninth centuries, boundaries between groups of jurists were porous rather than fixed; there were no formal legal schools ( madh a hib, singu- lar madhhab ). Nurit Tsafrir notes, “It is not at all certain what the nature of a legal school in the second[/eighth] century was, and what it meant to be a follower of such a school.” 50 And with regard to what to call them, Steven Judd refers to an “epistemological dilemma” of long stand- ing: “In a world of diverse views held by thousands of scholars who travel frequently and borrow concepts from each other, how does one sort scholars and ideas into manageable categories?” 51 Naming schools after eponymous “founders” became standard in the ninth or tenth century, taking precedence over earlier categories based on “intellectual persuasion,” “teacher,” or “geography.” To use eponymous school names rather than geographical ones before the tenth century is thus anachro- nistic: the H ujja refers to its opponents as “the people of Medina” and Shafi ' i’s comparative work treats “two Iraqis.” But the labels Hanafi, Ma- liki, and Shafi ' i are useful so long as we remember that we are speaking, for instance, of a