I S L A M I C L AW I N C I R C U L AT I O N

Analysing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and

commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean
littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the
four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts
shaped, transformed and influenced the juridical thoughts and lives
of a significant community over a millennium in and between Asia,
Africa and Europe. By examining the processes of the spread of
legal texts and their roles in society, as well as thinking about how
Afrasian Muslims responded to these new arrivals of thoughts and
texts, Mahmood Kooria weaves together a narrative with the textual
descendants from places such as Damascus, Mecca, Cairo,
Malabar, Java, Malindi, Aceh and Zanzibar and colonial powers such
as Britain, the Netherlands and Germany to tell a compelling story of
how Islam contributed to the global history of law from the thirteenth
to the twentieth century.

Mahmood Kooria is a researcher at Leiden University (the

Netherlands) and a visiting faculty of history at Ashoka University
(India). He received his PhD in Global History from Leiden University
in 2016. In addition to numerous academic journal articles and book
chapters, he has co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean:
Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (2018) and Islamic
Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices (2022).
Currently he is writing a book on the matriarchal Muslim communities
in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ISLAMIC
C I V I L I Z AT I O N
 Editorial Board

Chase F. Robinson, Freer|Sackler, Smithsonian Institution (general

editor)
Anne Broadbridge, UMass Amberst
Michael Cook, Princeton University
Maribel Fierro, Spanish National Research Council
Alan Mikhail, Yale University
Intisar Rabb, Harvard University
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University
Other titles in the series are listed at the back of the book.
 I S L A M I C L AW I N
C I R C U L AT I ON
Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian
Ocean and the Mediterranean
Mahmood Kooria
Leiden University

Ashoka University
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DOI: 10.1017/9781009106825

© Mahmood Kooria 2022

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First published 2022

 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British
Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kooria, Mahmood, author.

Title: Islamic law in circulation : Shāfiʿī texts across the Indian

Ocean and the Mediterranean / Mahmood Kooria, Universiteit
Leiden.

Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY :

Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Cambridge studies in
islamic civilization | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049802 (print) | LCCN 2021049803 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781009098038 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009107679
(paperback) | ISBN 9781009106825 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Islamic law–Indian Ocean Region. | Islamic law–

Mediterranean Region. | Shafiites.

Classification: LCC KBP325 .K66 2022 (print) | LCC KBP325

(ebook) | DDC 340.5/9091824–dc23/eng/20211109

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049802

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049803

ISBN 978-1-009-09803-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To all the PhD students across the world, who pursue their dreams
with dedication to knowledge despite the paucity of resources and
pressures of various sorts.

May your paths shine ever and may our paths cross!
 Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration, Dates and Places

Introduction

Part I

1 Circulation Networks

2 Circulatory Texts

3 Architecture of Encounters

Part II

4 The Code

5 The Commentary

6 The Autocommentary

7 The Supercommentaries

8 The Translations
 Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
 Figures
Major places mentioned in the book from the Indian Ocean
and the Mediterranean

2.1 A genealogical chart of Shāfiʿī texts as prepared by the

Yemeni-Indonesian scholar Sayyid ʿUthmān in 1881, Leiden
University Special Collections.

4.1 Cover folio of an early Minhāj manuscript, Leiden

University Special Collections, Or. 2227

4.2 A comparable cover of another early Minhāj manuscript,

Princeton University Library, Garret 1388Y

5.1 Title page and a contents page of the Tuḥfa, Mecca

Library, Fiqh al-Shāfiʿī 83

6.1 Opening pages of the Fatḥ, Ponnāni Jumuʿattu Paḷḷi

Library MS. 141

8.1 Cover pages of the Javanese translation of the Kitab

Toehpah, British Library, MS. Add.12290.

8.2 Title pages of some European translations or editions of

Shāfiʿī texts
 Acknowledgements
This book is a product of a journey which has lasted a decade, from
the moment I decided to study this topic until it was complete.
Several people, places and institutions across many countries have
supported me enormously in this long meditation. Words are not
enough to thank all of them, but I count it an honour to be able now
to acknowledge their unstinting support, even though space restricts
me from compiling a full list.
Jos Gommans read many drafts of my doctoral dissertation,
which forms the core of this book, and his feedback was
exceptionally sagacious. Maaike van Berkel, Léon Buskens, Henri
Chambert-Loir, Jatin Dua, R. Michael Feener, Tom Hoogervorst, Iza
Hussin, Nico Kaptein, Ronit Ricci, Petra Sijpesteijn and Jan Just
Witkam read the dissertation in detail and provided insightful
comments for converting it into a book. In addition, Joel Blecher,
David Kloos and Nira Wickramasinghe also guided me on the
practicalities of writing and publishing this book. Robert Gleave,
Engseng Ho, Michael Laffan and Bahauddeen Muhammed Nadwi
have been sources of continuous support and have graciously
advised me whenever I struggled. Sanne Ravensbergen has always
been an intellectual and personal inspiration.
Discussions with Omar Anchassi, Nijmi Edres, Eirik Hovden,
Irene Schneider and Knut Vikør as part of the “Understanding
Shari‘a: Perfect Past, Imperfect Present” (USPPIP) project helped
me refine some of my arguments. Philippe Peycam stimulated me to
link the research to larger institutional plans and projects. Norifumi
Daito, Archa N. Girija, Meera Muralidharan, Byapti Sur and
Guanmian Xu were on hand to offer intellectual and emotional
support, while Hayat Ahlili, Abdullah Alhatlani, Marcela Garcia
Probert, Eftychia Mylona and Tijmen Baarda became great
compadres through our shared interests in Middle Eastern history.
Abhishek Avtans, Sarthak Bagchi, Murari Kumar Jha and Pralay
Kanungo added flavours of camaraderie and nostalgia to the long
hours of conversations. Auswaf Ahsan Ophira Gamliel, Abhilash
Malayil and István Perczel provided different perspectives to look at
southwestern Indic traditions, while Yogesh Sharma taught me about
the breadths and depths of Indian Ocean studies, a subject I often
continued in seemingly endless chats with dearest Shelly Johny,
Rajeesh Kumar and Abdur Rahoof Ottathingal. Supriya Varma and
the late Vijaya Ramaswamy guided me through the different ways of
understanding the ancient South Asian past.
When travelling like a nomad in the name of knowledge, many
friends welcomed me into their homes, acclimatised me to new
terrains and became great company inside and outside academic
settings: specifically Dadi Darmadi in Jakarta; Arfiansyah and P. B.
Siddik in Aceh; Abdulkader Tayob and Shaheed Tayob in Cape
Town; Muhammad Arafath, Annu Jalais, Carola Lorea and Shafeek
Hudawi in Singapore; Sayyid Muhsin in Kuala Lumpur; Nisa Harun
and Jafer Paramboor at Seremban; Sami al-Daghistani and Soraya
Batmanghelichi, and also Mosarrap Khan and Mary Ann in New
York; and Kareem, Fayiz and Abid in London.
 Several colleagues and friends helped me obtain crucial
materials for this study. In India, Ashraf Thangal Chettippadi,
Musthafa Hudawi Aroor, Usman Amjadi, Rasheed Elamkulam and
Abdul Samad Faizy helped me locate and access restricted
resources at various private collections. In the United Kingdom, Nur
Sobers-Khan and Arani Ilankuberan at the British Library guided me
towards many rare sources. In Indonesia, Intan Lidwina, Jajang
Nurjaman, Oman Fathurahman at Jakarta, and Muhajir Alfairusy and
Herman Syah at Banda Aceh showed me ways to access local
public and private collections. C. G. Brouwer, the late Emeri van
Donzel, Amirul Hadi, Reza Huseini, Ashraf Kadakkal, Sri Margana,
Ruud Peters and Hussain Randathani provided or suggested many
primary and secondary materials. Jaleel Hudawi Balayil regularly
cleared up my doubts related to Islamic law and texts with his vast
knowledge of Shāfiʿī literature. Stephano Joel, René Wezel,
Sunarwoto and Syahril Siddik read sources with me in French,
Dutch, Javanese or Malay, and Aadil Zubair and Iqra Raza gave
cartographic and creative support. In the course of my work I have
been privileged to enjoy the support of many dear friends in the
Netherlands and India: in particular Abdul Basith, Lennart Bes,
Abdullah Edachalam, Aashique Iqbal, Kunhi Kasargod, Manjusha
Kuruppath, Sander Lugtenburg, Nandagopal Menon, Yasir P. V.,
Nadeera Rupsinghe, Umar Ryad, Musthafa, Shahina, Ayyoob
Thayyil, Abey Thomas and Brijith Thomas.
Generous fellowships from various sources also enabled me to
conduct my research and finish this book: Erasmus-Mundus
Consortium of IBIES (Interdisciplinary Bridges for Indo-European
Studies), Cosmopolis Programme at Leiden University, USPPIP
Project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area
(HERA) and Social Science Research Council’s InterAsia Program.
The support I have received from academic institutions has also
proved indispensable. In Leiden, the institutes of History and Area
Studies, the African Studies Centre, and the International Institute for
Asian Studies provided academic homes during and after my
doctoral studies. So did the Dutch Institute in Morocco at Rabat, and
the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.
A number of different libraries and archives also facilitated my
research during my visits or provided me with digital copies of
invaluable manuscripts: British Library and Royal Asiatic Society in
London; Government Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research
Centre and Madrasa-i Muhammadi Library in Chennai; Mappila
Heritage Library at Calicut University, the libraries of Tanur, Chaliyam
and Ponnani Valiya Jumuʿattu Paḷḷi and the Regional Archives of
Kozhikode in Kerala; Salar Jung Museum and Library in Hyderabad;
National Archives of India in Delhi; Perpustakaan Nasional and Arsip
Nasional in Jakarta; Perpustakaan dan Museum Ali Hasjmy and
Aceh State Museum in Banda Aceh; Dayah Tanoh Abee in Aceh
Besar; libraries of International Islamic University Malaysia and
International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization in Kuala
Lumpur; Leiden University Library and its Special Collections; the
National Archief in the Hague; Staatsbibliothek in Berlin; Juma AI-
Majid Center for Culture and Heritage in Dubai; King Saud University
Manuscript Collections in Riyadh; Masjid al-Ḥarām Library in Mecca;
and Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
 I have also benefited from the questions and comments I
received while presenting parts of this book at various institutions
across the world, especially at the universities of Aarhus, Bergen,
Bochum, Bonn, Calicut, Cambridge, Chennai, Dar Es Salaam, Doha,
Duke, Exeter, Göttingen, Harvard, Hyderabad, Kerala, Oxford,
Princeton, Seoul, Singapore and Yogyakarta, and at the institutes or
centres in Banda Aceh, Berlin, Frankfurt, Manila, Leiden and
Panakkad. The organisers of these events, the discussants, co-
panellists and participants have provided constructive feedback that
sharpened this work. None of its chapters have appeared in print,
except minor sections of Chapter 8 which were published in
Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 41, no. 2
(2018): 202–219; Indonesia 106 (2018): 45–87; and
Rechtsgeshichte: Journal of the Max Planck Institute for European
Legal History 24, no. 2 (2016): 190–214.
I am indebted to each and every one of these friends,
colleagues, mentors, institutions, journals and events for their
support, rigorous guidance and encouragement. I am also grateful to
the three anonymous peer reviewers who read earlier versions of
this book and provided tremendously useful comments. Maria Marsh
and Atifa Jiwa at Cambridge University Press have offered
unwavering support from the book’s acquisition to its production. I
am also extremely grateful to Mervyn Richardson and Joan Dale
Lace for their extensive copyediting.
But even with all that support, my work might not have been
finished if my Mom Maimoonath and my siblings had not kept
encouraging me to take my own path. I always wondered about my
mother’s sources of inspiration and enormous courage as she faced
lonely struggles in a rural village in Malabar. She was determined to
educate all of us at a time when anyone in the area hardly ventured
out into the university and she was content for us to go to faraway
places while she remained often lonely at home. Words fail me, but
from the depths of my heart I thank her, along with Fayiza
Aboobacker, who joined me as a fellow traveller in the final stages of
this work.
Academic and personal journeys of a doctoral student between
the regions now usually identified as the Global South and North are
always enshrined in struggles between homelands and new homes,
where familiar and unfamiliar words and worlds dance in tandem and
the pursuit of knowledge becomes the pleasure of life but also the
struggle of existence. Prudent words attributed to the ninth-century
jurist al-Shāfiʿī, whose ideas formed the school of thought with which
this book engages, resonate with a kennismigrant when he says:
“The stranger is as fearful as a thief, as depressed as a debtor, as
humiliated as a prisoner. When he recalls his folks and his country,
his heart flutters like a bird’s wing.” To the struggles of such early
pursuers of knowledge in strange situations and distant lands, I
dedicate this book.
 Notes on Transliteration, Dates and
Places

In translating Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish words, I

have followed the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
(IJMES) transliteration system, except for ḏāl (‫)ذ‬. For Malayalam,
Tamil and Urdu words I have mostly followed the schemes of ALA-
LC Romanization Tables. For Arabi-Malayalam (Malabārī), Arabu-
Tamil (Arwī) and Jāwī I have mixed the IJMES style for Arabic with
that of ALA-LC, identifying the root-language of the words. I did the
same for the Malay and Bahasa Indonesia words, except for some
commonly used names. I have italicised the foreign terms at their
first occurrence but avoided italicisation when those are too
recurrent, such as ḥadīth, fuqahāʾ and madrasa.
I have given only Common Era years and avoided the Hijri Era
for the sake of smooth readability. All dates converted thus have
been cross-checked with the Hijri months and years. For a few dates
I have depended on secondary sources. If the month of the year is
not known, and thus not convertible into a single Common Era year, I
have identified the year, qualified as “in or after”.
As this book covers a vast littoral of the Indian Ocean with
several subcontinents on its shores, I use the term “South|East” Asia
and Africa in order to refer to South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia,
South Africa, Southeast Africa, Northeast Africa and East Africa,
unless I specify otherwise.

Major places mentioned in the book from the Indian Ocean

and the Mediterranean.
◈
Imagine. Yourself. In a ship. In a premodern port. A time
before steam engines and satellite systems would propel and
guide the ships. Entirely dependent on sails and winds.
On the deck. Waving adieu to all the loving and loved
bodies and minds. Slowly the shore and land become an
imagination, like your memory. No idea when or where you
will land next, because land itself becomes a notion. Water is
your reality. Wind is your engine. Stars are your guide.
Keep alive the hope of land, distance and time. That
hope in turn depends on the wings of the winds, the whines of
the waves. Hope as your captain does. In the next few
weeks, months or a year one becomes like a worm on the
wood. Floating over a bottomless ocean. Uncertainties dictate
behaviours. Civility and cruelty converge. Recollections of the
past and imaginations of the future merge. One becomes
nothing but a beast caged up along with many others.
Memory and hope offer etiquettes of present behaviour, or
visions of civility, love, lust and fear. A human interpretation of
divine intervention. Stands on the thresholds: Islamic Law in
Circulation.
Yet free yourself from claustrophobia. After all, you are
on the ocean. In a ship of imagination, one that voyages
through time and place, at a safe distance from the past. It is
about to lift anchor. For a long journey crossing borders,
carrying peoples of many nations, criss-crossing centuries. A
journey of thousands of nautical miles and a thousand years
entangled with lives of people, faiths, laws and languages.
Observe the routes of this vessel, ebbs and flows of the
ocean, together with many figures and forms of the bygone
eras.
The voyage is in the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean. Between Aleppo, Alexandria, Malindi,
Malabar, Maluku, Java, Colombo, Cape Town, to name but a
few. Without following a chartered and unidirectional route.
Multidirectional, transtemporal and transregional. This
freedom comes with restrictions too. Of law and life. Law of
life. Law regulates the tidal swings of human civilisations. If
not for it, the ship might run aground, hit coral reefs, wreck,
along with your breath and valuables.
In the vast freedom of mobility, the ship anchors in a few
places for a bit longer. To gather supplies, and for you to
explore new terrains together. Sometimes you can join
caravans and travel inland before you head back to the ship.
When the ship is anchored, do disembark, get on shore,
wander around, dare to venture inland to hinterlands, observe
those places and people closely. That observational
knowledge would offer fodder for your journey forward and
backward.
In this long voyage of about 450 pages, people from all
over the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean accompany you.
Not only from shores and islands, but also from mainlands
and hinterlands. Some fellow travellers might disappear
during the caravan rides, to make a home out of the arid
lands, and to disrupt the existing laws of life and norms there.
Many return, as you have to! New entrants in the ship come
up with new ideas, texts, commodities but also with new
predicaments. From Damascus, from Cairo, from Isfahan,
from Delhi, as much as from Jakarta, Mombasa, Lisbon,
Cochin, Amsterdam and London.
The journey lasts over a millennium. From the ninth
century to the twentieth. The timescale is like spacetime,
shrinking and expanding. Your journey has the hope of land,
a destination, an orderly world, a progression of time, but they
waver all the time, like the ship, dependent on the whims of
winds.
Forget your thalassophobia! Get ready to set sail on the
mast! Listen to a poem, attributed to al-Shāfiʿī from the ninth
century. One of your fellow masters on this ship:

There is no rest in residence for a person of culture

and intellect,
so travel and leave where you are residing!
Travel! You will find a substitute for what you’re
departing.
And strive! The beauty of life is in striving!
I’ve seen water become stagnant if it’s still
become pure if it runs, but not if it doesn’t flow.
The lion cannot hunt if it doesn’t leave the den,
the arrow will not strike without leaving its bow.
If the sun stood still in its heavenly orbit
It would tire people, Arabs and non-Arabs.
Gold is dirt when first found in its lands,
Oud is but another wood in its oodles.
If one travels, the destination is honoured
If one travels, he is honoured like gold.1
 Introduction
◈

The journeys of Islamic legal texts and ideas across the worlds of the
Indian Ocean and the Eastern Mediterranean form the fulcrum of this
book. With a focus on the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law, it observes
how and why the texts shaped, transformed, influenced and
negotiated the legal lives and juridical thoughts of a significant
community over a whole millennium, crossing many boundaries of
place and time.
For most Muslims, legal and mystical works first written as much
as a millennium ago are highly significant in their everyday lives
alongside the foundational scriptures of the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth
(Prophetic traditions). They all influence the ways in which they
perceive and practise their religion. The circulation of Islamic
knowledge depends on such texts, which as kitābs retain a guiding
power through the mediation of Islamic scholars. The disciplines of
law, mysticism and theology provide them with an all-encompassing
framework to teach, practise and disseminate what constitutes the
main body of this knowledge system. In the ordinary lives of many
Muslims, each legal and theological school or mystical order is a
point of reference and a source of piety. It is an essentially curious
question why such ancient texts from so distant a place should
sustain their ring of relevance.
In the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean littoral that
binds Asian and African continents together, Islam has had a
remarkable impact in shaping the laws in circulation since the
premodern period. From the ninth century onwards, Muslims have
been an important force in the maritime circulations of commodities
and communities, inspiring many scholars to identify the Indian
Ocean as an “Islamic Sea” or “Muslim Lake” for its remarkable
mélange of Arab, Persian, Indian, Swahili, Malay, Abyssinian and
Javanese followers, who shaped and influenced its socio-economic
aspects in variegated ways. Nuances of these multi-ethnic, multi-
racial and multi-lingual historical developments provide fascinating
analytical and exploratory avenues for global histories of law, religion
and society. Specifically for the history of Islamic law, it is even more
interesting for the fact that the majority of Muslims have historically
been living in the so-called peripheries and have been practising
Islamic laws (aḥkām al-Islam) from as early as 850 CE in such
remote places as Guangzhou in China.1 One wonders how they
could have observed Islam and its laws from so far away, and if they
retained that tradition over the course of time along with their
coreligionists.
For Muslims living in the Indian Ocean and the Eastern
Mediterranean littoral, the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law has been one
of the major lexicons that provide a shared vocabulary, whether in
the Philippines, Syria, Indonesia, South Africa, Yemen, Tanzania,
Kenya, Sri Lanka or Malaysia. The school is named after Idrīs al-
Shāfiʿī (767–820), one of the leading jurists of early Islam, and it was
established in the ninth century on the basis of the juridical
approaches and teachings he had imparted during his peregrinations
in present-day Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. It is remarkable
how his teachings a thousand years ago in those places found its
largest following in the largest Muslim country, Indonesia, for
example. This aspect relates to the historical influence of Islamic law
in general and Shāfiʿīsm in particular among the Indian Ocean
Muslims, and to the direct historical intellectual connections between
these regions in terms of legal thoughts and practices.
How and why did Islamic law spread along the coastal belts
from South|East Africa to South|East Asia, how did similarities occur
and how did connections function? How and why did one particular
school emerge as the standard form of law, and how did it develop
into the fully fledged legal practice of those regions? What sort of
materials and texts enabled the presence and persistence of law and
its one school among them as one of the most important sources for
better socio-religious lives? With these questions in mind, this book
explores the legal arguments of jurists within the context of scholarly,
political, economic and social connections at major nodal points in
the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littoral: Cairo, the
Levant, the Hijaz, Ḥaḍramawt, Malabar, Java, Zanzibar and Aceh
between the ninth and twentieth centuries. It brings together such a
large transregional and transtemporal canvas through a “textual
cord” of Shāfiʿī cosmopolis with all its nuances and complexities. It
traces the conjunctions and disjunctions across Islamic lands and
between classical and postclassical Islamic laws through the prisms
of circulatory legal texts, through the textual traditions differently
developed with continuities and ruptures, and through their
respective impacts on the contrasting intellectual landscapes of
Muslims.
 Opening the Gate of Law
The textual cords of Islamic law are rooted in its long discursive and
disciplinary practices. Authors of juridical texts, whether based in
South|East Asia, Africa or the Middle East, aimed to be part of a
longer discursive intellectual textual tradition, relating their writings to
earlier texts, scholars and ideas, yet emphasising the contextual
priorities of their own places and times. All these writings generally
came under the disciplinary framework of fiqh, a crucial field for
explaining the long Islamic scholarly tradition and for understanding
law and legality as discussed in this book. It is a discipline that
emerged primarily from the attempts to regulate the everyday life of
a believer according to the individual or collective interpretations of
the Qurʾān, Prophetic traditions and other scriptural sources of
Islam.
In Islamic terminology two dominant terms are used to
categorise legal knowledge generically: Sharīʿa and fiqh. Sharīʿa
literally means way or path, but it has been used from early on as an
umbrella term to refer to divine commandments and laws as evident
in the foundational scriptures of Islam. The fiqh is human, scholarly
interpretations of the Sharīʿa and is divided into three major
subfields: uṣūl al-fiqh connotes legal theory; furūʿ al-fiqh refers to
substantive law; and takhrīj denotes the process of interrelating
them. These terms represent independent genres of Sunnī Islamic
legal writing, especially uṣūl al-fiqh and furūʿ al-fiqh. This book is
concerned with the furūʿ al-fiqh, and all the texts it focuses on belong
to this genre unless stated otherwise. I use the terms fiqh and
(Islamic) law interchangeably. There are other major genres of
Islamic knowledge such as the Qurʾān and its exegesis (tafsīr); the
ḥadīth; theology (kalām); mysticism (taṣawwuf). All these disciplines,
along with additional fields such as logic, grammar, rhetoric and
literature, are made sense of in terms of being ancillary to the fiqh. A
Muslim jurist should study these areas and their texts, but only to
sharpen juridical knowledge. This emic understanding of the entire
Islamic knowledge and textual corpus is also entangled with some
etic concerns. The Qurʾān per se is not helpful for any historical
discourse unless it is interpreted in tafsīr. On the Indian Ocean rim,
even up to the sixteenth century, we have no extant exegetical text.
The same goes more or less for ḥadīths and theology. The case is
slightly better for mysticism, whereas for law it is even more telling.
We have fiqh texts written by the oceanic Muslims from as early as
the fourteenth century.
Islamic law mainly evolved in the eighth and ninth centuries. In
the eighth century the Islamic jurists were divided broadly into two
groups. While “the guardians of traditions” (ahl al-ḥadīth) valued the
traditions of the Prophet Muḥammad and the customs of Medina
more than they valued reason, “the guardians of reasoning” (ahl al-
raʾy) preferred legal rationality and a context-based analogical
deduction (qiyās), juristic preference or equity (istiḥsān), consensus
of opinion (ijmāʿ) and local custom (ʿurf). The former group was
predominantly based in the Hijaz and the latter in Iraq. The
“traditionalists” would eventually evolve as the Mālikī school, named
after its leading jurist Mālik bin Anas (711–795), and the “rationalists”
as the Ḥanafī school, named after its prominent jurist Abū Ḥanīfa
(699–767). In an attempt to reconcile this legalistic division, the
abovementioned al-Shāfiʿī accommodated Mālik’s standpoint of
istidlāl (legal reasoning beyond qiyās) as a source of law and refuted
Abū Ḥanīfa’s idea of equity. His approach resulted in the school of
Shāfiʿīsm, but against it there emerged the more traditional legal
thought of Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal (780–855). In these entanglements
between tradition and reason, what is interesting is that all four
“founders” of their schools were known to one another as students or
teachers. In fact, their relationships go beyond the Sunnī tradition.
Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (c. 702–765), the founder of the Shīʿī school of
Jaʿfarīsm, was a teacher of Abū Ḥanīfa; al-Shāfiʿī was a student of
Mālik bin Anas; Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal was a student of al-Shāfiʿī. Such
connections and disconnections mirror the pattern of the later
tradition of Islamic law and particularly of Shāfiʿīsm. As much as
every scholar belonged to their teacher, they all formulated their own
independent ideas.
All these jurists, their followers, and many more shaped the
hermeneutics of the fiqh and produced a vast corpus of legal texts,
which deal with diverse legal questions referring to the past, the
present and the future of Islamic tradition.2 References to the past
revealed their attempts to place themselves in the long tradition of
discourses of earlier texts and scholars. Contemporary contexts and
references to a particular space and time constitute the present, and
a vision of the future is embedded in their idea of constructing an
ideal society. Since almost all fiqh texts engage with the same legal
areas and interconnect past, present and future, they provide an
opportunity for historians to understand how attitudes and mentalities
of scholars changed on issues or themes over centuries. They not
only exhibit continuity from the past to the future, but also enable us
to identify discontinuities which had clear influences in a specific
place and time, as exemplified by the present of a text. But did these
law books actually reflect any changes in the last thousand years
and did they engage with their local contexts?
Most early Islamicists believed that the freedom for ijtihād,
“independent investigation”, in Islamic knowledge system ended
roughly around 900 CE with “the closure of the gate of ijtihād”. The
major Sunnī legal schools were thus restricted to four and all other
legal streams were disqualified, arguably by a consensus of the
jurists, and later scholars had to choose one of the schools and had
freedom to investigate only while standing within a school. This
general idea motivated many scholars to believe that “original” and
“independent” legal thoughts ceased forever in the history of Islamic
law, and “sterile commentarial literature” represented the increasing
“decline of knowledge in our age”.3 In the last few decades, however,
this approach has been questioned and scholars have argued
convincingly that Islamic law indeed continued to be more dynamic
and flexible in later centuries.4 Many recent scholars researched the
legal opinions of a number of schools, jurists and texts from the
second millennium onwards, and one scholar has even identified a
second formation of Islamic law in this millennium.5
The developments later in the history of Islamic law
emblematise an urge for the stability and continuity of thoughts,
institutions and values. The unbroken chains of scholars and
students over centuries as much as the chains of their books and
commentaries authenticate a longue durée of circulation. The links
make the continuity of intellectual enquiry permanent and show the
ways through which participants asserted themselves into the
tradition. They always stretch back to previous scholars of the
school, and through them to the Prophet, and ultimately to God. Yet
within this unbroken chain of transmission there are frequent
ruptures in legal ideas and texts. Indeed, at times discontinuity
dominates the discussions and makes one particular scholar or text
tower over the longer tradition and governs its course across time
and space. Analogies for these ruptures can be found in the very
early phases of Islamic law, when students often “stood against” the
legal regimes of their teachers. Often points of disagreement erupted
about rationality and traditionalism, a predicament that would remain
instructive throughout Islamic legal history.
An obligation to subscribe to one school of thought did not force
later jurists to accept blindly the legal ideas of their eponymous
founders. They continued to engage with each issue critically,
treating it as something new and providing a new perspective and
juridical ruling. Sometimes this opposed what the founding figures
thought and argued. Adherence to one school did not hinder its
followers from intellectual activity or the urge to go beyond what was
known and accepted. Setting up a constitution for a nation does not
restrain its jurists, legislators or the like in later centuries from
revisions and amendments. They might even introduce paradigm
shifts into the whole framework of the nation itself. Similarly,
standardising the four legal schools among Sunnīs and adhering to
one of them did not lead to intellectual inertia in later centuries. Many
jurists who were followers of a particular school openly contradicted
several rules of its founding leaders.6 In Shāfiʿīsm, the legal opinions
of two later jurists, Rāfiʿī and Nawawī, were regarded as the most
valid after the thirteenth century. The eponymous founder, al-Shāfiʿī,
was often a distant reference point for authenticity among
succeeding jurists when compared to Nawawī or Rāfiʿī, and their
works at times diminished the importance of the views of early
jurists. Such an evolution of a discursive tradition made Islamic legal
thought more vibrant in later centuries and generated intellectual
continuity and discontinuity in legal theories and practices. The
writing of commentaries is the most significant symbol of this
evolution.
 Longue durée of Texts: Commentarial
Ocean
There are parallels between the history of Islamic legal texts and that
of the oceans which can be read as historical phenomena of a
longue durée. In his ground-breaking work on the Mediterranean, the
French historian Fernand Braudel conceptualised the long and
complex history of such geographical structures as oceans, and
argued that geographical structures have a long-term and sustained
history, one that is “almost silent and always discreet, virtually
unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little
touched by the obstinate erosion of time”.7 The history of traditional
Islamic texts is no different. A law book from the thirteenth or
sixteenth century belonged to a longer textual tradition that in turn
originated in the early ninth century. That genealogy has been
sustained into the twenty-first century through recurrent textual
progenies. In them the changes are also “almost silent and always
discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its
participants”. This book thus moves from the geographical longue
durée of Braudel to the textual longue durée that concerns minor but
influential changes embodied in texts.8 The core and corpus of these
texts remain concrete across geography and chronology, but their
meanings and rulings change almost imperceptibly. Those changes
might remain unnoticed in their immediate contexts, but they have
the potential to create a tornado of changes in the longer run.
 A network of Islamic texts and communities connected nodal
points, geographically and chronologically distant, through one or
more textual cords. Two phenomena are crucial in this process:
Islamic law as a genre and oceanic networks. Maritime networks
enabled traders, travellers, scholars, sailors and slaves to transmit
texts and ideas as much as those people depended on the networks
to transfer commodities. The Muslim maritime itinerants carried the
Islamic dogma with them as they travelled and prospered in these
networks. In Islamic history there was an upsurge in the use of sea
travel for trade and education as much as for war and pilgrimage.9
Details of overseas educational travel from the earliest Islamic
sources are sparse and hard to trace. While we do not know of
actual events, it is clear from an oft-quoted saying that China was
the farthest potential destination for educational travel among early
Muslims.10 It is therefore not surprising to find a practising Islamic
community in Guangzhou in the middle of the ninth century, but how
did they, or any other such Muslim community, connect with the
developments and disseminations of Islamic teachings in the Islamic
heartlands? Commentarial and oceanic networks provide the
answers.
Writing a commentary to or a summary of a previous work was
normal practice in Islamic juridical scholarship as early as the ninth
century.11 To write anything other than a commentary was
exceptional since the eleventh century, and this practice dominated
Muslim legal scholarship until the twentieth century. Even today it
continues in different shapes and forms as virtual and hyper-textual
commentaries. The popularity of commentaries (sharḥ, pl. shurūḥ)
and supercommentaries (ḥāshiya, pl. ḥawāshī) was to a large extent
the consequence of the spread of educational centres (madrasas) in
the tenth century.12 By the thirteenth century they had become a
mark of intellectual activity, revived Islamic legal thought by making it
intellectually vibrant, and connected distant communities of Muslims
in their socio-legal journeys. This development resonated with the
European legal tradition through the rise of glossators and
commentators in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries respectively.
While teaching or reading texts, the jurists added material, such
as the opinions of other scholars, solutions to new legal issues,
disagreements with the author, or corrections to the original text.
These were the essential characteristics of commentary writing.
While commentaries provide interpretations for specific legal texts,
supercommentaries or ḥāshiyas exhibit “an established scholarly
practice reflecting the cumulative nature of Muslim scholarship”.
They became veritable encyclopaedias or veritable museums,
recording excerpts or whole documents from works which may
otherwise have been lost.13 The margins of manuscripts had thus by
the thirteenth century become the space for the expression of
intellectual opinions of various lengths and strengths. Ibn Jamāʿa
(1241–1333), a thirteenth-century Shāfiʿī scholar, gave advice on
this practice:

There is nothing wrong with writing important notes (ḥawāshī,

fawāʾid, tanbīhāt) in the margins of a book one owns … Only
important notes that pertain to the contents of the book in
question should be given, such as notes that call attention to
 difficult or doubtful passages, allusions, mistakes, and the like.
Problems and details that are alien to the contents should not be
allowed to deface the book, nor should there be so many
marginal notes that it becomes disfigured or the student is at a
loss to find out where they belong.14

The commentaries of Shāfiʿī jurists were multi-layered and

multi-formed in their production, dissemination and engagement, as
will be explained in Chapter 2, with thirteen forms found around the
Indian Ocean littoral. Some commentaries were written by less
famous scholars in order to gain entry into the intellectual world,
although such works are comparatively few. Those who did so
wanted “to identify themselves with superstars in order to entice
people into reading their works, even, or perhaps especially, when
their ideas differed from those of the original author”.15 But most
other commentators were already established scholars, who had an
urge to engage critically with the standpoints and approaches of a
particular text and its author or from a genuine admiration for
particular scholars. The commentaries, supercommentaries and
glossaries, interdependently and independently, provide an
opportunity to understand the varied approaches of scholars from a
number of different geographical and chronological contexts on a
particular issue. Each such text has the advantage of exposing
students to two or more intellects, that of the author of the base text
and that of the commentator, glossator and/or supercommentator.
Indeed, “it is only in writings of these commentators that it is possible
to find the doctrines of the different schools expounded in their
fullness”.16
How did the commentaries revive legal thought in the different
places and at the different times they were written, and how did they
contribute to the intellectual development of the Shāfiʿī school? Why
were increasing numbers of commentaries written on a text even
when dozens of commentaries on it already existed? What made
some commentaries more celebrated than others, and what do these
texts tell us about the intensive discursive tradition of the Muslim
communities in distant yet connected places and periods? By
addressing this subset of questions vis-à-vis the Shāfiʿī textual cord
this book explores how a text from the thirteenth century claiming to
belong to a ninth-century tradition was repeatedly revived until the
twentieth century by numerous scholars according to the needs of
their own localities and their own times. On the basis of this textual
longue durée, it becomes clear that the legal tradition of Islam, which
has mostly been characterised as having lost its originality and
individuality by the end of the so-called classical era, in fact
continued to be discussed more thoroughly in the “postclassical era”
than in the early centuries of Islam. It produced rigorous works in
Shāfiʿīsm that set the frameworks of legal discourses for centuries to
come. Commentary writing functioned as an effective juridical
exercise, and communities throughout the Mediterranean and the
Indian Ocean participated in this tradition with their own additions
and versions, creating advances in the legal tradition in a way that
would appeal to a large following over several centuries.
 In parallel and similar to the development of commentarial
tradition, the reach of Islamic law also extended beyond borders.
The Shāfiʿī school was born in Iraq, developed in Egypt,
institutionalised in the Levant and the Caspian, and attracted
followers in Malabar, Sumatra, Java, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Johor,
Maguindanao and Cape Town. In the process, several historical
communities took leading roles in circulating the school and its texts,
such as the Egyptians, Hijazis, Ḥaḍramī and non-Ḥaḍramī Yemenis,
Comorians, Ethiopians, Iraqis, Gujaratis, Acehnese, Javanese,
Sudanese, Malabaris, Maqāssarīs, Malays, Persians, Swahilis,
Syrians and Tamils. The school’s main centres also changed over
time according to shifts in socio-political and economic scenarios. By
the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century we see in the
contexts of South|East Asia and Africa a surge in local centres for
religious education, far from the prominent institutions at Mecca,
Medina, Cairo or Damascus. Whether or not those famous centres
had lost some of their prominence at this time, Muslims from the
maritime littoral had clearly established their own hubs which
attracted a significant group of students, teachers and jurists.
Gradually these centres became famous in their respective
subcontinents, not only as centres of education but also for
advanced legal ideas and related textual production. They
incorporated themselves into the wider sphere of Islamic intellectual
discourse by generating commentaries, supercommentaries and
abridgments.
There was increasing transmission of texts and ideas to and
from the diverse lands of Islam and an active textual network
developed which contributed to the spread of the Shāfiʿī school
around the rim of the Indian Ocean and in its hinterland. All these
historical processes depended on the maritime highways of the
Indian Ocean, not just as passive routes for intellectual interaction
but rather as active participants. Resonant with such fluidities, this
book is concerned with both transtemporal and transregional
spectrums of Islamic law. In terms of temporality, it moves beyond
narratives surrounding the formation and developments of Islamic
law in the classical period and explores the ways in which it
circulated in the postclassical era, in the second millennium, from the
thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. Spatially, it goes beyond the
Middle-East-centric narratives of Islamic law and examines closely
the Indian Ocean world to see how Islamic legal discourses spread
and evolved in South|East Asia and Africa, yet in conversation with
one another. Taken together, the study unravels the nuances of
intellectual and legal exchanges among and between the Asian,
African and Arab communities through the circulation of ideas, texts
and institutions before and after the European expansions.
 Law in Circulation
Humans are generally identified as rule-driven creatures, and the
broadly defined legal systems have determined transregional,
transcultural and interpolity exchanges since early recorded
histories. This becomes especially evident in the last two millennia
thanks to the extant records available from diverse religious, regional
and imperial settings. Among religious traditions, law is widely
recognised to have been central to Judaism and Islam as a corpus of
meticulous instructions to regulate the everyday lives and behaviours
of their followers. Elaborate and substantive rulings constituted
historical and contemporary realities for them. In Islamic societies,
law was a significant frame that regulated collective and individual
lives. Although prescribed rules may not have been practised in their
entirety, certain notions and segments of what was understood as
Sharīʿa gained momentum among Muslims from the ninth century
onwards. This prominence of law is not to say that it was the only
source of authority or core and kernel of Islam, but it existed along
with several other streams, including mystical, philosophical and
theological perspectives. Even so, law prevailed as an imperative
interpretative and instructive field, as we see in the writings of
important Islamic figures such as Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) in
the eleventh century, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) in the thirteenth–
fourteenth centuries, and Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1382) in the fourteenth
century.17 Despite the fact that their primary areas of religious,
disciplinary and academic interests went beyond law and some of
them even protested against the overemphasis on law, they affirmed
its supremacy in their contemporary world as along with religion.
Western theorists only ambivalently identified this centrality of
law among Muslim communities. European investigations into the
Islamic social order and normativity started with the expansion of
colonial regimes, and Afrasian practices of justice occupied the
attention of many scholars of religion, law, language and cultures.
When Max Weber branded the arbitrary role of law as kadijustiz, he
had in mind the image of a legal system without rationality and
unconstrained by rules.18 Before and after him, several European
scholars and jurists, such as Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Cornelis
van Vollenhoven, Joseph Schacht and Georges-Henri Bousquet,
filled in that image with details of executions and discourses of
normative social orders among Muslims. Their writings resonated
with accounts from earlier European itinerants of the administration
of justice in the Muslim “Orient”. Certain stereotypes emerged and
were sustained as being synonymous with Islamic normative order.
Some such ideas still prevail today. The nuanced investigations of
historians, anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers were
centred on questions about the ability of these norms and traditions
to bequeath a coherent legal system, and the translatability and
commensurability of Sharīʿa and fiqh as law. Is the phenomenal
normativity among Muslims legal, or can law also be Islamic? These
questions were connected directly to the very investigations on the
fundamental physiognomies of law and its historical, cultural,
authoritative roles in society.
 Law has been defined diversely through interpretative, cultural,
textual and praxeological frames. Differing from the Greek
philosophical division between the natural world (physis) and human
world (nomos) and the consequent separation of laws of natural
science and the social sciences as human and physical laws, the
discipline and the field of law have generally been established as an
arena for engaging with a formalised and objectivised system of
rules to guide human relations. Into this human world of law and its
“open texture” enters Islam with its divine revelations as related
logical reasonings in the form of Sharīʿa. It breaks the usual
characterisations of law, and inserts epiphanies and prophecies as
its prime source, as they were compiled in the Qurʾān and the
Prophetic traditions with ascribed inflexible and timeless dogmas.
To what extent then can revelations and revealed texts with
unquestionable authority be part of human law? The culturalist
interpretations of law approached this question with an emphasis on
textual analysis, whereas others identified law as “part of a
distinctive manner of imagining the real”, mediated by a textual
corpus that helps in formulating a cultural code of meanings to
interpret the world through words with idiosyncratic legal sensibility.19
Brinkley Messick combines textual, cultural and imaginative
interpretations of the Sharīʿa and defines it as a textual polity that
comprises “a conception of an authoritative text” and “a pattern of
textual authority”.20 This book, attentive to these endeavours,
demonstrates that the written texts ascribed to divine sources,
written rules and unknown regulations, hermeneutical and
ontological discourses, communities of interpreters and followers
surrounding them, and historical praxis with material and
metaphysical consequences, all presented a larger and longer
continuum in which meanings of law were circulated both
horizontally and vertically across geographical and chronological
strata. In the process of time, the meaning of the laws varied
between an ultimately divine law to the historical, human-experience
terrain of laws.21
This dimension recognises Islamic law as a multiverse in both
premodern and modern times, especially if seen through non-
Western eyes. Discussions of law have very much centred on
Western categorisations. From a non-Western (Global Southern)
analytical, temporal and spatial view, we can understand how Islam
and its laws present a cosmopolis of their own, in which multiple
historical actors benefited, suffered, flourished, exploited and
progressed. It breaks such monolithic images as kadijustiz, which
prevailed in European academia, and presents multiple shades of
law and justice discursively and administratively. In both juridical
discourse and judicial practice, Islamic law stands outside the usual
understanding of law as state-centric and imperial, or as state-
sponsored projects for codifications and judicial institutions. Rather it
appears more as an exclusive realm for jurists, for the fuqahāʾ
estate. Broadly conceived, Islamic law as the interpretative mode of
the fiqh did not have the same connotations and technical definitions
in its interpretative, cultural, praxeological and textual worlds. Its
meanings and implications changed as normative orders varied from
place to place and over time within Muslim communities. What
brought them together was, this book argues, a geographically wider
and chronologically longer cosmopolis of Islamic law.
The cosmopolis of law is an analytical frame that
accommodates deep continuities, subtle changes and innovations
and a longue durée of legal systems. Etymologically cosmopolis
links the Greek kosmos (world) and polis (city). Usually it means a
city inhabited by people, more precisely free males, from different
regions. In philosophical discourses, however, it represents an
interaction between the cosmos and the polis, between the orders of
nature and society. It embodies different concepts in Greek, Chinese,
Roman, Islamic, Hindu and Christian traditions in their attempts to
elucidate interactions between these orders. The gist of all their
arguments is that they narrativise a more orderly structure for society
and for the world at large and relate meanings between the material
and the metaphysical, the seen and the unseen, near and distant
worlds. Any attempt to arrest socio-cultural, spiritual and political
disorders in respective legal systems undoubtedly aims towards this
goal. It aims for an ideal state, but history shows us that it mostly
achieves the opposite. In his influential elaboration on cosmopolis,
Stephen Toulmin demonstrates how the rationalist trend in the
Renaissance (and its humanism) produced the Enlightenment that
searched for certainty. He calls it the “Politics of Certainty” in the
seventeenth century.22 This “Counter-Renaissance” was entangled
with ideas of cosmopolis as reflected in the earliest thoughts of the
Enlightenment. Although this was a phenomenal development in that
century through a prism of rationality, the underlying call for a definite
order was reflected in other places and times. Disorder remains in
terms of social and cultural practices, and even the idea of law itself
seemed inevitably to display the nature of chaos. The internal
dynamics of an idea targeted at terminating the disorder are
embodied with conflicts and cohesions, invisible in the immediate
present, but becoming inflamed in the long run.
A scrutiny of legal cultures across the globe sheds light on the
idea. Theoretically longing for order remained the core aim of
legalistic discourses, by either projecting the tradition or downplaying
it in favour of rationality. In practice the final outcome varied, and
particular systems of law in particular cultures achieved their goals
more successfully than others. Disorder was condemned, but it
existed and at times it even prevailed. It may not have led to such
anarchy that law was eliminated, yet it maintained an “orderly
disorder” within or against the tradition of discourses. That explains
the idea of a cosmopolis of law. In literary and cultural studies, the
concept of a “cosmopolis” has been analysed well by scholars such
as Sheldon Pollock, whose work on the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis”
evoked the orders of nature and society in Sanskrit literature.23 It
implicates three additional aspects: a supraregional dimension; a
prominence of political dimension; an actual qualification of
Sanskrit.24 Ronit Ricci advanced Pollock’s approach by bringing in
the role of religion and suggested that an Arabic cosmopolis
replaced the Sanskrit one in South and Southeast Asia. Similar
cosmopoleis existed around the rim of the Indian Ocean for other
languages too, and a few historians have explored its usefulness as
a conceptual frame for the dynamics of maritime commerce and
hierarchical elements of urban networking since it also connotes “a
multi-centered linked community based upon the pluralism of its
member”.25 My idea of a legal cosmopolis corresponds closely to
such conceptions, yet it differs from them in that my emphasis is first
and foremost on legal cultures rather than on literary, linguistic and
mercantile parameters.
In the cosmopolis of law, universalism, local contexts,
supraregionality, religious traditions and networks, and the very
question of law play crucial roles. Political structures, although
indispensable for legal systems within or outside the parameters of
legal pluralism, do not play a vital part in the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis that
will be analysed in this book. That cosmopolis stood for a universal
and divine law, free from political intervention; it stretched from the
Eastern Mediterranean to the Eastern Indian Ocean; it practically
disengaged with states in local contexts; it simultaneously sustained
a tradition of internal political conflicts inherent to the Shāfiʿī school
and the fuqahāʾ estate it associated with. What can be seen in this
long-term historical journey of a legal cosmopolis is a “disorderly
order”. Toulmin’s idea of a cosmopolis promulgates the urge of
European intellectuals to bring order into the society, whereas
Pollock’s conception stands for a more open, flexible and aesthetic
world. I combine them both into a legal cosmopolis, precisely
because the law wanted to arrest disorder, which was sustained
across time, bringing about minuscule changes capable of leading to
dramatic ruptures far away in place or time.
Within the cosmopolis of law, we need to provincialise and
disaggregate Islamic law as a monolithic, inflexible and timeless
phenomenon as much as to identify its value as conceived and
perceived by jurists in their specific contexts. This brings in the role
of contextual elements influencing and even shaping the “contents”
of law at large, and Islamic law in particular. To talk about “context” in
the contents of Islamic law is also to provincialise Islamic law.
Although extra-religious customs and norms in the opinions of a
jurist may be more than plausible historically as regional
impressions, scholars have been reluctant to assess the overall
regional (especially Middle Eastern) framework in which the
contextual assertions enter the body of Islamic law.26 Is it possible to
understand Islam and its laws delineated apart from Middle Eastern
contexts? The implication of any attempt to answer this question is to
evaluate the “Islamic” legal cultures of Muslims on a broad spectrum
with close attention to the local contexts in which their law and legal
texts were produced, survived and circulated.
To “provincialise” is imperative in examining the contexts of
Islam during its long history, not necessarily because it resonates
with recent postcolonial theoretical interventions targeted at the
imaginary figure of Europe and the claims to generalise a universal
human history.27 Rather, this provincialisation addresses the deep-
rooted racialist and deterministic taxonomies of provinces, zones
and climates intrinsic to premodern Islamic thought. Long before
such geopolitical categories as the Middle East and the Near East
and their variants and synonyms came to dominate European
epistemologies, intellectuals from the regions in question understood
the larger world in creative yet judgemental frames. For many of
them, climate defined the way people looked, behaved, thought, ate,
dressed and so on. This geoclimatic–human interconnection is
familiar to Western audiences because of Montesquieu. But long
before him, Islamic philosophers, geographers and historians such
as Muqaddasī, Idrīsī, Birūnī and Ibn Khaldūn promulgated the idea
of a reverberating repertoire of civilizations dependent upon the
weather.28 They analysed civilizations in terms of cultivable and
habitable lands. These they divided into seven zones on the basis of
their temperature: the hottest (zone one) stretched from West Africa
to East Africa, to South Arabia, India, the Malay Archipelago, parts of
China, Japan and Korea; the coolest region (zone seven) covered
most areas around the North Sea, England, Europe, Russia and
Central Asia; the central one (zone four) was moderate in every
respect, including the lands from Tangier to Iraq, Syria, Amanus,
Qazwin, Khurasan and Isfahan and also parts of Spain and Anatolia,
which became centres of Islamic civilization.
This book does not aim to discredit the geoclimatic divisions,
even though it does challenge an important misconception in which
Islamic thought (including legal thought and history) evolved as part
of a self-perceived privileged province vis-à-vis several other
“uncivilized” ones. In their conception, the Indian Ocean and most
Mediterranean areas come under the first and second zones, which
are the most disparaged: the people in the first zone lack
scholarship, law, religion; they “are closer to dumb animals than to
rational beings” and have “less civilization than the other zones”,
according to Ibn Khaldun, a most zealous proponent.29 He even
goes on to say that “they frequently eat each other” and “they cannot
be considered human beings.” From these calumnies Arabia (places
like the Hijaz, Yemen, Hadramawt, Ahqaf and Yamama) is excluded,
despite it being geographically located in the first and second zones,
because it is “bounded by the sea from all three sides” and the
humidity from the sea influences its air and makes it “to some degree
temperate”.30 The great irony of this statement is that other oceanic
littorals do not qualify for this privilege. This book challenges such
prejudiced divisions and explicates their contributions to the kernel of
Islam through engagements with law, scriptures and wider
discourses, precisely the activities of which they are accused of
being incapable. We must bear in mind that Ibn Khaldūn’s
observations on the early history of Islamic law have been highly
influential in later Islamic legal historiography, so it is no wonder that
the intellectual contributions of Indian Ocean Muslims have long
been neglected. Once we provincialise the geoclimatic divisions and
sequential universalisations to which they were predisposed by
drawing examples from the oceanic region, then Islam and its
thoughts and praxis emerge as contextualised counters in the grids
of a larger historical boardgame, moving, capturing, felling, raising
and checking one another through perpetual circulations.
The longue durée of legal systems has hardly been addressed
in relation to discourses of law in premodern, non-Western societies.
Most of the studies start with European expansions into Asian,
African or American lands, and with European legal systems
beginning to interact with those in their newly colonised lands. But
Islamic law existed in theory and practice in many of these lands
before the arrival of the Europeans, and it has continued to be
relevant since the Europeans left. Particular textual corpora and their
textual genealogy are our best examples for this. The legal texts of
the longue durée are important indicators of continuity and rupture in
the Islamic legal traditions and the diversity they embodied over long
periods of time.
Beyond the state-centric views of law inherent in legal
historiography, this book proposes a quadripartite division of the
Islamic juridical corpus, consisting of a divine entity, fuqahāʾ estates,
states and communities. The role and presence of God – very much
at the centre of Islamic concepts of law – are not usually discussed
in legal historiography. States have utilised this legal order, much as
its jurists and their clusters have utilised the state, but it was not an
exclusive possession of the states as it was in Western legal
systems and Western colonised worlds. The fuqahāʾ estates
dominated the discourse and praxis of Islamic law. This they did
through the individual, collective and institutional settings in which
they managed to adduce the Sharīʿa. Through various forms of
authority and leadership, the fuqahāʾ estates united and divided the
Muslim community at large, which had wider implications for the
concepts and history of Islamic laws.
Relatedly, the well-established historiographical constructions of
a distinct “customary law” and theoretical “customs as law” by jurists,
Islamicists, historians, anthropologists and area specialists, which
they set in contrast to a universal “Islamic law”, prove to have been
seriously misjudged. This is especially true when we agree to the
recent suggestion that what makes Islam is its “logic of internal
contradictions”.31 The contradictions in legal understandings,
practices and norms should not be allowed to confront each other.
We need to acknowledge the attempts of Muslims to identify their
customs and practices within the frameworks of Islamic law through
personal identification, elaboration of the discursive and paraxial
contents, or identification with the community of Islamic law. These
three elements are co-constitutive of the human geographical and
historical phenomenon of Islam. If someone identifies with these, an
outsider cannot reject that person as non-Islamic or less Islamic,
even in the realm of law.
Regional legal norms have always been essential to assess
many legal opinions of Islam, and those have been central to the
broader legal cosmopolis. This is more explicit in the case of the
Mālikī school, which argued for the legal practices of Medina to be
taken as proper “Islamic” law. But there are also some fuqahāʾ from
the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī schools who agreed that customs from any
region have certain implications in legal judgments and ritual
practices. This materialised in the acceptance of customs (ʿurf;
ʿādāt) in legal theory.32 In the Shāfiʿī case we see many jurists
considering ʿurf as a valid source of law, something we see in
postclassical texts for both substantive law and legal theory. The late
acceptance of ʿurf as a source of law was preceded by a selective
recognition of particular regional customs as law. Not all customs
from all regions were considered to be law. Only those of a few
regions enjoyed that privilege. Not until the legal theorists of
Shāfiʿīsm incorporated regional customs as legitimate sources of law
was there a way to remove confusions in identifying which customs
could be seen as authentically “divine” law. It became more complex
with an increased mix of new ethnicities introducing their customs
into the Arab-dominated spheres of Islam. Each estate contributed to
this process on different levels. The discussion of Shāfiʿī texts in this
book identifies the regional elements, customs and norms of each
text. There is a general notion that substantive legal texts give no
room for such contextual analyses in a historical perspective. I shall
attempt to show that they can do so.
Circulation is an especially important factor in this regard, not
only in the historical process of legal texts and ideas but also as an
analytical category in the Islamic legal cosmopolis. It helps identify
the input of multiple contributors from different areas, without
assuming the centrality of one group, place or institution over the
rest. Taking on Bruno Latour’s idea of “centres of calculation”, Kapil
Raj has conceptualised circulation in his global historical analysis of
scientific exchanges between Europe and Asia in the seventeenth to
nineteenth centuries. He identifies its relevance for historians to
follow specific practitioners, skills, texts and instruments across
continents and communities in “the mutable nature as much as of
the men themselves, as the knowledge and skills they embodied, in
the course of their geographical and/or social displacements”.33 In
such exchanges, the historical actors engendered changes,
modifications and recompositions in line with their trajectories and
areas of circulation. The concept stands close to what many other
contemporary historians have termed “connected history”, “histoire
croisée”, “shared history” or “entangled history”.34 That overall
approach pertains to this study conceptually as it chooses a long
historical canvas and traces actors from distant lands who had
worked together for the spread and scrutiny of Islam and its laws,
instead of remaining passive recipients of a legal system imported
from the Islamic heartlands.
Within legal historiography such historical exchanges between
different regional, religious, temporal and imperial legal systems
have been identified as examples of legal transplant, transfer,
translation, transmission, diffusion, borrowing, métissage,
hybridisation and creolisation, and many others. These categories do
not help us find a comprehensive picture of the longue durée of
exchange, as they mostly present and represent the early stages of
contacts when legal ideas and texts were being diffused and
transmitted, focusing on the modern period alone. Eventually, if not
immediately, the actors on both sides modify what is exchanged in
order to cater for their individual and collective tastes, aesthetics and
demands. These modified and recomposed outcomes are
exchanged further in multiple directions, and the exchanges go on as
long as the circulatory networks, sociabilities and spaces are
sustained. In the legal circulations of Islam across the Indian Ocean
and Mediterranean, laws, schools, texts and rules, and certainly also
actors, places and periods, became modified in diverse ways.
Whether or not any rules pre-existed their practices, their authority
was respected through constant processes of negotiation and
recomposition. The history of Shāfiʿīsm and the corpora of its
commentaries during a millennium bear testimony.
 Contradictory Circles of Studies and
Sources
This book engages with five major and two minor burgeoning fields
in historiography, with connected concerns over time and space. Of
the major fields we have the global history of premodern law outside
Europe, law that developed independently, correspondingly and
sometimes in dialogue with European legal traditions; Islamic legal
history outside the Middle East; the commentarial traditions of Islam
and its laws and intellectual continuity and discontinuity in the
postclassical phase; the history of Shāfiʿīsm; the historical reception
of Shāfiʿīsm along the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds. In
the minor areas we have the history of education and book
production along the oceanic littoral. I shall briefly explain the first
two major fields while the remaining ones are self-evident.
The predominant trends in writing legal history consider the
legal traditions of Afrasia or the world at large only when they
encounter European colonial expansion. In the Atlantic and Indian
Ocean littorals European expeditions have often been marked as
starting points for legal investigations, whether in terms of
sovereignty, empire building or legal pluralisms. The legal cultures
and colonial regimes have been analysed as two sides of the same
coin, beginning in the late fifteenth century and culminating in the
nineteenth century. The insurmountable literature in the field ignores
the rich legal traditions that circulated among the Afrasian
communities before and after the arrival of the Europeans. In the last
three decades scholars have started to explore nuances of the
premodern legal cultures in diverse imperial, religious and regional
spectrums, such as China, India and Ethiopia, as well as in
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism. This book contributes to
this field by taking one contemporaneous and widely followed legal
tradition, that of Islam, from the oceanic rim that connects these
places. A close reading of its juridical discourses reveals the
imagined universalism and ingrained contextualism that premodern
jurists from Asia and Africa promulgated in their ratiocinations.
Compared to the legal histories of other major regions and
religions, Islamic law has attracted an enormous literature, to the
extent that at first sight it appears that no aspect remains untouched
or inadequately studied. There are many works dealing with diverse
topics, but most of these studies are very much centred on the
Middle East and North Africa, as broadly conceived.35 Apart from a
handful of studies, Islamic law in the premodern Muslim worlds
outside the Middle East, in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia,
has been almost completely ignored. The historiography of Islamic
law acknowledges the presence of Muslim communities in these
regions mainly when dealing with European applications of Islamic
law during colonial expeditions in the eighteenth century onwards.36
Following in the footsteps of recent scholarship that examines the
contributions of Muslim scholars from distant Asian and African lands
to the central Islamic knowledge base since the premodern period,
this book unravels the multidirectional circulation of Islamic law
which has brought together several Malabari, Swahili, Javanese,
Comorian, Sumatran, Malay and Ethiopian scholars with Egyptians,
Syrians, Yemenis, Persians and Hijazis. The book shows that they
produced, circulated and advanced laws of Islam in the premodern
period, and that they continued to do so in the modern period.
Such a history of Islam is directly related to the postclassical
developments of Islamic knowledge, particularly that of Shāfiʿī law,
and more so in the Indian Ocean littoral. Contributions of this work to
these major areas should be evident to the reader in the following
pages, as well as adding to the history of education and of books,
which are not the prime concern but interested scholars may find the
discussions useful. By studying the simultaneous progress of a legal
text on an intellectual level with the dissemination of a school of
thought on a contextual level this book therefore demonstrates how
Shāfiʿīsm spread and developed around the rims of the Indian
Ocean and the Eastern Mediterranean in the second millennium. In
the process, it engages with the global developments of the
thirteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in the legal,
educational, cultural, imperial and intellectual realms. The story that
evolves in the form of commentaries and marginalia shed light on the
transregional, transtemporal and transoceanic circulations of law in
the premodern world, before any European or Western legal cultures
colonised the global judiciaries.
Finding sources for such a large-scale study on the Islamic legal
history of the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean rims with a focus on
Shāfiʿīsm unravels contradictory situations in method and practice.
On the one hand, materials are almost non-existent, but on the other,
there is an unmanageable abundance. This consists of actual texts
written as Shāfiʿī legal manuals, commentaries, glosses, marginalia
and translations in the Middle East, South|East Africa and Asia, and
Europe. In those vast corpora my prime resource for study has been
the Minhāj al-ṭālibīn by Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī (thirteenth-
century Damascus), and by extension some texts which function as
commentary, autocommentary or supercommentary: Tuḥfat al-
muḥtāj by Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (sixteenth-century Cairo and Mecca);
Fatḥ al-muʿīn by Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī (sixteenth-century
Malabar); Nihāyat al-zayn by Nawawī al-Bantanī (nineteenth-century
Java and Mecca); and Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn by Sayyid Bakrī (nineteenth-
century Mecca).
The five texts are supplemented by other works from the same
authors and their contemporaries, their commentaries or marginalia
produced in different contexts. The most useful among them are
Nawawī’s Majmūʿ, Ibn Ḥajar’s Fatāwā, Malaybārī’s Ajwibat al-ʿajība,
Ramlī’s Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, Sharbīnī’s Mughnī (the latter two from
sixteenth-century Cairo), Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī’s Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm
(seventeenth-century Aceh) and Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjarī’s
Sabīl al-muhtadīn (eighteenth-century Kalimantan). All of these are
substantive legal texts, although the general consensus among legal
historians is that such texts, in contrast to the fatwā collections, do
not provide extensive historical data relevant to their contexts and
authors.37 I question this consensus by showing how these texts
enlighten us on their historical contexts.
I also utilise different biographical or hagiographical literature,
giving preference to contemporary writings. In the premodern Middle
East there are rich contemporary sources, such as biographical
dictionaries (ṭabaqāt), biographies (tarājim) and chronicles
(tawārīkh). Those of significant use are Nawawī’s Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ
wa al-lughāt, Ibn ʿAṭṭār’s Tarjmat al-Nawawī and the Ṭabaqāts on
Shāfiʿī jurists by Ibn Ṣalāḥ, Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Subkī, Ibn
Qāḍī Shuhbah and Abū Bakr al-Muṣannif. The ṭabaqāts with regional
specialisations have also been useful, such as the one on Yemen by
Ibn Samurat al-Jaʿdī. The sixteenth-century accounts of Mecca,
Bulūgh al-qirāʾ and Ghāyat al-marām by ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz,
Nayl al-munā by Jār Allāh bin Fahd, and the works of Quṭub al-Dīn
al-Nahrawālī were useful for understanding the regional as well as
transregional links of the city that functioned as a connection point
for several regions and communes. Similar details can be found
three centuries later in the accounts of Snouck Hurgronje and ʿUmar
ʿAbd al-Jabbār for nineteenth-century Mecca. From this textual
complexity, I have partially but carefully utilised the opportunities
they provide for a better understanding of a Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of
texts and ideas.
While these rich materials open a convoluted web of evidence,
there is still a real scarcity of material for Muslims outside the Middle
East. We have a few premodern legal texts from the Indian Ocean
rim, but even fewer on legalistic practice, biography or textual
history. However, I make use of whatever is available on the theme
from a wide range of materials, including inscriptions, travel
accounts, trade records, letters and documents. For sixteenth-
century Malabar, I also have utilised Arabic historical accounts of the
Portuguese incursions into the Indian Ocean littoral, Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn, ascribed to the author of the Fatḥ, the contemporaneous
Fatḥ al-mubīn by one Qādī Muḥammad al-Kālikutī, and Maslak al-
atqiyāʾ by the uncle of Fatḥ’s author. I have supplemented this
evidentiary corpus with accounts by contemporary Portuguese
authors as well as later European, Arab and Indian sources. The
situation becomes slightly better once we come to the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, when we have more biographical
dictionaries from Southeast Asia and East Africa. Aboe Bakar
Djajadiningrat’s Tarājim ʿUlamāʾ Jāwa, Ali Hasjmy’s Ulama Aceh, K.
H. Siradjuddin Abbas’ Ulama Syafi’i dan kitab-kitabnya, Abdallah
Salih Farsy’s The Shafi’i ulama of East Africa and three descriptive
studies on Indian Shāfiʿīsm (one each in Arabic, English and Urdu)
all include useful details. These materials are supplemented with
archival materials, biographical information and popular writings
available in translations or adaptations of the Minhāj, Tuḥfa, Fatḥ,
Nihāya and Iʿāna in Tamil, Malayalam, Dutch, Urdu, English, Malay,
Swahili and Bahasa Indonesia.
Many substantive legal texts mentioned above have been
published, some even have critical editions. For initial readings, I
depended on the critical or printed editions whenever available, but I
cross-checked with manuscripts when citing or quoting directly from
the principal texts under consideration. I tried my best to track down
the original and best manuscripts of these works, most of which
come from public and private collections in Leiden, London, Mecca,
Damascus, Malabar, Aceh, Minangkabau, Java, Zanzibar and
Somalia.38 This cross-examination is important for analysing
commentaries, because, as Johannes Pedersen has noted, in the
culture of copying Islamic manuscripts copyists often included their
own additions or corrections.39 A multi-copied text thus often
becomes a multi-distorted text, yet it also provides potential insights
into the commentarial logic of its copyists and users. This increases
the need for revising our approach to source criticism for Islamic
legal texts. I made significant efforts to read original manuscripts and
as many comparable manuscripts as possible against one another
and the printed, critical editions. Such a comparative reading of the
published versions of the texts vis-à-vis manuscripts has been very
rewarding, especially as some recent critical editions are said to
contain several mistakes.40
 Outline of Chapters
By following the Islamic legal corpus that circulated among the
Muslims in the postclassical period and across the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean, this book explores the roots and routes of the
Shāfiʿī school of law through time, over a millennium, and across
thousands of miles. It explores how and why a network of Islamic
texts connected nodal points, geographically and chronologically
distant, through a single textual cord. It investigates why and when
the school appealed to the believers on the Indian Ocean rim, and
why certain textual genealogies became more significant in the
traditional legalists’ synthesis of texts, for both the everyday religious
lives of laypersons and the legal arguments of the jurists.
The first three chapters provide the analytical toolkit for my
closer examination in subsequent chapters. The chapters
contextualise the Shāfiʿī school from the angles of its people, its
texts and their encounters. Chapter 1 examines the Islamic legal
historical developments that facilitated the evolution of an order of
jurists (the “fuqahāʾ estate”) for whom the texts were a central
component of juridical discourses and practices. Their networks
enabled the transmission of legal textual ideas within and across
regions through micro and macro scholarly communities. Situating
the school parallel to or inside the networks of individuals and
institutions, the chapter investigates the actors behind Shāfiʿīsm’s
appeal to a wider following, making it predominant around the Indian
Ocean. Chapter 2 looks at the circulation of texts. It describes and
analyses their centrality in juridical discourses, general architectures
and characteristics of their production and circulation, and the major
textual families of the school. It examines how specific legal texts
enabled communication within different clusters of Shāfiʿīm, as well
as within their contemporary socio-political, cultural and economic
contexts. Chapter 3 considers the intellectual conflicts and cohesions
rooted in the textual–scholarly nexus. It brings together the people
(Chapter 1) and texts (Chapter 2) by analysing the architectures of
encounters between them to see how the texts influenced people
and how the people shaped the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée over a
millennium and on a vast geographical canvas across the Eastern
Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.
In the second part, four consecutive chapters follow one or two
texts belonging to the Minhāj family: the Minhāj of Nawawī (1233–
1277), the Tuḥfa by Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (1504–1567), the Fatḥ by
Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī (1524 to ca. 1583); the Nihāya by Nawawī
al-Bantanī (1813–1898); and the Iʿāna by Sayyid Bakrī (1850–1893).
Using the Minhāj as a base, the discussion moves back and forth in
time over a millennium in order to examine the internal dynamics,
regional settings and transregional circulation of the interconnected
texts. Chapters 4 and 5 address primarily temporal concerns on the
development of Islamic law in the postclassical period. A closer
examination of the two most important texts from the thirteenth and
sixteenth centuries (the Minhāj and Tuḥfa respectively) reveals the
nuances of commentarial tradition that evolved in the Islamic world
and the ways by which the Muslim jurists communicated among
themselves as well as with the wider world around them. Chapters 6
and 7 advance these temporal concerns further with investigations
into the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. But both chapters are
additionally concerned with space in order to see the reception and
advancement of the Shāfiʿī school in the Indian Ocean rim. Instead
of being passive receivers of Islamic law imported to them from the
central Islamic lands, I argue that they contributed to the legal
tradition in their own ways. A closer study of the Fatḥ and its
supercommentaries Nihāya and Iʿāna proves enlightening in this
regard.
These four chapters also involve three broader aims: to follow
the content and structure of a text at its formation and its reception
within the tradition of Shāfiʿīsm; to trace regional contexts that could
have influenced the text and its author; to connect the texts with
wider networks of mobility, economy and intellectual developments in
the school. Emic and etic approaches are combined to achieve these
aims. Traditional narratives circulating within or around the school
and its texts form the basis of the emic analysis, for they provide
“internal” or “insider” perspectives. The primary and secondary
sources on the regional and transregional contexts of the school and
the texts in focus form the basis of the etic approach, in that they are
“external” or “outsider” accounts of wider historical developments.
The final chapter takes the four principal texts together to
analyse their translations into Afro-Eurasian languages from the
eighteenth to twentieth centuries. With the appearance of several
unprecedented actors with clear imperial agendas, this story of
translations complicates the linear narrative of Islamic textual
circulations. The texts became tools and agents of vernacularisation
and colonisation, and the new set of actors advanced the textual
longue durée and the fuqahāʾ estate to new levels that make the
trajectory of these texts even more fascinating.

1al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, Dīwān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī, 1996),

53–54.

1 See the account by a ninth-century Muslim traveller in Jean

Sauvaget, ʹAhbār aṣ-ṣīn wa l-hind. Relation de la Chine et de
ľ’Inde, rédigée en 851 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1948), 7; Eusèbe
Renaudot, Ancient Accounts of India and China by Two
Mohammedan Travellers Who Went to Those Parts in the 9th
Century (London: S. Harding, 1733), 7–8.

2Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington,

DC: Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown
University, 1986).

3Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Transmitters of Authority and Ideas

across Cultural Boundaries, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries”, in
The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic
World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. David O. Morgan and
Anthony Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
582–583; cf. H. A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism: A Historical Survey
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 71; C. Snouck Hurgronje,
Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century: Daily Life, Customs
and Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 205.

4Wael Hallaq, “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?”, International

Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 1 (1984): 3–41.
5 The Ḥanafī school took the lead in this line of enquiry because of
its prominence in the Ottoman Empire and in Central and South
Asia. For example, see Guy Burak, Second Formation of Islamic
Law: The Ḥanafī School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Abdul Hakim I.
Al-Matroudi, The Ḥanbalī School of Law and Ibn Taymiyyah
(London: Routledge, 2006); Haim Gerber, Islamic Law and
Culture, 1600–1840 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Sherman A. Jackson,
Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

6Hallaq, “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?”, 11; Jackson, Islamic

Law and the State, xxx.

7Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean

World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (London:
Collins, 1972), 1: 16.

8For a similar approach towards the ḥadīth texts, see Garrett

Davidson, Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual
History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years (Leiden:
Brill, 2020); Joel Blecher, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith
Commentary across a Millennium (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2017).

9 In a ḥadīth, the Prophet Muḥammad is said to have prohibited

his followers from undertaking any oceanic voyages except for
holy war (jihād) and obligatory pilgrimage (ḥajj). Abū Dāwūd
Sulaymān bin al-Ashʿath al-Sijistānī, Sunan, ed. Shuʿayb al-
Arnāʾūṭ and Muḥammad Kāmil Qurah Balalī (Beirut: Dār al-Risālat
al-ʿĀlamiyya, 1994), 4: 145–146, no. 2489. This aspect has been
overlooked in previous studies, although the prohibition seems to
be only theoretical, for in practice it was not observed by Muslims.
On the early Muslim engagements with the ocean, see Christophe
Picard, Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval
Islamic World, trans. Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2018). However, he does not address the
aforementioned ḥadīth.

10This is an Islamic proverb rather than a (fabricated) ḥadīth. For

the broader picture, see Houari Touati, Islam and Travel in the
Middle Ages, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 2010).

11 In the tenth-century bibliographical survey of Ibn al-Nadīm we

find many summaries and commentaries of legal texts from
various schools. For the Shāfiʿī school, he mentions around ten
summaries or commentaries on al-Shāfiʿī’s works. When
considering the number of legal texts available to him at that time,
what he mentions are remarkable. Three to four centuries later the
practice reached its zenith, when it was normal to write a
commentary. Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, ed.
Ibrāhīm Ramaḍān (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1994), 247–292 on legal
texts of all schools; on the Shāfiʿī texts, 259–265; cf. Abū al-Faraj
Muḥammad Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, ed. Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid
(London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2009).

12 Unless I state otherwise, I use “commentary” for any sort of

textual engagement with an earlier exemplar, whether it be a
summary, supercommentary or poetic rendering.
13 C. Gilliot, “Sharḥ”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; John
Esposito, ed. “Hashiyyah” and “Sharh”, in The Oxford Dictionary of
Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110 and 287.

14Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm Ibn Jamāʿa, Taḏkirat al-sāmiʿ wa al-

mutakallim fī adab al-ʿālim wa al-mutaʿallim (Beirut: Dār al-
Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2012), 133–134. The translation is from
Franz Rosenthal, “Ḥāshiya”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

15 Jackson, Islamic Law and the State, 7.

16Abdur Rahim, The Principles of Muhammadan Jurisprudence

according to the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʻi and Hanbali Schools
(London: Lucaz, 1911), 33.

17 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qurʾān wa duraruh (Beirut:

Dār al-Jīl wa Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīda, 1988), 20–21; Taqiyy al-Dīn
Ibn Taymiyya, Siyāsat al-sharʿiyya with its Sharḥ by Muḥammad
bin Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthīmayn, ed. Ṣāliḥ ʿUthmān al-Laḥḥām (Beirut: Dār
Ibn Ḥazm and Dār al-ʿUthmāniyya, 2004); ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn
Khaldūn, Muqaddima, ed. ʿAbdullāh bin Muḥammad al-Darwīsh
(Damascus: Dār al-Balkhī and Maktabat al-Hidāya, 2004), 2: 185–
198; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An
Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1958), 2: 335 and 3: 3–30.

18 For a critical engagement with this concept and its afterlife, see
Intisar Rabb, “Against Kadijustiz: On the Negative Citation of
Foreign Law”, Suffolk University Law Review XLVIII (2015): 343–
377.
19 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in
Interpretative Anthropology (London: Fontana Press, [1983] 2016),
chapter 8: “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative
Perspective”; Baudouin Dupret, What Is the Sharia? (London: C.
Hurst, 2018), esp. chapter 1: “A Concept and Its Contexts”.

20Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination

and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).

21For comparative, theorical and empirical views on this, see Paul

Dresch and Hannah Skoda, eds. Legalism: Anthropology and
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

22Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of

Modernity (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992).

23 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of

Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006); Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated:
Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and
Southeast Asia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

24 Pollock, Language of the Gods, 12.

25For other cosmopoleis, see Jos Gommans, “Continuity and

Change in the Indian Ocean Basin”, in The Cambridge World
History, vol. 6: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800
CE, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry E.
Wiesner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 182–
209; for its application in the context of maritime commercial
networks, see Anthony Reid, “Cosmopolis and Nation in Central
Southeast Asia”, ARI Working Paper Series 22 (Singapore: Asia
Research Institute, 2004); Eric Tagliacozzo, “An Urban Ocean:
Notes on the Historical Evolution of Coastal Cities in Greater
Southeast Asia”, Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 911–932; the
quote is from Kenneth R. Hall, “Ports-of-Trade, Maritime
Diasporas, and Networks of Trade and Cultural Integration in the
Bay of Bengal Region of the Indian Ocean: c. 1300–1500”, Journal
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, no. 1 (2010):
116.

26A telling exception would be Chibli Mallat, “From Islamic to

Middle Eastern Law: A Restatement of the Field (Part I)”,
American Journal of Comparative Law 51, no. 4 (2003): 699–750;
(Part II), 52, no. 1 (2004): 209–286.

27Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial

Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000).

28 Muḥammad bin Aḥmad al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī

maʿrifat al-aqālīm, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1906), 9, 58–
62, passim; Muḥammad bin Aḥmad Abū al-Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, al-
Qānūn al-Masʿūdī (Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya,
1954–56), 2: 549–579; Muḥammad al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī
ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfat al-Dīniyya, 2002); Ibn
Khaldūn, Muqaddima, 1: 133–200.

29Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddima, 1: 146, 154, 190. Quoted translations

are from Rosenthal, 1: 119, 122, 174–176.

30 Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddima, 1: 190.

31 Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being
Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

32For an elaboration on this process, see Ayman Shabana,

Custom in Islamic Law and Legal Theory: The Development of the
Concepts of ʿUrf and ʿAdah in the Islamic Legal Tradition (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

33Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the

Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 226.

34For some of these approaches, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam,

Explorations in Connected History, 2 vols. (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2005); Michael Werner and Bénédicte
Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the
Challenge of Reflexivity”, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 30–
50; Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper, “Between Metropole
and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda”, in Tensions of
Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura
Stoler and Frederic Cooper (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997), 1–56.

35 For a detailed recent overview, see Ayesha Chaudhry, “Islamic

Legal Studies: A Critical Historiography”, in Oxford Handbook of
Islamic Law, ed. Anver M. Emon and Rumee Ahmed (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018), 5–43.

36 Good examples for this are several well-read textbooks in the

field: Wael Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Knut S. Vikør, Between
God and the Sultan: A History of Islamic Law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005); Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to
Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

37 Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life

in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017; David Powers, “Fatwas as Sources for
Legal and Social History: A Dispute over Endowment Revenues
from Fourteenth-Century Fez”, Al-Qantara, 11, no. 2 (1990): 295–
341; Nico Kaptein, “Meccan Fatwās from the End of the
Nineteenth Century on Indonesian Affairs”, Studia Islamika:
Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies 2, no. 4 (1995): 141–159.

38 For a detailed list, see the Bibliography.

39Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 47–49.

40 See for example the list of errors pointed out in a recent version
of the Minhāj, al-Asiri, “Corrections to Dar al-Minhaj’s Minhaj al-
Talibin”, http://islamclass.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/corrections-
to-dar-al-minhajs-minhaj-al-talibin/ (accessed on 5 March 2021).
Part I
◈
◈
Who mastered the sea? At a time before the folk of Iberia
ventured into the Atlantic or crossed the Cape of Good Hope?
The Vikings, the adventurous and the audacious, one might
think! The Venetians, the Genoese, the Hanseatic, too. They
all did, but in the Mediterranean in the main, occasionally
venturing eastwards to the Red Sea and westwards to the
North Sea. But the Mediterranean is a closed sea, a rivulet
compared to the massive expanse of the Indian, Atlantic and
Pacific oceans.
Maritime communes of Asia and Africa mastered those
oceans. In their mtepes, dhows, junks or perahus, they
tackled the monsoons. Between Guangzhou in China and
Sufala in Mozambique. Between Comoros and Cambodia.
That is how, for example, the Southeast Asians ended up in
Madagascar in the centuries of the first millennium!
The vast coastal and oceanic expanse, from the western
tip of the Mediterranean in the Gulf of Gibraltar to the eastern
tip of the South China Sea, was once concourses of Arabs
and Persians. Within a century after the rise of Islam, they
conquered Tangier in Morocco and Sind in Pakistan and
established protectorates, along with considerable
settlements in places such as southern Italy, southern India
and southern China. Between the power of rule and the
power of settlements, Islam’s ethics and laws influenced their
behaviours. Small circles of learning and places of worship
shaped them. Micro-circles of comradery. Faith. Trust. Doubt.
Power. Distrust. Harmony. Hospitality. Hostility. Diverse
factors made micro-networks macro, and macro ones micro.
Weren’t they afraid of the sea, as you might be on this
ship? How does one dare leave oneself to the fate of a
seamless and bottomless ocean? Wasn’t it suicidal? It must
have been. That is why the Prophet possibly proscribed any
oceanic voyage except for pilgrimage and holy war. Both are
in some way suicidal. “There is fire below ocean, and ocean
below fire,” he is reported to have said. Even his second
Caliph proscribed an army commander who wanted to
conquer the Greek islands. “The sea is a great creature upon
which weak creatures ride; like worms upon a piece of wood,”
the Caliph was told as he dismissed the request. The safety
of his people was dearer to him than glory of new conquests.1
But did Muslims follow those instructions? Adventurers
cannot sit idle. The ocean is their favourite gemstone. The
Egyptians, the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Shirazis, the
Khurasanis, the Omanis ventured out to the sea. They were
joined by the Swahilis, Indians, Chinese and the Malays,
many of whom had embraced the new faith as much as they
embraced the ocean. In the micro-circles, they conversed,
quarrelled, traded, cheated, trusted, befriended, married,
made love and law, and made macro-networks. Law was
around the core of their itineraries. In and beyond the
uncertainties of the oceans. As you yourself shall see.
 1
Circulation Networks
◈

In the making of Islam and its laws, a learned community of jurists,

authors, teachers and ordinary people intertwined their contributions
across geographical and chronological borders. By contesting or
undercutting political entities, they asserted the centrality of divine
law in the socio-religious lives of people and advanced the ways in
which the law was perceived, practised and discussed. From the
formative stages, texts stood at the forefront of the progress of
discussions. For the Shāfiʿī school, diverse transregional stimuluses
helped it to survive and spread and occasionally to decay and
contract between the ninth and the twentieth centuries. After its initial
spread in ninth-century Iraq and Egypt, the school had found further
sociocultural support in Khurasan, Transoxiana and the Levant by
the tenth and eleventh centuries; it arrived in South Arabia by the
twelfth century and circulated further into South|East Asia and Africa.
In the following centuries, it was to become the dominant legal
school on the Indian Ocean rim. How did the school achieve this,
and who were the people behind its continuous spread and survival?
What role did legal texts play in this process?
This chapter analyses the pivotal historical elements that
enabled the expansion of the Shāfiʿī school, and Islamic law at large,
in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean littorals with a focus on
individual, collective and institutional circulations from circles of
learning. The emphasis here is on the people who participated in
and contributed to the circulatory regime from its formative lands to
its eventual movements in the oceanic rims, while Chapter 2 focuses
on the texts as such. This chapter starts with a brief overview of
early circles of juridical learning that leads to a discussion on the
formation of the legal schools and consequently of “the fuqahāʾ
estates”. It then identifies a “maritime wave of Shāfiʿīsm” in the
Indian Ocean arena, contesting some anachronistic assertions in
existing literature on the spread of the school and the exclusivity of
the Ḥaḍramīs. I argue that a cosmopolitan network of Kārimī
merchants, Egyptians, Syrians, etc. along with other Arabs,
Persians, Malays, Javanese, Sumatrans, Indians, Swahilis,
Ethiopians and Comorians led to a simultaneous expansion of the
school.
 Early Circulators
Since the early history of Islam, there were certain specialist
“scholars” of “Islamic knowledge” who learned and interpreted the
Qurʾān and narrated the sayings and stories of the Prophet and his
companions. These discussions took place at gatherings in
mosques, houses and other places. By the mid-eighth century, such
groups led by a specialist formed the prototype for a network of
scholars and students who would move across borders to teach and
circulate what they knew and to listen and learn what they did not
know. For obvious reasons, geographical locations played a role in
such micro-networks but were not decisive in forming a school of
thought. Even so, we do see certain scholars in certain regions
forming their own circles of adherents with clear methodological and
hermeneutical frames in which the Qurʾān and Prophetic traditions
were used and reused to address many everyday concerns
unresolved in the scriptures.
By the eighth and ninth centuries, law had become a serious
subject of discourse in the micro-networks. There were several
reasons for this, varying from everyday trivia of personal etiquettes
of piety to larger crises such as identity and authority. In the still
expanding regions of Islam, the communities and subcultures from
outside the initial heartlands were being integrated into the Islamic
community (umma) through political conquest and widespread
conversion. These developments naturally generated multi-layered
predicaments for the Muslim leadership in social, cultural, political
and legal spheres. Codifying and canonising Islamic teachings thus
became the highest priority, and law played an important role in the
process. The circulatory regime of individual specialists and students
through educational circles addressed this conundrum in their
academic ventures when they zoomed into exclusive circulation of
legal ideas, methods and texts.
There were certain crucial circles which had led to the spatial
expansion of Islamic legal ideas, such as those led by al-Shāfiʿī,
Mālik bin Anas, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Awzāʿī (d. 774), Sufyān al-
Thawrī (d. 778), Abū Ḥanīfa and his two prominent disciples, Abū
Yūsuf (d. 798) and Shaybānī (d. 805). Students flocked directly or
indirectly to the circles of such masters. This led to a connection
between micro-networks with intensifying legalistic disagreements, in
both methodology and outcome, and some students came up with
distinctly new approaches.
By the end of the first millennium CE, Islamic legal debates were
more institutionalised and organised. The micro-networks spread
over place and time to become explicitly legal schools (maḏhabs),
and there were more than ten prominent such schools by the end of
the millennium. Among Sunnīs there was Shāfiʿīsm, named after al-
Shāfiʿī; Ḥanafīsm, after Abū Ḥanīfa; Mālikīsm, after Mālik bin Anas;
Ḥanbalīsm, after Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal; Thawrīsm, after Sufyān al-
Thawrī; Ẓāhirīsm/Dāwūdīsm, after Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī (d. 884);
Awzāʿīsm, after ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Awzāʿī; and Jarīrīsm, after
Muḥammad bin Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 923). There were two prominent
schools among the Shīʿīs: Zaydīsm, named after Zayd bin ʿAlī (d.
740), and Jaʿfarīsm, after Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765). The school of the
Khārijīs was Ibāḍīsm, after ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿIbāḍ (d. 708). By the tenth
century many of these schools had gained a strong foundation that
bound together their followers. This led to the birth of macro-
networks.
The case of al-Shāfiʿī, the founder of Shāfiʿī school, offers a
convincing example for the interconnections between micro-
networks, the formation of an independent micro-network and its
gradual evolution to macro-networks. He participated in the micro-
networks of many scholars, including Mālik bin Anas. He may have
been born in Palestine or Yemen, and when he was two years old
his mother took him to Mecca, where he grew up. After studying
there and in Medina, he went to Baghdad. For unclear reasons he
then moved to Cairo and lived there until his death at the age of fifty-
two.1 During this latter part of his life he is said to have dictated his
work to his students, as was the practice of the time. Through his
teaching circles, a distinctive and strong micro-network evolved in
which his disciples in Baghdad, Mecca and Cairo all contributed to
the strengthening of his legal thoughts in their respective regions.2
This led to the development of a “doctrinal” school of law by the mid-
ninth century.3
Even though Shāfiʿīsm could not maintain a stronghold over
Egypt in the ninth century, as the country was strongly influenced by
Mālikīsm, the political structures offered favourable conditions for its
expansion for more than a century. For example, the then semi-
independent ruler in Cairo, Aḥmad bin Ṭūlūn (d. 884), encouraged
members of his household to study al-Shāfiʿī’s teachings by
attending the lectures of his one disciple, to whom the former even
gave financial support.4 The ideas began to expand beyond Egypt,
attracting a wide audience by the tenth and eleventh centuries in
Iraq, Transoxiana and Khurasan, which in turn became new centres
for Shāfiʿīsm. The Transoxiana students and teachers had mostly
been educated in Egypt, but some were also educated in Baghdad
by the immediate disciples of al-Shāfiʿī. In the course of time, the
school (and Sunnīsm at large) was endangered when the Shīʿī
dynasty of the Fāṭimids took control of the region and introduced
their jurisprudence. It regained strength after the Ayyūbids came to
power in the twelfth century. Ever since the school had become
prominent in the region, as the historian Ibn Khaldūn would write
later in the fourteenth century: “It [the school] turned out to be in a
better position than before, and was greatly cultivated” through
numerous jurists, followers, teachers and students.5 Their
movements and activities contributed to the development of micro-
networks into macro-networks and further into fuqahāʾ estates within
and beyond the borders of Arabian, Arabised and Persian lands.
 Fuqahāʾ Estate
The expansion of Shāfiʿī circles into macro-networks, with systems
of organisation and transferring knowledge and texts focusing on
Islamic law, emblemises the rise of a phenomenon identified here as
“the fuqahāʾ estate”. In many ways it is an indirect adaptation of
Georges Duby’s seminal tripartite conception of the medieval
European society into three imaginary “orders”,6 but a major
difference would be that the fuqahāʾ are not a broad order like the
clergy and are not merely those who pray. They are more of an
“estate”, like the jurists or journalists who formed the third or fourth
estates in a democratic society – terms again derived from the
“estates of the realm” of premodern Europe. The conception of the
fuqahāʾ estate has two principal levels, a formative micro-level and a
developed macro-level. In the early centuries of Islamic legal
thought, knowledge was circulated from person to person through
small “circles”, as mentioned earlier. These circles of individuals
eventually developed into doctrinal “schools”. People journeyed
through them until the mid-ninth century, yet most of their journeys
remained within central Islamic lands. This is the formative stage, the
“micro-level” of the fuqahāʾ estate. By the late ninth century, mobility
had increased and in many other parts of the Muslim world
conflicting doctrinal schools began to arise. The collective of
members of those different schools as a single body of jurists formed
the fuqahāʾ estate.
 The increase in the number of specialists and opportunities for
long journeys and interactions with other, differing views required the
subgroups within the estate to acquire more organised structures
with distinctive functions, identity, autonomy and etiquette. The
Shāfiʿīs were only one group among many Islamic jurists looking for
a more organised structure for their professional activities. If the
“school” is about intellectual engagements with a particular stream of
thought, the “estate” is about having a common platform for all the
specialists (khawāṣṣ) of law on which to organise, debate and assert
the distinctiveness of their profession and protect it from the
intrusions of an uninformed public (ʿawāmm), including political
powers.
By the tenth century, the geographical spread of legal networks
with a local and translocal authority had evolved into clusters of
members of the scholarly class in the Islamic world. Individuals
participated in micro-networks and eventually moved into broader
educational realms. They formed and made use of macro-networks
cutting across the existing social and political arenas through their
legal engagement. They aimed to be a parallel society of legal
specialists outside the dominant frameworks of society. If we follow
the jurists’ own perceptions about themselves, they are the true
ʿulamāʾ and all their pursuit of knowledge is aimed at a better study
of the law. Good examples of this are the general gradation of fiqh as
the highest knowledge, and the development by the jurists of a
professional distinction within the ʿulamāʾ class as experts in legal
matters.7 As for the other disciplines, such as Qurʾān exegesis and
ḥadīth, which could be seen as being at the top of Islamic subjects of
study, or grammar, logic and linguistics, which might stand outside
spiritual concerns even though they were taught in a purely religious
environment, these were understood by them as a source or a
means for making legal inferences. Hence, the specialists of other
disciplines and sub-disciplines, who would otherwise be identified as
ʿulamāʾ, are just mediators or facilitators for fuqahāʾ. This self-
perception helps in analysing their space and sphere as a
determined fuqahāʾ estate rather than the generalised and abstract
ʿulamāʾ estate.8
In the long discursive tradition focusing on particular texts, the
collective of Muslim jurists as fuqahāʾ estate comprises a number of
individuals, institutions, ideas and texts. Every place may have its
own estate, either with members of Sunnī, Shīʿī and Ibāḍī schools or
with members of only one particular school. If there were many
schools then I call each a “cluster”, such as the Shāfiʿī cluster of
Khurasan which opposed the Ḥanafī cluster, while both belonged to
the Khurasani fuqahāʾ estate. Each cluster might have had its own
institutions, such as madrasas and mosques, but it is quite possible
that most clusters shared the same institution. The interaction
between the fuqahāʾ of distant lands, as when the Shāfiʿīs of
Khurasan arrived in Damascus, marked the beginning of the “macro-
level” in the evolution of the estate. This increased mobility arose
from a macro-network of scholars, across which texts, ideas and
certificates moved beyond borders. To put these organisational
terms simply, we see that a circle evolved into a school, whose
members formulated a cluster in a region.9 A cluster is a community
of ideas in which ideas distinguish a school. Members of one or
more clusters in one place formulate a single body of jurists called a
fuqahāʾ estate, able to share values, norms, protocols and
institutions. The micro–macro distinction is about the widening scale
of interactions between and among the circles and schools in the
formative stage of the estate, and then among and between the
clusters in its developed stage. The evolution of micro-networks into
macro-networks should not be taken as a process of elimination.
Even after the expansions, micro-level circles and regional networks
still existed in the central Islamic lands and beyond, feeding the
needs of macro-mobilities.
Through the expansion of macro-networks in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, the fuqahāʾ rose to a position of power in which
their notions of religious authority were invested exclusively into their
own legal collectives. This period also witnessed a transition of the
supremacy of caliphs to various amirs and sultans. They began to
decentralise notions of ultimate power and to make the institution of
a caliphate purely symbolic. Consequently, the holders of political
power came to be perceived as servants of the Muslim community,
whereas the fuqahāʾ thought of themselves as having “true” power of
religion vis-à-vis ruling polities.10
 Individual and Institutional Frames
In the circulation of Shāfiʿīsm and broadly Islamic law, individual and
institutional frameworks had significant roles in the nourishment of
proto-, micro- to macro-networks and fuqahāʾ estates. These frames
of networks enabled the very presence of an estate and its functions,
and facilitated the production and dissemination of texts central to its
survival.
The foremost pillars on which the estate’s regional space rested
were the individuals. The polity and community, with their religious,
legalistic or social lives and thoughts, circle around individual jurists,
with diverse traditional, textual and charismatic authority. The
fuqahāʾ, with traditional authority, asserted power from the domain in
which they were engaged, such as classrooms, podiums, niches
(miḥrāb) or pulpits (minbar). Although they were predominantly men,
women also participated in studying and teaching law and issuing
fatwās across centuries independently or alongside their male
colleagues and classmates at public venues, private houses,
mosques and madrasas.11 Irrespective of gender, a pious Muslim
would encounter some of these spaces every day. The traditional
legitimacy ascribed to the fuqahāʾ allowed them to control the
regularity of rituals, social and religious norms, commercial dealings
and any violations to the order of everyday life by law. Usually a
believer came to an individual jurist in the locality, not the other way
around.12 If an issue could not be solved at a lower level it was
referred to the fuqahāʾ of higher expertise, charisma and/or position
in the congregation, higher institutions or legal courts.
In both the early and later periods, individual jurists have been
at the core of circulating Islamic legal knowledge and praxis. Most of
the successful fuqahāʾ achieved a certain charisma, though the
quality varied, which helped to mobilise their own circle of followers
within the community. Besides students, the members of the state,
nobility and the community at large also provided the fuqahāʾ with
far-reaching status. The existence of this circle formed an axis of
jurists around which text-based knowledge, such as fatwās, advice
and morals, was disseminated. The most important segment of the
circle, the students, had direct and intense engagement with the
texts. They were a significant factor in sustaining a jurist’s profession
as a teacher. Normal teaching involved producing commentaries,
summaries and other textual writings on texts used in the curricula.
With the help of one’s intellectual environment (one’s students and
texts), and of constructed notions of charisma (through narratives
about one’s personal qualities in teaching, writing, fatwā-giving and
piety), the micro-networks of a teacher-jurist and/or an author-jurist
expanded into a macro-network. It should be stated, though it is
partly obvious, that these local micro-communities and circles
facilitated the existence of an estate as a dynamic entity in most
localities.
When there was more than one noteworthy jurist attracting
separate circles in the same locality this often resulted in the
formation of a cluster for a particular school. If most or all members
of multiple circles belonged to the same school, they together formed
the estate there and controlled its various expressions. If the
members followed different schools, they formed clusters, which
could bring together adherents who traversed across circles and
individual affiliations. In such cases of divided clusters, the internal
dynamics of a legal fraternity were at times competitive, hostile and
argumentative. One example of this was made explicit in eleventh-
century Nishapur when violent conflicts emerged between the
Shāfiʿīs and Ḥanafīs.13 Another is seen in thirteenth-century Cairo,
where the Shāfiʿī cluster dominated, provoking protests from
representatives of the others. The clusters, with their internal
disagreements, defined the characteristics of the fuqahāʾ estate’s
unity as a single body in each region. Despite their internal scuffles,
they all stood together whenever they realised that the power of their
estate was under threat from polity or community. For example, we
see many leading scholars from the Ḥanafī, Mālikī and Ḥanbalī
schools endorsing a bitterly worded letter Nawawī wrote to the
Mamlūk ruler Baybars (r. 1260–1277).14
Where there was a cluster of many jurist teachers and authors
in one locality students could study the laws of whichever school
they chose. They could move between circles looking for teachers
expert on a particular theme or text. Within the cluster, students
could switch between teachers or study the same text with many
different teachers with the aim of achieving blessings (baraka),
listening to different interpretations, or clarifying doubts by applying
the frames of linguistics, philology and rational sciences. The
clusters functioned as a pool of scholarship in which enthusiasts
could use many available teachers to master subjects or texts.
These possibilities were extended when multiple clusters coexisted
in one estate, providing aspirants more opportunities for interschool
studies.
Institutions were a clear visible space for Islamic legal
circulations. They included mosques (masjids), colleges (madrasas)
and occasionally legal courts (maḥkamas). Religious, educational
and juridical activities were intertwined in these places. Mosques
also were centres of learning across the Islamic cultures; legal
procedures and judgments were often brought in front of a teacher in
a college, who may also have been a muftī or a judge. These
institutional frameworks were infused with a strongly divine spirit,
which ensured the estate’s authority over the space and its
legitimacy among the community. With reference to many Qurʾānic
verses and ḥadīths, the masjid was identified as the “house of God”,
and its custodians were the professionally defined groups among the
fuqahāʾ, the imāms and khaṭībs. Similarly, the college was seen as a
place where God’s knowledge was transmitted and it was
proclaimed as a sacred space of divine arbitration between the
umma and God from the fuqahāʾ through their knowledge. The
acceptance among the community of such dictums encouraged
increased financial backing for the estate from laypersons, who
perceived their offerings as meritorious acts.15
The most important progress in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries was the proliferation of many higher educational centres
across the Islamic world. Their rise can be traced to the rise of legal
education in the Islamic world for professional purposes. Most
colleges in the earlier phase focused exclusively on law, and “the
colleges of law” were inseparable from the “schools of law”.16 Some
clusters in various fuqahāʾ estates were successful in dominating
newly established colleges on behalf of their respective schools.
However, the benefactors of the colleges had their own priorities
and, depending on the general trends in a particular locality, they
chose to offer endowments inclusively or exclusively. The scholarly
opulence of Shāfiʿīsm came from clusters with benefactors from
various social strata of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran, who all
contributed to the expansion of the school. Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 1092),
the vizier of the Seljūq Empire, is one important figure in this regard.
He not only contributed to the general advancement of Islamic
educational institutions by establishing numerous colleges across
the empire in the late eleventh century, but also through his
endowments provided a chair primarily for the school of Shāfiʿīsm.
Some endowments he made were exclusively for Shāfiʿīsm. Political
entities were by no means alone in making endowments. Merchants,
nobles, scholars themselves, slaves and laypersons all contributed
to the rise of colleges and thus to the circulation of the ideas of the
school.
The establishment of Islamic law as a professional field and of
many associated prestigious centres of higher learning attracted
several students to pursue fiqh more dynamically. Shāfiʿīsm gained
remarkable numbers through the charisma of such scholars as Abū
Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Shīrāzī (d. 1083), Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī (d. 1085)
and Ghazālī in the eleventh century. Fiqh in general, and Shāfiʿī fiqh
in particular, thus became a glamorous discipline. Ghazālī wrote in
the late eleventh century that jurists receive “more fame, financial
security and supremacy over anyone else including preachers,
storytellers and theologians”.17 The academies of Baghdad,
Nishapur, Cairo and Damascus attracted students from different
parts of the Islamic world. These cities hosted the prominent higher
educational centres of Shāfiʿīsm from the eleventh to the fifteenth
centuries, although there were constant shifts in their relative
rankings of prestige. Students from adjacent rural areas mostly
ended up at these urban centres of learning, which could be ruled by
ʿAbbāsids, Ayyūbids, Seljūqs or Mamlūks. This was not a
geographically restricted pattern. Both students and teachers
travelled across political borders. Changes in economic, social,
cultural and political conditions influenced the mobility of scholars,
but no single component, certainly not politics, controlled circulatory
networks.
Institutions, whether colleges or mosques, were also spaces for
contestation between individuals, schools and clusters. Only a few
mosques and colleges had imāms, muftīs, judges and/or chairs for
all the four legal schools. In Egypt, for example, the influential Sunnī-
Mālikīsm and Shīʿīsm were replaced by Sunnī-Shāfiʿīsm when the
Ayyūbid ruler al-Nāṣir Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, better known as Saladin, (r.
1174–1193) took political control of Syria and Egypt. He appointed a
Shāfiʿī scholar, Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Kurdī (d. 1209), as the
chief judge, a move that had reverberations for a century; all
subsequent chief judges were Shāfiʿīs until the rule of Baybars. This
helped in making Shāfiʿīsm the predominant legal school in Egypt,
with other schools such as Mālikīsm and Ḥanafīsm being relegated
to a minor status. The school affiliations of madrasas also
demonstrate this fact. Of the twenty-seven colleges founded
between 1172 and 1265 and whose school affiliations are known,
“fifteen were exclusively Shāfiʿī institutions, four exclusively Mālikī,
four exclusively Ḥanafī, and none exclusively Ḥanbalī; two were
Shāfiʿī-Mālikī, two Shāfiʿī-Ḥanafī, none Shāfiʿī-Ḥanbalī, and one, the
Ṣāliḥiyya, had a chair for each of the four schools. There were no
combinations (e.g. Ḥanafī-Mālikī) that excluded the Shāfiʿīs.”18 This
prominence of Shāfiʿīsm and absence of other schools in many
madrasas had costs. Many jurists protested against the Shāfiʿī
dominance and asserted their individual and independent
frameworks, making the institutions places of interschool
contestations.
For students, such institutional constraints could be intimidating.
If a student or believer belonging to a particular school wanted to
seek instruction, advice or a fatwā from scholars in his or her school,
and there were none available in the locality, then it would be
necessary to travel to a place where they were available, or
alternatively satisfy themselves with the expertise of an available
representative of another school. Only a few scholars were well-
versed in all four schools; all had an adherence to one school,
although most fuqahāʾ also had training in the basic laws of the other
schools.
Various individuals (a jurist and members of his or her circle),
organisations (clusters and schools) and institutions (masjids,
madrasas and maḥkamas) were units in spaces where legal ideas,
texts and practitioners had a collective sovereignty under the
umbrella of the estate. It was this dominion which accelerated the
circulation of Islamic legal knowledge across borders and through
the centuries. The legal regimes and their textual mainstays
continued to appeal internally to the fuqahāʾ, and externally to the
community and polity associated with their traditional, textual and/or
charismatic authority. Except when radical change occurred, the
shared sovereignty of fuqahāʾ over these domains remained mostly
unquestioned throughout the diverse regional and transregional
expressions of Islamic legal cultures.
 Oceanic Networks
How did the individual and institutional frameworks and fuqahāʾ
estates contribute to the prominence of the Shāfiʿī school in the
Indian Ocean littoral? Thanks to certain regional settings and
scholarly–mercantile interconnections in the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean, Islam and its laws appealed to a wider following
beyond its former borders. In each locality, individual, collective and
institutional efforts strengthened the development of Islamic legal
thoughts and practices by processes of vernacularisation. The
itinerant scholars and their clusters connected the regional and
transregional developments with spread of ideas, texts, norms and
ethics. The gradual domination of Shāfiʿīsm in the oceanic rim
occurred mainly through the decisive contributions of particular
micro-communities, individuals and a few institutions.
With regard to the micro-communities, the credit for bringing and
spreading Shāfiʿīsm to the Indian Ocean shores has been attributed,
both in traditional Muslim accounts and in scholarly writings, to the
Yemenis, or more precisely to the Ḥaḍramī Sayyids.19 But the
scholars never make clear why, when or how this happened in the
early centuries. It is true that ports in Malabar, Konkan, Gujarat,
Coromandel, Java, Sumatra, Kilwa, Mogadishu, Mombasa or
Zanzibar had maritime mercantile connections with South Arabia, but
that does not explain the mobility of juridical thought and practice
from Yemen, especially if such legalism was yet to flourish in the
country. Therefore we need to discuss briefly when and how Shāfiʿī
legal thought arrived in Yemen and how and when it intensified
through scholarly practices. This would in turn explicate how the
trajectories of Shāfiʿīsm from Egypt, Syria and Iran relate to its
spread across the Indian Ocean rim, without limiting the narrative
only to Yemenis or Ḥaḍramīs.
Shāfiʿīsm spread in both Yemen and on other Indian Ocean
coasts at almost the same time through scholarly-mercantile
interconnections in what can be considered as the initial phase of its
spread in the oceanic littoral. Shāfiʿīsm only came to clear
prominence in Yemen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
“Shāfiʿīsm, its texts and scholars were not popular in Yemen” before
the arrival of Qāsim al-Jumaḥī al-Qurashī (d. 1045) in the eleventh
century, according to Ibn Samura (d. 1190), who wrote a biographical
dictionary of Yemeni jurists.20 Until the end of the tenth century, the
predominant school in the region was Ḥanafīsm, with a small amount
of Mālikīsm.21 When Qurashī arrived in Yemen after his studies in
Mecca and Medina, he set up an educational circle at Sahfana and
attracted students from across Yemen, including Ṣanʿāʾ and Aden.22
In the same century, some of his students produced studies
engaging with previous works of the school. In the twelfth century,
they were introduced to Shīrāzī’s Muhaḏḏab, which revolutionised
their legal ideas, especially in opposing Ḥanafīsm.23 Yaḥyā bin Abū
al-Khayr al-Yamanī (d. 1163) was a leading scholar in the region and
he set up another group of Shāfiʿī scholars. He himself wrote a
commentary on the Wasīṭ of Ghazālī.24 The texts of these scholars
and many others gave Shāfiʿīsm wider currency in and around the
region in the twelfth century.
In the thirteenth century, Yemen witnessed the arrival of many
Shāfiʿīs who deepened the ideas of the school there. Some political
and economic turbulence under the Mamlūks caused many Egyptian
businessmen flee to Yemen in the early and middle parts of the
century. They returned to Egypt at the end of the century, when the
most influential Mamlūk sultan Baybars introduced new policies that
persuaded many expatriates to come back. But until then these
businessmen had been settled in the ports of Yemen and had
become involved in local socio-religious spheres.25 Most Egyptians
followed Shāfiʿīsm by this time, so their religious practices and legal
procedures in Yemen would have followed the prescriptions of this
school. As a consequence, the juridical orientation of the general
populace in the region was influenced by Shāfiʿīsm, complementing
the efforts of legal scholars. During this time, probably due to the
influence of Egyptian expatriate elites and local scholars, the Rasūlid
sultan Manṣūr ʿUmar (r. 1229–1249) converted from Ḥanafīsm to
Shāfiʿīsm, an act that further contributed to the popularity of the
school.26 Thus the expansion of Shāfiʿīsm in Yemen was
precipitated greatly by events in Egypt.27 The role of Egyptian
networks was crucial for the spread of the school across the Indian
Ocean rim, as it was for Yemen, and also Khurasan, Baghdad and
Damascus. There were many intermediary micro-communities, but
none was as exclusive a force as that attributed to Yemenis in the
existing literature.28
 Before examining the role of Egyptians and other micro-
communities in this network, there is one more problem related to
the Yemenis. Most studies have focused on a particular community
of the Yemenis, the Ḥaḍramī Sayyids, despite the prevalent
argument that the massive migrations from Yemen happened
because of natural calamities and socio-economic intricacies.29
Could not the same predicaments have affected other Yemenis apart
from the Ḥaḍramī Sayyids? Did they not also want to migrate to
other regions? The answer should be yes, but very few studies have
been conducted on this issue. We have clear evidence of non-
Ḥaḍramī members of a premodern Yemeni diaspora in different
coastal townships of the Indian Ocean. They also contributed
significantly to the spread of Shāfiʿīsm along the ocean rim. This
urges us to separate the Yemenis into different ethnic groups, not
merely the Ḥaḍramīs.
Most of the non-Ḥaḍramī Yemenis belonged to or claimed to
belong to such families as the Āmudīs, Makhdūms, Bakrīs,
Ḥumaydīs and Asʿadīs, whose lineages arguably went back to the
early stages of Islam. In that way they assumed a legitimacy to
preach the correct forms of Islam transmitted directly and
authentically from the Prophet through their ancestors. Yemeni tribes
and clans such as Banū Ḥamdān, Qahṭānī, Azd and Ḥumayr, which
are spread around the Indian Ocean rim, were mentioned in the
hierarchical structure of noteworthy Arab tribes by Ibn Ḥajar al-
Haytamī.30 In a way, these non-Ḥaḍramī Arabs contributed to the
Islamic legal culture of the rim more than the Ḥaḍramīs. The
Ḥaḍramī Sayyids took part in the religious sphere, with a stress on
spiritualism backed by their claim of descent from the Prophet
Muḥammad. The non-Ḥaḍramī Yemenis, however, established
themselves in the legal culture through intensive training and their
aspirations for a career in law. This difference between “ascribed”
authority and “achieved” authority is clear, but only once we consider
the internal dynamics. Otherwise, as a single block, both micro-
communities contributed to strengthening the Shāfiʿī clusters on the
coasts.
The Ḥaḍramī Sayyids were perceived in the Indian Ocean arena
as a religiously privileged group because of their claim of lineage
from the Prophet Muḥammad. They occupied various religious
positions. In Southeast and East Asia and elsewhere they operated
mainly in mercantile matters, but religious and mercantile
involvement intersected. They contributed to the life of Shāfiʿīsm in
the regions where they congregated by writing texts, influencing local
praxis, establishing standards and norms, etc. This dynamism gave
them their own space as a micro-ethnic community in the fuqahāʾ
estate. But all this happened only after the sixteenth century. Before
that, the Egyptians, Syrians and Persians were influential in this
sphere.
The roles of Egyptian Kārimī merchants and their links with the
fuqahāʾ world in spreading Islamic law in general and Shāfiʿī ideas in
particular are remarkable. They were a loosely organised group of
merchants who were active across the shores of Egypt, South
Arabia, South|East Asia and East Africa. Their organisational
structure has been a point of debate among social historians, yet
scholars agree that Arab Muslims and Egyptian Islam enjoyed a
general superiority.31 Although they admitted non-Muslim merchants
including Christians and Jews into their ranks, Sunnī-Shāfiʿīs held a
prominent position among them, as a detailed list of Kārimī
merchants from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries demonstrates.32
By the fifteenth century, Kārimī had become a synonym for a
maritime trader in the Islamic commercial world and in scholarly
discussions. The long-existing mercantile connections of ports in the
Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean through Kārimī merchant-
scholars contributed to strengthening the legal systems of Islam.
Apart from some passing references, no one has paid much
attention to the juridical affiliations of these merchants and how ideas
could have circulated with them between so many distant nodal
points. Almost all the Muslim Kārimī merchants were affiliated to one
or other Islamic legal school, among which Shāfiʿīsm dominated
because of its influence as a standard and widespread form of
legalism in Egypt, along with some influence from the Mālikī school.
Therefore, in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries an ordinary trader
would have been aware of it through social and commercial
engagements.
The biographical dictionaries prepared by Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī
(1372–1449) and others talk about merchants who clearly followed a
school, and Shāfiʿīsm was the most prevalent one. The normal
practice in a biographical dictionary was to mention most persons
with their legal school affiliation. For example, the full name of a
Kārimī merchant is given as Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl bin Muḥammad al-
Aqfahsī al-Miṣrī al-Shāfiʿī, which indicates that he followed the
Shāfiʿī school. Apart from being professional merchants, some were
also legal scholars who played crucial roles among the Kārimīs.33
The Maḥallī family was a renowned Kārimī mercantile group involved
in Levantine trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of
them in particular, Burhān al-Dīn al-Maḥallī (d. 1403), was known as
the “sultan’s trader” or the “outstanding merchant” (tājir al-khāṣṣ).34
Some became famous in the world of legal scholarship. One of the
noted commentaries of the Minhāj, on which this book focuses, was
written by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Aḥmad al-Maḥallī (1389–
1459). He titled his commentary, which became one of the most
celebrated texts in the school, Kanz al-rāghibīn, but it was widely
known in Shāfiʿī circles as “Maḥallī”.35
There were direct connections made from the Eastern
Mediterranean to the coastal belts of the Indian subcontinent. These,
as well as arrivals of Kārimī merchants, further explain a possible
input of Shāfiʿīsm from the Levant. The merchant-scholars who
travelled to the Indian coasts made references to Shāfiʿīs from
Damascus as well as Cairo. The aforementioned Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl
is noteworthy among them.36 Another is Qāḍī Abū ʿAlī ʿAbd al-
Raḥīm al-Baysānī al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 1200), who made huge profits
every year from his trade in the Indian Ocean and the
Mediterranean. He was a Shāfiʿī judge based in Egypt and a friend
of the Ayyūbid sultan Saladin.37 Two other jurist-merchants, Ibrāhīm
bin ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Khwāja (who came from Damascus but then
migrated to Cairo) and Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Muḥammad,
arrived on the Malabar Coast, but we have no clear evidence of their
affiliations.38 Based on biographical dictionaries, Carl Petry has
convincingly tabulated the travel patterns of some medieval Muslim
notables who came to the Indian subcontinent and took up
occupations there, including legal: muḥtasib, shāhid, notary, judge
and assistant judge; scholarly: mudarris, lecturer; and religious:
khaṭīb, sermoniser, muqriʾ, reciter and muʿtaqad; others were nāẓir,
supervisor, or tājir, dealer, and other bureaucratic or commercial
occupations. In his table the legal affiliations of judges or assistant
judges are not given,39 yet they all show a direct link between the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean with mutual influence on each
other’s legalist formulations, together with those from Yemen, Persia
and other nodes on the oceanic rim. Where their school affiliations
are not known or if they were not Shāfiʿīs, they can be identified as
part of an early stage of “the intermixed schools” in the maritime
legal scape. That indicates a simultaneous presence of more than
one school, without any of them being dominant, as was the case on
the Indian Ocean rim prior to the sixteenth century.
All this evidence helps us appreciate the role of Egyptians and
Syrians in the expansion of Shāfiʿīsm in the Indian Ocean arena.
While some Kārimī traders only ventured up to the ports of Yemen,
many voyaged further eastwards, to the Indian coasts and farther
into East Asia as well as to East Africa, and they had a similar
juridical affiliation to the merchants whose destination was Yemen. In
these circumstances Yemen per se cannot have any claim to the
initial spread of Shāfiʿīsm to the Indian Ocean coasts. In fact, there
were many more micro-communities, all of which have been
forgotten or ignored in the historiography. These include the Indians,
the Persians and the Jāwīs.
 For the “Indians”, or al-Hindīs as they are called in Arabic
sources, we have evidence from the thirteenth century, if not earlier,
related to a few South Asian scholars who were active in the Islamic
circles of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. A number of entries in
the Shāfiʿī biographical dictionaries provide some valuable
information.40 Ṣafiyy al-Dīn Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Raḥīm bin
Muḥammad al-Hindī al-Urmawī (1246–1316) is a good example. He
was born in India, travelled to Yemen in 1269, performed hajj, went
to Cairo and then to Rūm (Byzantium), met and studied with one
Shaykh Sirāj al-Dīn. He then arrived in Damascus in 1286, where he
settled for the rest of his life. He taught at the madrasas of Atābikiyya
and Ẓāhiriyya al-Juwwāniyya and became famous for his expertise in
theology, to such an extent that the historian Subkī says that he was
the leading figure among Ashʿarī theologians in Damascus – similar
to ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī bin Muḥammad al-Bājī (d. 1315) in Cairo.41 He
confronted the controversial scholar of the time Ibn Taymiyya publicly
in the presence of many scholars and the governor. In the debate,
Ibn Taymiyya was defeated by this argumentative Indian, which led
to the former’s downfall and imprisonment. Our main source, Subkī,
also says that Urmawī was a venerable teacher of his father Taqiyya
al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 1355) during his studies in Damascus, and gave
him many writings including certain Nihāya as he gained respect of
his teacher.
Another Indian scholar, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aḥmad bin Muḥammad bin
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin Muḥammad al-Hindī al-Bājī al-Shāfiʿī (d. 1315),
offers a different case for investigation. If we focus on him as Feener
and Laffan focused on “al-Jāwī” with the adjectival patronymic form
(nisba) “al-Hindī”, we find a bit more interesting details on the
contemporary scholarly practices in and connections with the Indian
subcontinent.42 We know that ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn studied in Damascus and
worked as a finance secretary in Karak, an important stopping place
on the caravan route between Damascus and Egypt and for pilgrims
from Damascus to Mecca. He left this job once he obtained his
professorship at Sayfiyya Madrasa in Cairo. His noted work in
Shāfiʿīsm is a legal hermeneutical text called Ghāyat al-suʾūl fī al-
uṣūl.43 Apart from this information, we do not know much about his
life, scholarly genealogy or contributions. Yet the genealogical line of
his patronym reveals that he belonged to a family with many Muslim
ancestors. We do not know who of three forebears (parents or
grandparents) was actually a Hindī; it could have been ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn
alone or his great-grandfather Muḥammad. If it was his great-
grandfather then a strong “Indian” scholarly presence had been
active for generations in the Middle Eastern socio-cultural spheres.
This should be read along with the historical fact that the
Ghaznawid rulers in South Asia followed Shāfiʿīsm (particularly
Maḥmūd Ghaznī, r. 998–1030, who converted from Ḥanafīsm to
Shāfiʿīsm),44 as well as the rulers who succeeded them from the
Ghūrid dynasty, after the conversion of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Ghūrī (r.
1163–1203) from the Karrāmiyya sect to Shāfiʿīsm in 1199 at the
hand of his judge (qāḍī).45 His conversion is said to have happened
following the night on which both the sultan and the judge dreamt of
al-Shāfiʿī, the founder of the school. Ghiyāth al-Dīn is also said to
have extended his patronage to Shāfiʿīsm against Karrāmism, and
the great Shāfiʿī scholar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī was one of those who
received patronage to fight against the Karrāmi preachers.46 It
should not necessarily be taken for granted that the juridical
affiliation of these rulers to a particular school was followed by their
subjects. We do not know if their subjects in Central and South Asia
followed them in Shāfiʿīsm.
Another reference comes from Southeast Asia, from the
kingdom of Samudra Pasai. During the reign of Sultan al-Kāmil (see
below) two Indian scholars called Maulana Naina bin Naina al-
Malabari and Bawa Kaya Ali Hisamuddin al-Malabari are said to
have come to Samudra together with many other scholars.47 The
sultan gave them various positions and asked them to spread their
Islamic knowledge and expertise throughout his kingdom. Maulana
Naina was appointed as the commander of army while Bawa Kaya
was appointed as minister of foreign affairs. Beyond these patchy
details we do not know much about them, notwithstanding an
epigraphic claim.48 Furthermore, there seems to be an inconsistency
in this narrative, as it puts the years of Sultan al-Kamil’s reign in the
second half of the twelfth century. But, according to the existing
historiography, the Samudra Pasai kingdom was only Islamised in
the late thirteenth century, and a ruler with the name Kamil sat on the
throne only in the late fifteenth century, and even then for less than a
year.49 These inconsistencies apart, similar narratives are told about
the presence of “Indian” scholars from Gujarat and Malabar in the
earlier kingdom of Perlak as well as during the reigns of later kings
such as Malik al-Ẓāhir (d. 1326). The Southeast Asian narratives on
Hindīs or Malabaris tell us about a historical awareness of the
potential contributions of such “Indian” scholars, while the Arabic
biographical entries demonstrate their juridical-cum-intellectual
journeys from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, in the opposite
direction to the Kārimī merchant-scholars’ peregrinations.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we have more
evidence of Indian Shāfiʿīs being very influential on the Indian Ocean
rim and spreading the school’s ideas. One way this happened was
through voluntary migrations of Indian scholars, particularly from
Gujarat and Malabar, who went to Southeast Asia, the Middle East
or East Africa looking for new possibilities for their intellectual and
economic improvement. The journeys of Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī (d.
1658) illustrate this trend: he was born and brought up in Ranīr
(Rander) in Gujarat but was educated in Ḥaḍramawt. He built a
successful career at the court of the Acehnese sultanate before he
was finally forced to return home. His journeys are not untypical;
many people before him had undertaken similar journeys.50 His
contribution to the textual circulation of Shāfiʿīsm in Southeast Asia
was unprecedented, for he wrote the first known Shāfiʿī legal text in
the region. Apart from these voluntary migrations, there were also a
few Indians who were forced to migrate to distant lands such as
South Africa and who found careers as jurists specialising in
Shāfiʿīsm. For example, Achmat van Bengalen (1750–1843) was
deported to Cape Town from Chinsura in Bengal and eventually
became one of the most renowned Shāfiʿīs there in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.51
Another important group which contributed to spreading the
school across the rim were the Persians. Southern Persia had
always been a vital link in the maritime trade and its inhabitants were
familiar with the opportunities oceanic networks presented. Many
Persians, not just from the southern part but also from far north-
eastern regions such as Isfahan, had been active in the circulation of
Islamic legal ideas and texts for centuries. The fourteenth-century
Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (1304–1377) refers to many Persian
judges and shaykh al-Islams he met in different parts, including
China. Notwithstanding questions regarding the accuracy of his
accounts on China, patronymic names such as Iṣfahānī, Tabrīzī and
Shīrāzī that appear in such premodern travel accounts suggest the
mobility of scholars who had originated from Persian homelands. Ibn
Baṭṭūṭa hardly ever refers to their scholarly affiliations so we do not
know if they were in fact Shāfiʿīs. But their presence in such
townships and ports suggests that the maritime routes were well
exploited by individual Persians for circulating legal ideas. Also, the
early Islamic communities in East Africa consisted of a good number
of “Shirazis”, among whom were several dissident Muslims. These
included the Shīʿīs, Ibāḍīs and Khārijīs, who sought refuge in the
region. Some Persians also utilised the overland Silk Road, which
primarily disseminated the Ḥanafī stream of law as far as China, a
geographical and doctrinal area outside the focus of this study.
Since the sixteenth century we have clear evidence of the
presence of Persian Shāfiʿīs all over the oceanic rim. They had to
flee from Iran once the Ṣafawids came into power and began to
force Shīʿīsm onto the entire region. The founder of the Ṣafawid
dynasty, Shāh Ismāʿīl I (r. 1501–1524), made extensive incursions to
convert the Sunnīs to Shīʿīsm in a way that would change the
religious landscape of Persia for centuries to follow. Until then,
Shāfiʿīsm had been one of the predominant schools there. Regions
such as Khurasan, Samarqand, Nishapur and Shiraz had once
played decisive roles in the early histories of Shāfiʿīsm. Prior to and
during the Seljūq rule in the region, Shāfiʿī scholars had managed to
build up their own vital spaces in estates that were dominated by the
Ḥanafīs. Eventually Shāfiʿīsm became the dominant legal thought
there. Even the Ṣafawids themselves were born into a Sunnī lineage
or, more precisely, a Shāfiʿī-Sufi tradition, until Ismāʿīl I decided to
convert himself and his kingdom entirely to Shīʿīsm. When he started
his massive inquisition against Sunnīsm, Shāfiʿīsm suffered the
most. While Ḥanafīsm found its new home in the adjacent Mughal or
Ottoman Empires, Shāfiʿīs had to seek refuge elsewhere.52
Three options were open to them: to convert to Shīʿīsm; to flee
their homeland to preserve their faith; to face death. Historical
sources show that many scholars and followers of Sunnīsm in
general and of Shāfiʿīsm in particular died for their faith. Ismāʿīl’s
army massacred thousands of Sunnīs all across his kingdom. For
example, during the Herat Episode many Shāfiʿīs, including the
Shaykh al-Islam of Khurasan, were killed.53 Many other Sunnī
scholars and followers converted to Shīʿīsm and joined the new Shīʿī
scholars who had been imported from southern Lebanon and Iraq.
The trajectory of the Ṣafawī Sufi order itself represents this moment
of conversion. The order was established by Ṣafiyy al-Dīn Ardabīlī
(d. 1334) as a fusion of Shāfiʿī legalism with the mystical ideas of
Sufism. The whole order was Shīʿīsed in the early sixteenth century.
Likewise, many Shāfiʿī jurists renounced their school and embraced
the new juridical and theological streams. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-
Dawānī (d. 1502) is said to have been one of the “last Shāfiʿīs of
Persia”, if he did not convert to Shīʿīsm.54
Thus some met their death and others converted to the new
faith. But the third category is of more importance to this study: those
who fled from Persia to protect their faith and practice. Many Sunnīs,
more particularly the Shāfiʿīs, and their descendants took refuge in
adjacent Ḥanafī kingdoms. The presence of Shāfiʿī scholars in the
kingdoms of Sikandar and Ibrāhīm Lodhīs, and subsequently in the
Mughal domains, could be related to Sunnī refugees fleeing
Persia.55 Many Shāfiʿīs took refuge at Ottoman courts and in major
cities. Some went to Mecca and Medina. One example is
Muḥammad bin al-Ḥusayn al-Ḥusaynī al-Samarqandī (d. 1588), who
became a prominent Shāfiʿī in sixteenth-century Medina and was
expert in many languages.56 In Mecca, Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī (d. 1605) is
another example. He was a Ḥanafī jurist and a scholar of ḥadīths
who migrated from Herat and studied with Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī
whom we shall discuss in detail later. Many Persian Shāfiʿīs took
refuge on the Indian Ocean rim utilising existing networks of trade
and legalism. They flocked into many regions, from East Africa to
East Asia, as we can see from a number of different primary sources
which note the increased presence of Persian Sunnī-Shāfiʿīs from
the early sixteenth century onwards.57
In the case of Jāwīs, an umbrella term for people from
Southeast Asia including Malays, Javanese, Acehnese and
Makassarese, we have references to their engagements with Shāfiʿī
law as early as the mid-fourteenth century. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who arrived
on the coast of Sumatra in the 1340s, recorded his visit to the
Samudra Pasai sultan Malik al-Ẓāhir II (d. 1349), where he
encountered Shāfiʿīsm being studied and practised. He noted that
the sultan was a Shāfiʿī and a lover of fuqahāʾ, as also were his
subjects.58 His detailed description shows the eminence of Shāfiʿī
law in the region in the mid-fourteenth century. Before the
intensification of Yemeni migrations many Jāwī scholars must have
thus set out to spread the ideas of the school in and around the
region. We have ample evidence from the seventeenth century
onward. At that time the Jāwīs directly influenced the legal practices
of many Muslims, not only in Southeast Asia but also in Sri Lanka
and South Africa. The spread of Islam in South Africa, and in
particular of Shāfiʿīsm, was due to Jāwī jurists, who arrived there as
political prisoners and exiles, and included people such as Shaykh
Yūsuf al-Maqāssarī (d. 1699).
Beyond these micro-communities and their individual members
there were other individuals who contributed to the process of Shāfiʿī
domination, though without much scholarly support from the ethnic
communities of the diaspora to which they belonged. Among the
most important were slaves, sailors, military personnel, prisoners
and political exiles. The Eastern African slaves who were traded
across the Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Mediterranean
practised their religion in various ways. Their religious affiliations, like
those of the slaves from the East (especially from Southeast) Asia, is
yet to be studied thoroughly. Some patchy references to a few other
Shāfiʿīs who were active in some coastal cities say nothing of their
background, so they make no further contribution to our enquiry. But
we can assume that there must have been similar individuals in the
same places from similar ethnic and regional backgrounds forming a
micro-ethnic community that would contribute to the fuqahāʾ estate.
 Oceanic Institutions
Earlier we discussed how the individual and institutional frameworks
contributed to the transregional and transtemporal spread and
survival of Islamic law at large and the Shāfiʿī school in particular in
the Islamic heartlands. Now in the oceanic littoral, how did the micro-
communities and individuals create and utilise institutional spaces for
the advancement of the school?
Transregional educational networks of Islamic communities in
the central Islamic lands and oceanic regions through the strong
influence of Arabic as a lingua franca enabled Muslims from different
regions to travel across regional borders looking for colleges,
teachers, students, certificates, texts and ideas.59 Outside the
heartlands of Islam, religious and educational institutions such as
mosques and colleges (variously identified as pondok, pesantren,
dayah, surau, madrasa, maktab, etc.) were at the same time
providing a space for Shāfiʿī ideas to be circulated and to penetrate
the rim of the Indian Ocean. The educational spaces there were
mostly attached to newly established or already existing mosques.
Many of those had been founded in the coastal belts by the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries and spread in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. For example, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa talks about a mosque-cum-
college he encountered in the kingdom of Samudra Pasai in the
1340s. He writes:
 I went to the mosque, performed the Friday prayer with the
guard Qayrān. Then I went in to the sultan. There I saw the qāḍī
Amīr Sayyid and students on his right and left. He [the sultan]
shook me by the hand and I saluted him, whereupon he made
me sit down upon his left and asked me about Sultan
Muḥammad [Tughluq of Delhi, d. 1351] and about my travels,
and I answered him accordingly. Then he resumed the
discussions of Islamic law according to the school of al-Imām al-
Shāfiʿī. He continued that until the afternoon prayer. After the
prayer, he went into a chamber there and put off the garments
he was wearing. These were robes of the kind worn by the
fuqahāʾ, which he puts on when he comes to the mosque on
Fridays. Then, he dressed in his royal robes, which are mantles
of silk and cotton.60

In this passage, we see how a mosque functioned as the space for

legal exchanges in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia. This
description also tells us how the sultan could become part of a
learning circle before switching back to his function as a ruler. What
we see from the sixteenth century is a systematic utilisation of those
institutional spaces by the micro-communities and individuals of the
Shāfiʿī clusters to spread their ideas. Both in mosques and in
colleges, Shāfiʿī law was taught and studied along with other
religious and non-religious subjects; sometimes it was taught along
with legal doctrines of other schools. Diverse individuals, micro-
communities of the diaspora and associated institutions offered
enthusiastic support for Shāfiʿīsm.
 If we set these institutions against the contemporary political
and social scenario of the following centuries, it is interesting to note
the parallel development or historical continuity of powerful Muslim
empires and kingdoms in South|East Asia and East Africa.61 In
South Asia it was the Delhi and Mughal sultanates that
predominated; in Southeast Asia it was the Malacca, Aceh and
Mataram sultanates; and in East Africa multiple coastal sultanates
arose in the fifteenth century and maintained a fluctuating legacy
until the nineteenth. There were also minor Muslim kingdoms in
these regions which can be seen to reflect the development of higher
educational centres. To what extent did such Muslim rulers
contribute to the work of these institutions? Did they ever give
patronage to Shāfiʿī scholars and their educational ventures?
In South Asia, we know hardly anything about how the Delhi and
Mughal sultans contributed to the establishment and functioning of
these institutions in the coastal belts of the subcontinent in support of
Shāfiʿīsm. Although they established and patronised many academic
centres in the heartlands of South Asia, we do not have much
evidence for them paying attention to those on the Indian Ocean rim,
except during the regnal years of Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707).
Instead, such initiatives were funded by minor rulers, mercantile
communities, local aristocrats and non-Muslim rulers. But many
religious institutions on the coast and in the hinterland of Aceh were
established and funded by the Acehnese sultanate. In Java the
Mataram sultanate also gave remarkable endowments for
educational purposes, especially during the reign of Sultan Agung (r.
1613–1645). In East Africa the Adal sultanate gave some
endowments, but constant years of war with the Solomonic Empire
hindered the educational aspirations of its Muslim subjects.
The minor coastal kingdoms contributed towards the institutional
empowerment of fuqahāʾ and the process of Shāfiʿīsation and they
are worthy of mention for their passionate religious activities.62 They
also provided material support for the estate, with lands for mosques
and madrasas, by paying the salaries of teachers and giving
endowments for daily expenditures and even stipends for the
students. Many members of royal families were educated in such
institutes and some of them later became rulers of their respective
kingdoms and introduced Shāfiʿī legal texts as foundations of their
new legal codes and state constitutions.63
Along with these establishments and educational developments
with or without the support of royal lineages, it should also be
mentioned that the period from the sixteenth century witnessed a
remarkable development in material resources directly relevant to
the flourishing of intellectual and juridical enterprise. The coastal
economies of the kingdoms encountered or became associated with
the new European expansion in the waters of the Indian Ocean. This
helped these kingdoms to access larger networks stretching beyond
previous limits – networks of associates or networks of enemies. The
development in material resources led to the establishment of many
new educational institutions and an increased movement of scholars
between the Middle East, South|East Asia and Africa. Most of these
institutions and scholars promoted deeper study of Islamic law,
theology, mysticism and other related disciplines.
 Conclusion
The evolution of micro-communities into macro-networks of fuqahāʾ
enabled the spread of Islamic legal ideas in and beyond the
heartlands of Islam. In the case of the Shāfiʿī school, al-Shāfiʿī’s
prominent student groups, starting from their bases in Baghdad and
Cairo, had advanced his teachings into a doctrinal school by the
ninth century. By the tenth century, its wider influence was marked in
Khurasan, Shiraz and Transoxiana to the east, and in Cairo,
Baghdad, Basra and Damascus to the west. Although the school
competed temporarily with the political dominance of the Shīʿī
Fāṭimid kingdom, stretching from the Levant to the Hijaz, it renewed
its expansion by the eleventh century. Developments in the twelfth
century, such as the fall of the Fāṭimids and the rise of the Sunnī
Ayyūbids, and the growth of the maritime economy through Arab-
Persian dominance over the Indian Ocean, contributed to its further
expansion to more eastern, western and southern regions.
The “fuqahāʾ estates” emblemise the expansion of Shāfiʿī
circles from micro-networks to macro-networks and oceanic
networks, with specialised and systematic circulations of knowledge
and texts of Islamic law. They utilised the increasing number of
specialists and the opportunities for academic journeys into legal
spheres with more detailed rules, organised structures, specific
functions, distinctive identities, and autonomy for those involved. The
Shāfiʿīs were only one group in the “estate”; it was about having a
common platform for all legal specialists on which to organise and
assert the distinctiveness of their profession and discipline and to
protect it from intrusions by an uninformed public. They aimed to be
a parallel society of legal specialists outside the dominant
frameworks of society. They managed to construct a notion around
themselves that they were the true guardians of divine law in
opposition to existing political entities. Idealistic concepts, such as
the siyāsat al-sharīʿa, found firm ground in their claims for autonomy
over legal interpretation, transmission, authority and administration.
Even if they were not successful in bringing such claims fully into
practice, the manuals and texts they produced clung to this viewpoint
and became normative in the ideas of Shāfiʿī jurists.
The interrelation of the fuqahāʾ estate with institutions is mostly
one of an explicit collaboration in Middle Eastern contexts, in which
the educational and religious institutions, once established and
funded, were an exclusive space for the estate. From the tenth
century onwards, many such institutional spaces were established
and collaborative conventions between estates and institutions were
normalised through exclusive interdependence. But that exclusivity
changed once it came to the Indian Ocean rim. That was primarily
because most regions where the estate had to operate were under
predominantly non-Islamic socio-cultural and sometimes political
structures, where the Muslim communities were in a minority and
noticeably diverse, and where there were often new entrants
representing a foreign diaspora. The institutions in the oceanic littoral
thus did not always come exclusively under the estate. Muslim jurists
had to negotiate with its promises and problems in its circulatory
regime, and the oceanic nexus of traders, brokers and religious
leaders provided a durable structure in which they could operate.
Their predicaments were similar to those of early jurists in the Middle
East, who ratiocinated Islamic law and promulgated their teachings
immediately after Islamic conquests of many distant lands – at a time
when the estates were yet to evolve from the micro-networks of
scholarly circles and clusters.
The circulation of Islam and its laws in the Indian Ocean littoral
was aided by the participant communities from diverse Arab, Asian
and African backgrounds. A cosmopolitan network of Kārimī
merchants, Egyptians, Syrians, Persians, Jāwīs, Hindīs and Swahilis
contributed to the simultaneous expansion of Islamic law, specifically
the Shāfiʿī school. In the littorals of the Indian Ocean and the
Eastern Mediterranean, the school thus gained the loyalty of such
circulators of knowledge thanks to a “maritime wave of Shāfiʿīsm” in
the sixteenth century replacing the existent intermixed legal scape.
The roles of such a mixed Afro-Asian–Arab triangle in the process
should be acknowledged and analysed. Their engagement with the
school and broadly with Islam in the postclassical period was as
complex as it was with all other communities in history, inside or
outside the heartlands of Islam. In this broad cosmopolitan
circulation of Shāfiʿīsm and Islam in general from the micro-networks
to the oceanic networks by means of the fuqahāʾ estates, a textual
longue durée of legal knowledge offered strong connections and
points for discussion across borders. The next chapter investigates
the nuanced ways in which such legal texts were produced through a
rich commentarial tradition rooted in the larger textual families of
both classical and postclassical Shāfiʿīsm.

1The ḥadīth is from Abū Dāwūd Sulaymān bin al-Ashʿath al-

Sijistānī, Sunan, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ and Muḥammad Kāmil
Qurah Balalī (Beirut: Dār al-Risālat al-ʿĀlamiyya, 1994), 4: 145–
146, no. 2489. The statement to the Caliph is cited in Dionisius
Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian
Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 13.

1 Not many detailed primary sources for the life of al-Shāfiʿī are
available to us. The earliest biography of al-Shāfiʿī is said to have
been written by Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī, but that text has not survived. Ibn
Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī’s (d. 939) and Aḥmad Bayhaqī’s (d. 1066)
biographical writings are therefore our earliest detailed sources,
even though they were written almost one and two centuries
respectively after al-Shāfiʿī’s lifetime. An early biographical study
in a European language is Joseph Schacht, “Shāfiʿī’s Life and
Personality”, in Studia Orientalia Ioanni Pedersen, ed. Flemming
Hvidberg (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1953), 318–326. For
recent studies, see Ahmed El Shamsy, The Canonization of
Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kecia Ali, Imam Shafi’i:
Scholar and Saint (Oxford: Oneworld, 2011).

2 Some of his leading disciples were Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan al-

Zaʿfarānī (d. 874) in Baghdad, Abū al-Walīd Aḥmad in Mecca and
Ismāʿīl bin Yaḥyā al-Muzanī and Rabīʿ bin Sulaymān al-Murādī in
Cairo.
3This argument of El Shamsy opposed the existing claim of Wael
Hallaq on the “personal schools”. Hallaq himself questioned
Schacht’s view of “regional schools”; see Wael Hallaq, “From
Regional to Personal Schools of Law: A Re-evaluation”, Islamic
Law and Society 8, no. 1 (2001): 1–26; Ahmed El Shamsy, “The
First Shāfiʿī: The Traditionalist Legal Thought of Abū Yaʿqūb al-
Buwayṭī (d. 231/846)”, Islamic Law and Society 14, no. 3 (2007):
301–341.

4The disciple was Rabīʿ al-Murādī. Ahmed El Shamsy, “Al-

Shāfiʿī’s Written Corpus: A Source-Critical Study”, Journal of the
American Oriental Society 132 (2012): 334.

5 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddima, ed. ʿAbdullāh bin

Muḥammad al-Darwīsh (Damascus: Dār al-Balkhī and Maktabat
al-Hidāya, 2004), 2: 190. The translated quote is from ʿAbd al-
Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to
History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books,
1958), 3: 11–12.

6 Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined,

trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).

7 In the earlier phases, fiqh was identified as the knowledge of

religion, “for its leadership, nobility, and uprightness over all other
disciplines”. Muḥammad Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab (Beirut: Dār
Ṣādir, n.d.), 13: 522. However this perception became more
constrained over time.
8 For an example, see a sixteenth-century Shāfiʿī text entitled
Ajwibat al-ʿajība in which many scholars of the time deliver the
fatwās that if an endowment is made for ʿulamāʾ, only the fuqahāʾ
and those who stand close to them are eligible for its benefits.
Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība,
Ponnāni MS. 1203 [also numbered 2598], fols. 38a–39a, and an
edited version by ʿAbd al-Naṣīr Aḥmad al-Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī
(Kuwait: Dār al-Ḍiyāʾ, 2012), 157–158.

9 Here the word “cluster” is close to the existing usage of “school”,

but differs in its emphasis in two ways: (a) on the agency of
people, institutions and everyday nuances; a school denotes
intellectual frameworks; (b) on the region in which the people and
institutions were based; a school is more universalistic in
appearance.

10 Previous historiography of Islam has looked at the relationship

with the state and polity. Many historians followed different paths
on the complex relation between ʿulamāʾ and the society in
general and the polity in particular, when the fuqahāʾ come to
assume a more deterministic role. For example, see Guy Burak,
The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafı School in the
Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015). For more details on this eventual transition in
Mamlūk Egypt, see Yossef Rapoport, “Legal Diversity in the Age of
Taqlīd: The Four Chief Qāḍīs under the Mamluks”, Islamic Law
and Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 210–228; Sherman A. Jackson,
Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (Leiden: Brill, 1996); for an Indian Ocean
perspective on this transition, see Iza R. Hussin, The Politics of
Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the
Muslim State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016). In
this last case, when the European colonial structures became
predominant in the Muslim world, there was no question of
freedom for and jurisdiction of Islamic jurists against the increasing
powers of colonisation. Cf. Steven C. Judd, “Al-Awzāʿī and Sufyān
al-Thawrī: The Umayyad Madhhab?”, in The Islamic School of
Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress, ed. Peri Baerman,
Rudolph Peters and Frank E. Vogel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005), 10–25; Nurit Tsafrir, The History of an
Islamic School of Law: The Early Spread of Hanafism (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Muḥammad Qasim Zaman,
“The Caliphs, the ʿUlamaʾ and the Law: Defining the Role and
Function of the Caliph in the Early ʿAbbāsid Period”, Islamic Law
and Society 4, no. 1 (1997): 1–36; Michael Chamberlain,
Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–
1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Patricia
Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the
First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986). For earlier engagements with this question, see Ignaz
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras
and Ruth Hamori (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1981); E. I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

11Muhammad Akram Nadwi, al-Muḥaddithāt: The Women

Scholars in Islam (Oxford: Interface Publications, 2007), 77–80,
115, 119–120, 122, 280–281. Cf. Asma Sayeed, Women and the
Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2013); Jajat Burhanudin, Ulama
Perempuan Indonesia (Jakarta: Gramedia & PPIM IAIN, 2002).
12 For example, with regard to the fatwās that constitute a
recurrent node of interaction, the very epistemological basis of the
fatwā is the istiftāʾ (a request for a fatwā) which connotes a
layperson initiating an approach towards a jurist. This is an
illustrative example of the direction that legal rulings took in an
Islamic context, from bottom to top rather than vice versa.

13 Shihāb al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Kitāb Muʿjam

al-buldān (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1977), 1: 209–210; cf. Wilferd
Madelung, Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran (Albany: State
University of New York, 1988), 26–38.

14 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfat al-ṭālibīn fī tarjamat

Shaykhinā al-Imām Nawawī, Tübingen University Library MS. Ma
VI 18; ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfat al-ṭālibīn fī tarjamat li al-
Imām Muḥy al-Dīn, ed. Abū ʿUbayda Mashhūr Āl Sulaymān
(Amman: Dār al-Athariyya, 2007).

15 For a historical elaboration on this interlinkage in an Indian

Ocean region, see Mahmood Kooria, “Doors and Walls of
Mosques: Textual longue-durée in a Premodern Malabari
Inscription”, in Social Worlds of Premodern Transactions:
Perspectives from Indian Epigraphy and History, ed. Mekhola
Gomes, Digvijay Kumar Singh and Meera Visvanathan (New
Delhi: Primus Books, 2020), 128–151.

16 George Makdisi, Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in

Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1981), 1–4.
17Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qurʾān wa duraruh (Beirut:
Dār al-Jīl wa Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīda, 1988), 20–21.

18 Jackson, Islamic Law and the State, 54.

19 For example, see Edward Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World

History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 58; particularly on
South Asia, see Omar Khalidi, “Sayyids of Hadramawt in Medieval
and Early Modern India”, Asian Journal of Social Science 32, no. 2
(2004): 329–351; Abdul Latif, The Concise History of Kayalpatnam
(Kayalpatnam: Shamsuddin Appa Publication, 2004); ʿAbd al-
Ghafūr ʿAbd Allāh al-Qāsimī, al-Muslimūn fī Kayralā (Malappuram:
Akmal Book Centre, 2000); Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of
the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 1: Early Medieval India and the
Expansion of Islam, 7th–11th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 69–
71; vol. 2: Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th–13th
Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 276–277; A. D. W. Forbes,
“Southern Arabia and the Islamicization of the Central Indian
Ocean Archipelagoes”, Archipel 21 (1981): 80–85; A. Cherian,
“The Genesis of Islam in Malabar”, Indica 6, no. 1 (1969): 8; M. H.
Ilias, “Mappila Muslims and the Cultural Content of Trading Arab
Diaspora on the Malabar Coast”, Asian Journal of Social Science
35, nos. 4–5 (2007): 444, says: “The spread of Shafii School in
Malabar can really be traced back to Hadramis. Religiously
speaking, the Hadrami Saiyids had a particular mission of
spreading Shafi sect of orthodoxy”. On Southeast Asia, see
Kazuhiro Arai, “Arabs Who Traversed the Indian Ocean: The
History of the al-‘Attas Family in Hadramawt and Southeast Asia,
c. 1600–c. 1960” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2004); on
East Africa: B. G. Martin, “Arab Migrations to East Africa in
Medieval Times”, International Journal of African Historical Studies
7, no. 3 (1974): 367–390; Joseph Schacht, “Notes on Islam in East
Africa”, Studia Islamica, no. 23 (1965): 91–136.

20ʿUmar bin ʿAlī al-Jaʿdī Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt fuqahāʾ al-Yaman,

ed. Fuʾād Sayyid (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Sunnat al-Muḥammadiyya,
1957), 80.

21 Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt, 79.

22 Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt, 88.

23 Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt, 126–129.

24ʿAlī Muʿawwid and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, Introduction to Abū

Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Wajīz fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī (Beirut: Dār al-
Arqam, 1997), 68.

25The royal biographer, Muḥy al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir
has written about the return of these businessmen, see his al-
Rawḍ al-zāhir fī sīrat al-malik al-Ẓāhir, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-
Khuwayṭir (Riyadh: no publisher, 1976), 132.

26ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥibshī, Ḥayāt al-adab al-Yamanī fī ʿaṣr Banī Rasūl

(Yemen: Manshūrāt Aḍwāʾ al-Yaman, 1980), 53.

27Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt, 88. Even Abū Bakr bin al-Muḍarrab, the
main teacher of Qurashī, who taught him Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar and
some of its commentaries, was an Egyptian who had migrated to
Zabīd in the early eleventh century.
28 A telling example comes from fourteenth-century Malabar,
where religious scholars from Oman, Persia, Somalia, Iraq and the
Hijaz functioned in different roles and positions, but hardly any of
them came from Yemen. Sebastian Prange, “The Social and
Economic Organization of Muslim Trading Communities on the
Malabar Coast, Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries” (PhD diss.,
University of London, 2008), 141.

29There are many explanations for their migrations, relating to

geographical, climatic, political and economic aspects. The most
important study on the Yemeni migrations, primarily focusing on
the Ḥaḍramī community, is Engseng Ho, Graves of Tarim:
Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).

30Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Mablagh al-arab fī fakhr al-

ʿArab (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1990).

31 S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden:

Brill, 2010), 351–360: see “The Beginnings of the Kārim
Merchants and the Character of their Organization”; S. D. Goitein,
“New Light on the Beginnings of the Kārim Merchants”, Journal of
the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1, no. 2 (1958):
175–184; Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the
Near East in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976), 241–242, 300–301, 320–321; Eliyahu Ashtor, “The
Kārim Merchants”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 88, nos. 1–
2 (1956): 45–56; Walter J. Fischel, “The Spice Trade in Mamluk
Egypt”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1,
no. 2 (1958): 157–174.
32 Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Ashqar, Tujjār al-tawābil fī Miṣr fī
al-ʿaṣr al-Mamlūkī (Cairo: al-Hayʾat al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-
Kitāb, 1999), provides a list of more than 200 Kārimī merchants
with their full names, personal information and bibliographical
details of primary sources.

33 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr bi abnāʾ al-ʿumar

(Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿat Majlis Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya,
1967–76), 225; he also talks about many other merchant-scholars.
For another example, one Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan bin Suwayd was a
juristic consultant who occasionally acted as a notary public of
Mālikīsm, but he was essentially a Kārimī merchant.

34Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Middle Ages, 218, 275–276; on the

family in general, 74.

35 Its original title was forgotten over the course of time. A

nineteenth-century writer went as far as saying that Maḥallī did not
entitle his work. See Aḥmad Mayqarī Shumaylat al-Ahdal, Sullam
al-Mutaʿallim al-muḥtāj ilā maʿrifat rumūz al-Minhāj, ed. Ismāʿīl
ʿUthmān Zayn (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 627. He was
reasonably active in commerce and he is said to have made a
huge profit in the early fifteenth century before he turned to full-
time academic activities.

36 Carl F. Petry, “Travel Patterns of Medieval Notables in the Near

East”, Studia Islamica 62 (1985): 78–79. The following details are
from him, but I also cross-checked with the original source,
Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li
ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1992), 3: 202–204.
37 Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb bin ʿAlī al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-
Shāfiʿīyya al-kubrā, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Ṭanāḥī and ʿAbd
al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-
Ḥalabī, n.d.), 7: 166–168.

38 Sakhāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, 1: 69 and 8: 64.

39 Petry, “Travel Patterns”, 86.

40 For example, see the references on Abu al-ʿAbbas Aḥmad bin

Muḥammad al-Daybulī (d. 984) in Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 3:
56–57. This Daybulī, from the Daybul region, is the earliest Shāfiʿī
jurist with a direct Indian origin I have come across so far. He lived
and died in Egypt.

41 Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 9: 162–164, 190; 10: 166, 340.

42R. Michael Feener and Michael F. Laffan, “Sufi Scents across

the Indian Ocean: Yemeni Hagiography and the Earliest History of
Southeast Asian Islam”, Archipel 70, no. 1 (2005): 185–208. Here I
have looked into only the South Asian context in connection with
the Middle East. If we do the same exercise for other
subcontinents, let us say East Africa, the outcome would be more
promising against notions that are usually taken for granted. For
example, see Neville Chittick and Robert I. Rotberg, East Africa
and the Orient: Cultural Syntheses in Pre-colonial Times (New
York: Africana Publishing Company, 1975); Neville Chittick, “The
‘Shirazi’ Colonization of East Africa”, Journal of African History 6,
no. 3 (1965): 275–294; Molly Patterson, “South Arabian Maritime
Expansion and the Origins of East African Islam: 1200–1500”
(PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009). The major
primary source is Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who visited the kingdoms of Zanj,
Mogadishu and Kilwa in the fourteenth century.

43Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur

(Leiden: Brill, 1949), 2: 104.

44On the conversion of Maḥmūd Ghaznī, see Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-

Shāfiʿīyya, 5: 316; on another Ghaznawid ruler, Muhammad bin
Sam (r. 1030, 1040–41), and his affiliation with the school, see
Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 8: 60–61.

45 The judge was Qāḍī Waḥīd al-Dīn (or Wajīh al-Dīn) Muḥammad
al-Marwazī or Marwarrūḏī.

46 Abū ʿUmar Minhāj al-Dīn ʿUthmān bin Sirāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī,

Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, ed. W. Nassau Lees, Mawlawī Khadim Hosain
and ʿAbd al-Hayy (Calcutta: College Press, 1864), 77–78, for a
translation, see Abū ʿUmar Minhāj al-Dīn ʿUthmān bin Sirāj al-Dīn
Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī: A General History of the Muhammadan
Dynasties of Asia, Including Hindustān, from A.H. 194 (810 A.D.)
to A.H. 658 (1260 A.D.) and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals
into Islām, trans. Henry George Raverty (London: Gilbert &
Rivington, 1881), 1: 384–385; cf. Edmund Bosworth, “The Rise of
the Karamiyyah in Khurasan”, Muslim World 50, no. 1 (1960): 5–
14.

47 Ali Hasymy, Sejarah kebudayaan Islam di Indonesia (Jakarta:

Bulan Bintang, 1990), 9; Ali Hasymy, Kebudayaan Aceh dalam
sejarah (Jakarta: Penerbit Beuna, 1983), 48–49; Mehmet Ozay,
“Baba Davud: A Turkish Scholar in Aceh”, in Ottoman Connections
to the Malay World: Islam, Law and Society, ed. Saim Kayadibi
(Kuala Lumpur: The Other Press, 2011), 36.
48A tomb inscription dated 1226 (623 AH) belongs to Maulana
Naina bin Naina al-Malabari, writes M. Junus Djamil, Tawarich
Radja Radja Kerjaan Aceh (Banda Aceh: Kodam Iskandar Muda,
1968), 11.

49 The first Muslim ruler of Samudra is Sultan Malik al-Salih,

whose gravestone has been found and dated as 696 Hijri year,
which corresponds to 1297 CE. G. W. J. Drewes, “New Light on
the Coming of Islam to Indonesia?”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-
en Volkenkunde 124, no. 4 (1968): 433–459; for a striking critical
reading of these tombstones, see Elizabeth Lambourn,
“Tombstones, Texts, and Typologies: Seeing Sources for the Early
History of Islam in Southeast Asia”, Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 51 (2008): 252–286.

50 Ranīrī’s uncle had arrived in Aceh as a teacher in the late

sixteenth century; see his Bustan al-salatin Bab II, Pasal 13, ed. T.
Iskandar (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Pustaka, 1966), 32–35.

51 Achmat Davids, The Mosques of Bo-Kaap: A Social History of

Islam at the Cape (Cape Town: South African Institute of Arabic
and Islamic Research, 1980).

52 Many Shāfiʿīs, however, arrived at the Mughal and Ottoman

educational institutions. For example, when the Mughal Emperor
Akbar established several madrasas in Agra, he appointed some
professors from Shiraz, who had already left the place and were
looking for better opportunities. See Narendra Nath Law,
Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by
Muhammadans) (London: Longmans, Green, 1916), 163.
53The Shaykh al-Islam was Sayf al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Taftāzanī (d.
1510). On his murder, see Bābur, Memoirs of Zehīr-Ed-Dīn
Muhammed Bābur, Emperor of Hindustan, trans. John Leyden and
William Erskine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 1: 312–
313. This source says that the family occupied the position of
Shaykh al-Islam in Khurasan for several generations.

54Anne K. S. Lambton, “al-Dawānī”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd

ed.; “Davānī, Jalāl al-Dīn Moḥammad”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, VII,
Fasc. 2.

55 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite

Migration and Early Modern State Formation”, Journal of Asian
Studies 51, no. 2 (1992): 340–363; cf. Afzal Husain, “Growth of the
Irani Element in Akbar’s Nobility”, Proceedings of the Indian
History Congress 36 (1975): 166–179.

56ʿAbd al-Qādir bin Shaykh ʿAydarūs, Tārīkh al-nūr al-sāfir ʿan

akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir, ed. Aḥmad Ḥalū, Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ and
Akram al-Būshī (Beirut: Dar Sader, 2001), 565–566.

57For more specific references from such Indian Ocean coasts

such as Malabar, see Chapter 6.

58 Gibb translated the term fuqahāʾ as theologians, which is

certainly inappropriate. He also avoided the sentences about the
sultan and his subjects being Shāfiʿīs. See Ibn Battuta, Travels in
Asia and Africa, 1325–1354, trans. and selected by H. A. R. Gibb
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1929), 4: 874. For the
original sentences and terms, see Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad bin
ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī
gharāʾib al-amṣār wa-ʿajāʾib al-asfār, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-
Munʿim al-ʿUryān and Musṭafā al-Qaṣṣāṣ (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-
ʿUlūm, 1987), 631–632.

59 There are several studies along this line in premodern

centuries, but a good primary source is Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, al-
Riḥla fī ṭalab al-ḥadīth, ed. Nūr al-Dīn ʿAtar (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyya, 1975).

60Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥla, 631–632; this translation is partly taken from

H. A. R. Gibb’s Travels in Asia and Africa, 4: 875; but, again, we
note that he has skipped a significant amount of this passage, and
has mistranslated terms related to Islamic law and jurists.

61 On the interconnections between the political structures and

educational institutes, see Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of
Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic
Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); on a
later period: Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classrooms: Islam, the
State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).

62 Some of these minor kingdoms that made contributions to the

school include the South Asian kingdoms of Muzaffarids in Gujarat
and ʿĀdil Shahis in Bijapur (especially after Ibrāhīm ʿĀdil Shāh II,
who converted to Sunnīsm and made it the official version of Islam
in his kingdom), Southeast Asian sultanates of Ternate; of Pattani,
since the 1530s (after the conversion of the king); of Banten; of
Cirebon; of Pajang that succeeded Demak in 1568; of Banjar from
1526; of Maguindanao; of Sulu; of Luwu from 1605; of Johor, as
well as the East African sultanates of Harar and Awsa, and a
number of coastal chiefdoms such as Quitangonha, Sancul,
Sangage and Angoche, and multiple shaykhs of Old Shirazi, Kilifi
and Malindi dynasties.

63 A telling example comes from the Philippines. In the legal codes

of the Sulu and Maguindanao Sultanates drafted in the eighteenth
(and revised in the nineteenth) century, the Shāfiʿī texts Mirʾāt al-
ṭullāb of ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Sinkilī and the Minhāj were primary
sources. Mahmood Kooria, “In Between Many Worlds of One Law:
Arab, Malay and Filipino Legal Intermixtures of Shāfiʿīsm”, in
Philippine Confluence: Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, c.
1500–1800, ed. Jos Gommans and Ariel Lopez (Leiden: Leiden
University Press, 2020), 311–331.
◈
Beyond the boiling desire of adventure, why did people travel
risking their lives on the sea? For business, one might say.
But also, for better prospects of life. Salvation. Pilgrimage.
Propagation. In search of knowledge.
Does the last one seem a bit out of place, especially in
medieval times? Not really. In fact, the search for knowledge
was a big purpose of life for travellers of the time. More so in
the Islamic and Buddhist worlds. In Muslim circles, it had a
name of its own, Riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm. Everyone was
encouraged to get out of their tranquil quarters:

Leave your homeland and go abroad in search of

advancement!
Go and travel, for travel has five benefits:
Relief from worries, gain of a livelihood,
Knowledge, education, and keeping company with
good men.
Words attributed to none other than al-Shāfiʿī, your
fellow-master.1

In the peregrinations of the times, books gave company

to travellers. For searchers and disseminators of knowledge,
what can be a better companion than books at a time before
smartphones, tablets, movies or even newspapers?
Books had an authority, an elegance. And, ah, the pure
manuscripts! They were like gold or gems. Not only
metaphorically. Manuscripts were precious commodities: they
were bartered, bought and sold; they were often stolen, as a
sombre Egyptian jurist would whine in sixteenth-century
Cairo. When ships were wrecked and when people
scrambled to get ashore, survivors mourned the loss of books
at sea, as did a Gujarati noble off the coast of Mangalore later
in the same century. And that Indian gentleman was a patron
of our unlucky Egyptian fellow! Books connected them, in and
through the world of law across the seas.
There were etiquettes dictating the manners of reading,
listening, writing, copying, studying, teaching and even
correcting a book. Etiquettes with consequences. Laws for
and of books.
In long journeys across oceans, books cheered the
solitude and aloofness of voyagers under the guiding stars,
the breeze of winds, the heat of thirst. When ships anchored
at ports for weeks, some worms crept into the books, while
other bookworms crawled around when reading or copying
codices. In the heavy monsoon rain, people and places
shrank like mice into holes, but in the books the world was
expanded, for the worms among the insects and the humans.
In the secure vaults of the ships the books were guarded
at times. What sort of books were they?
 2
Circulatory Texts
◈

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal

spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law more
broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts,
studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing
and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising
them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them
they defended and established themselves as authorities on
religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of
fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the
fuqahāʾ estate. The whole estate became active with discourses on
works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so
on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and
its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of
fuqahāʾ estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the
circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.
What sort of materials and texts enabled the persistence of the
Shāfiʿī school among a large section of the Muslim community? How
did the understanding of texts change over time and place,
especially in the postclassical period when commentarial tradition
became the normative textual order? This chapter addresses these
questions by exploring diverse dimensions of the texts central to the
longue durée of the school. To begin with, it analyses some
foundational characteristics of Islamic textual tradition in which more
authority was attributed to text-centredness, and power and prestige
were rooted in generations of circulation and learning. The following
sections introduce specific categories of Shāfiʿī texts. They focus on
two “ancestral texts” of the school (Umm and its summary
Mukhtaṣar, from which most texts claim a common lineage), and
they survey the major textual families that form the prime corpus of
Shāfiʿī law. In these sections, places and periods criss-cross one
another, from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, from Cairo,
Damascus and Mecca to Basra, Baghdad, Shiraz, Malabar and
Java. In this matrix, readers can trace the ways in which the major
textual families of Shāfiʿīsm stretched out their limbs for centuries,
like octopuses, across central and maritime Islamic topographies. In
the final section, I concentrate on the oceanic circulation of texts, in
order to see how Islamic texts at large and Shāfiʿī texts in particular
travelled across the Indian Ocean littoral.
Taking all the sections together, this chapter demonstrates how
text-centredness resulted in the development of a normative
commentarial order in which Shāfiʿī jurists participated through
commendable production of legal literature. A systematic
understanding of its corpora is important for a better comprehension
of the postclassical commentarial tradition and its reception in the
Islamic world. In an ocean of Shāfiʿī texts, a connected and
comparative analysis informs us on the role of a text, its importance
or insignificance in the school, in order to see how the Shāfiʿī jurists
must have approached and analysed a text to cater for their
immediate contexts and legal necessities. The chapter also argues
that textual progenies travelled across place and time through the
scholarly-mercantile networks in the central Islamic lands and
oceanic littorals. This process in turn contributed to the
professionalisation of law and institutionalisation of the estate in the
regions.
 Textual Community
In the early centuries of Islamic law, scholars such as the
eponymous founders of the Sunnī schools were more concerned
with the oral transmission of their juridical arguments. But their
“doctrinal” followers in later centuries gave prominence to the texts
as a starting point for their articulations. This transition from orality to
textuality for juridical transmissions happened simultaneously with
what has been called the “book revolution”. That was experienced by
Middle Eastern societies in the ninth and tenth centuries when paper
prices fell and novel cultural practices emerged.1 The developing
Sunnī doctrinal schools of the time seized the momentum of textual
revolutions; the book revolution led to the birth of a “reading
revolution” in the following centuries. If the book revolution placed
the texts at the centre of discourses of Islam in general and of Sunnī
juridical formulations in particular, the “reading revolution” led to the
recognition of commentary-writing as a legitimate way of intellectual
and legalistic engagement, to cater for an increasing demand for
reading materials.
As with any other schools of thoughts of that period in the
central Islamic lands, students and teachers of Shāfiʿīsm also sought
more and more texts in their school. The burgeoning commentarial
tradition addressed and catered for this demand, and created a
plethora of high-quality works in the school, most of which required
interdisciplinary analytical skills, reading techniques and
interpretative mechanisms to comprehend not only the aesthetics of
the text but also the enigma of law itself. This led to the formation of
a textual community with specialist teachers, supercommentators,
glossators, abridgers, editors and codifiers taking shares in diverse
levels. They also stood at the centre of a legal network of textual
circulation. Their success in analysing and transmitting Islamic legal
knowledge resonates with what Moshe Halbertal has articulated as a
foundational characteristic of “text-centeredness” in the Jewish
tradition: “expertise in the text [was] a source of power and
prestige”.2
For the fuqahāʾ estate, texts mediated between its schools and
individual members through theoretical and substantive legal works.
In an estate, either in its regional form that included followers of
different schools or in its transregional form that encouraged
individual and collective interactions of both the estate and members
of diverse schools, the texts provided a discursive platform with
particular norms and values. Hermeneutical legal works drafted
common methods, rules and regulations of both the estate and its
individual members, providing them a shared vocabulary and
etiquette. On the other hand, the substantive legal texts
demonstrated a school’s viewpoints on legal particulars. When the
schools produced substantive texts of law, the theoretical texts
produced frameworks of the schools specifically and of the estate
more generally.
The Risāla and Umm by al-Shāfiʿī are two exemplary prototypes
of such a process of mutual complementation in the early history of
Shāfiʿīsm as well as of Islamic law at large. The Risāla defined the
sources and methods of juridical enquiry, boundaries and expanses
of Islamic law, and qualifications and responsibilities of the juristic
community.3 This hermeneutic broadly contributed to the formation of
the fuqahāʾ estate in the Sunnī tradition, as much as it led to the
making of Shāfiʿīsm itself. Likewise, once the estate was
empowered, the hermeneutical texts produced by its members
augmented the further enlargement of the estate as well as their
respective schools. The Umm, a substantive legal text, contributed
similarly to the development of the Shāfiʿī school through its
confrontational jurisprudential articulations, practical inferences and
everyday applications. Such a substantive text also explicates the
development of the estate through applied methodologies, functional
autonomies, defined rules, rights and duties.4 The legal
hermeneutics and their solicitations in substantive laws expressed
through texts represented the personal emancipation and flourishing
of a jurist within his or her school and the estate.
Beyond the theoretical and substantive legal texts in the
formative period of Islamic law, for both teachers and students
mastering a text represented an initiation into and an expertise in a
discipline or legal school. In other words, disciplines were
represented by texts rather than vice versa. If an advanced student
wanted to study a discipline, it was necessary for that student to
identify the appropriate text and then learn it from an expert with an
ijāza (certificate) to teach it. For example, in Shāfiʿīsm, in the twelfth
to the thirteenth centuries an appropriate text was the Tanbīh by
Shīrāzī. Many started and ended their study of Shāfiʿīsm with the
text, in the sense that it was the sourcebook on which the highly
learned and the primarily educated most depended. There were
other texts in addition to the Tanbīh which were widely studied,
taught, interpreted, abridged and circulated in Shāfiʿī circles, known
as “circulatory texts”.
In the Shāfiʿī circulation network, as in any other Islamic context
of textual studies, what mattered most was the certificate, the ijāza.
Three types of ijāzas were listed in the well-known Mamlūk chancery
manual of Abū ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (1355–1418), and all
three show how texts stood at the core of the whole process: ijāzāt
ʿarāḍāt al-kutub, the certificates for memorising a work and
presenting it in front of a teacher; ijāzāt al-riwāya, the certificates for
transmission; ijāzāt al-futyā wa al-tadrīs, the certificates to teach law
and issue fatwās. All these certificates were highly formalised with
particular guidelines, scribal styles and formats.5 This system of
graded certificates meant that even if, for example, one had a
manuscript of the Tanbīh and a teacher who specialised in Shāfiʿīsm,
theoretically one could not study that text unless the teacher had the
required ijāza to teach it. That certificate would need to have been
issued directly by the author or indirectly through a legitimate chain
of teachers who had ijāzas going back to the author, unless the
author or a transmitter made “global ijāzas” to transmit the work.6
That is why we see many Yemeni jurists commemorating the arrival
of Qāsim al-Qurashī in Sahfana, for he had an ijāza to teach the
Muhaḏḏab of Shīrāzī, the starting point for the textual legacy of
Shāfiʿīsm in the region.7
Scholarly genealogy (sanad or silsila) became a proof of the
authentic circulation of the ideas and texts of a school in the fuqahāʾ
estate. Most importantly, it was the starting point for a scholar’s
reputation. The chain linking distinguished teachers to someone’s
intellectual ancestry would validate, prioritise and standardise rulings
and opinions in the estate. This resonates with the circulator chains
that validated the circulation of ḥadīths by the eighth and ninth
centuries. The formation of or absorption into such a fuqahāʾ estate
becomes clear in Shāfiʿīsm from the time of Abū al-ʿAbbās bin
Surayj (d. 918), when the school began to have “an identifiable
teacher and identifiable students” with “a normal course of advanced
study leading to the production of a taʿlīq, virtually a doctoral
dissertation, defending the juridical opinions” of the school.8 Most of
the later Shāfiʿī scholars attempted to demonstrate that their
scholarly genealogy went back to al-Shāfiʿī through Ibn Surayj. A
telling example of this is Nawawī, the author of the Minhāj, who
asserts his legitimacy through a line of teachers connected to Rāfiʿī,
whose Muḥarrar is the core of the Minhāj.9 In turn, Rāfiʿī provides a
teacher–student chain of both texts and ideas back to al-Shāfiʿī, the
founder of the school, through Ibn Surayj.10 Both Nawawī and Rāfiʿī
furnish more than one intellectual genealogy, but Ibn Surayj is a
connecting node in most of those teacher lineages.
This scholarly genealogy mattered when transmitting texts, the
central function of the fuqahāʾ estate. That one scholar actually
heard a text from another, probably through many generations, and
had oral or written authorisation from the author, is an important
qualification to teach a text. Although priority was given to oral
transmission, written authorisation was also considered to be
legitimate. This would also explain why Nawawī wanted to connect
himself to Rāfiʿī, who connected himself to al-Shāfiʿī through Ibn
Surayj and Ismāʿīl bin Yaḥyā al-Muzanī (d. 878). Particular texts at
the centre of discourses had appeared before Ibn Surayj in the
Shāfiʿī school as a result of the work of Muzanī. Through this chain
of teachers and students they could transmit texts, ones written by
the teacher or by someone else who authorised the teacher. A
student wanting to learn a text from a teacher without authorisation
would have to depend on some other scholar with such
authorisation. That created alternative lines of teachers for students
and teachers specialising in certain texts or subjects. That was the
case for Nawawī and Rāfiʿī, for whom we see many alternative
teacher lineages both within and beyond the perimeters of the
school.11 In turn, these teachers had their own teacher lines criss-
crossing back to authors such as Rāfiʿī and Ibn Surayj. These
genealogical lines for scholars and for texts mattered more for
someone’s affiliation with the fuqahāʾ estate than for their position in
the broader society or for political support.
 Genres and Families
Texts as the central component of the estate enabled individuals to
communicate mainly within the estate, but also within wider
historical, textual and cultural contexts. In the Shāfiʿī textual tradition,
a text that has revolutionised the school and its parameters is the
Minhāj, written by Nawawī in the thirteenth century. This text,
however, did not come out of a vacuum. Many influential texts in the
school were written prior to and after the Minhāj in similar and
dissimilar genres and forms. All these texts are massive in form or
extensive in content, but here I would like to introduce briefly some
prominent texts which existed before, alongside or after the Minhāj.
Understanding these diverse textual categories and large families is
important, because they help us comprehend the complexity in the
textual tradition that led to the production and success of the Minhāj
(and similar texts), they embody some foundational characteristics of
the school and the estate as such, and above all they will receive
further attention throughout the study.
Before introducing the texts, a short note on the diverse genres
and categories that defined the course of Shāfiʿīsm through its rich
textual tradition. Substantive Islamic legal texts are generally divided
into mabsūṭ (expansum or detailed work) and mukhtaṣar (epitome or
digest), but this division does not tell us much about their diversity in
content and form.12 I have identified thirteen categories of Shāfiʿī
texts: (1) matn, core-text; (2) sharḥ, commentary, with five
subdivisions: complete commentary, linguistic and philological
commentary (mushkilāt), introductory commentary, concluding
commentary, and commentary on selected chapters; (3) mukhtaṣar,
summary; (4) ḥāshiya, supercommentary or marginal commentary;
(5) hāmish, marginalia and glosses; (6) taʿlīq, dissertation,
sometimes for a doctorate; (7) taḥqīq, edited material; (8) taṣḥīḥ,
preparatory material; (9) takhrīj, excerpts of Qurʾānic verses,
ḥadīths, poems, rulings, etc.; (10) tanẓīm, full or partial poetic
rendering; (11) takmīl, completion of an unfinished work; (12)
iṣṭilāḥāt, commentaries on jargons and terminologies; (13) tarjama,
translation.13 Some of these categories overlap, as one author can
poetise or translate an introductory commentary of a core text, thus
combining tanẓīm or tarjama with sharḥ of a matn, and many of
these existed independently or interdependently.
That the Shāfiʿī texts chose one or some of these typologies
needs some elaboration in relation to the commentarial tradition.
Why were they written as a commentary (broadly defined) to a
previous text instead of an “independent” and “original” work? The
main answer rests in the organisation and presentation of a legal
text, which can be in two ways: (a) the formal structure for organising
a matn, sharḥ, etc.; (b) the significance of structuring a text in which
typologies such as mukhtaṣar and mabsūṭ feature. The objective
structure matters in the first approach, whereas the latter is related to
subjective orientation, preoccupation and/or authorial intention. In
this, the author’s design and structure of the functions of a text have
implications. Certain functional and systemic concerns also are
engrained underneath this discursive tradition.
 The commentarial tradition was the normative textual order in
the postclassical period. To come up with an “original” and
“independent” work was almost impossible according to the
traditional methods of the Islamic scholarly community. A new work
would always have intricacies in getting noticed or accepted in the
normative order of the fuqahāʾ estate that paid close attention to the
textual longue durée. This problem was disentangled by the author-
jurists by writing commentaries to an established work. In an
abridgment, for example, a Shāfiʿī text does not just cut out or
paraphrase sentences, paragraphs or sections, but it is rather a
critical engagement with the text in an attempt to outshine the work
on which it depends. For this, it had to consult almost all the noted
legal texts, those of the same school and those from other schools
as well. It helps to obviate the difficulties in the system through its
own commentarial dissipative techniques, thereby making the
tradition non-conservative and organic. In the process, they
conversed with the existing texts with new problems, and produced
new works, just as any interpretative community would do.
 Common Ancestry
The Shāfiʿī school of law derives from the works al-Shāfiʿī produced
towards the end of his life.14 Because of this foundational fact, most
of the influential texts written in the school claim a direct or indirect
ancestry to his most important substantive legal text, the Umm. In
the five centuries between the Umm and the Minhāj, the writings of
the Shāfiʿī jurists were so extensive that even a brief survey would
take too much space and energy, but it is important that we have a
brief overview of this vast corpus, especially when most of those
texts claim a common ancestry to the Umm, a name that literally
means “the mother”. Indeed, it stands out as an ancestral clan
matriarch for all the subsequent texts emanating from the school.
Earlier scholarship considered the Umm as an organic text as it
not only includes the opinions of al-Shāfiʿī, who died in the early
ninth century, but also those of scholars such as Rabīʿ bin Sulaymān
al-Murādī (d. 884), who died six decades later. This notion has now
been questioned through an extensive source-critical study which
has shown that the Umm as available today is an authentic text
written by al-Shāfiʿī himself “to the extent that a manuscript culture
can reproduce a text authentically”.15 The interjections of Rabīʿ al-
Murādī, who was a student of al-Shāfiʿī and the compiler of the
Umm, are derived from his oral comments he made while teaching
his students, and they are now appended to the text. The many
quotations from the Umm in many texts of the ninth and tenth
centuries signify its authenticity and integrity in its modern printed
form.16
Before the Umm was compiled and became a well-known
independent text, there were two other compendia in circulation
among scholarly circles, the Mukhtaṣars of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Buwayṭī
(d. 846) and of Muzanī, two students of al-Shāfiʿī. Buwayṭī’s
compendium was the first. It embodied a convergence of the rival
approaches of traditionalists and rationalists. Eventually it
disseminated the ideas of al-Shāfiʿī not only in Egypt but also in the
eastern regions. When Buwayṭī’s one student arrived in Nishapur, a
reputed scholar in the city approached him and asked him not to
teach the Mukhtaṣar there, “presumably fearing that his students
would desert him” for the superior teaching of the new entrant.17
Narratives like this motivated students to leave for Cairo to study the
Umm with noted scholars such as Rabīʿ al-Murādī, who was
teaching and compiling the text there at that time. Meanwhile, the
Mukhtaṣar by Muzanī, about whom al-Shāfiʿī is supposed to have
said, “[he] is a backer of my school”, had become available. His
Mukhtaṣar focused on the juridical rationalism of al-Shāfiʿī’s
teaching, while Buwayṭī emphasised his traditionalism.
Over the course of time, Buwayṭī’s Mukhtaṣar became outdated
for several reasons: its overemphasis on the ḥadīths, a feature that
once made it popular; emergence of the Ḥanbalī school that paid
extra attention to the ḥadīths; and its disordered structure.18
Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar took its place and stood out as one of the early
texts of the school on which most followers depended. It broadened
the juridical reasoning that al-Shāfiʿī had put forward in connection
with the traditions. It avoided the elaborations that we see in the
Umm on each and every minor issue citing the scriptures. Instead, it
concentrated on rationalist extracts from sources which mostly
agreed with al-Shāfiʿī but occasionally disagreed. It usually referred
to al-Shāfiʿī using the phrase “al-Shāfiʿī said” (qāla al-Shāfiʿī), an
expression that refers to al-Shāfiʿī’s written works, or to what Muzanī
heard through oral transmissions or from lectures by al-Shāfiʿī.19
Apart from the Umm, it also utilised some other well-known works by
al-Shāfiʿī, such as the Risāla, Imlāʾ ʿalā masāʾil Mālik and others
less known.
The “architectonic design” of this Mukhtaṣar gives it its
coherence. It has chapter divisions and clarity along with an “internal
format” strongly based on al-Shāfiʿī’s juristic reasoning. This led to
its wider reception in contemporary micro-networks and later fuqahāʾ
estates. In the tenth and early eleventh centuries we see it at the
centre of Shāfiʿī circles in Iraq, Transoxiana and Khurasan. The text
had a vital role in the further development of the school, attracting
several followers and descendant texts. Many students of Muzanī or
their own students wrote commentaries on his Mukhtaṣar in the late
ninth or tenth centuries.20
The Umm and its abridgements by Buwayṭī and Muzanī had
significant roles in transforming al-Shāfiʿī’s teachings into a “doctrinal
school” by the mid-ninth century as previously discussed.21
Following this transition, its adherents generated an enormously rich
repository of commentarial texts.
 Major Families
The textual productions of Shāfiʿīsm differ in the tenth century
onward in their nature, genre and audience. Besides the
foundational Umm and Mukhtaṣar, the texts produced in the school
up to the end of the tenth century did not have much permanence or
fame among its adherents in the following centuries. This was
probably because most of the “independent” works written in the
school until then, according to the bibliographical survey of Ibn al-
Nadīm (d. in or after 995), were either attempts to reconcile
conflicting opinions of al-Shāfiʿī within or outside the school, or were
merged into a different school of law. For the latter type, the works of
Ibn Ḥanbal and Thawrī are good examples.22 This situation changes
by the eleventh century, when texts written in the school began to be
known as the founders of distinct families that advance the school in
the consequent centuries, through the boom of commentarial
tradition. Simultaneous to this shift from “classical” to “postclassical”
period in the school, there was the book revolution of the ninth and
tenth centuries and the reading revolution in the following centuries,
as referred to earlier. The book revolution pushed the texts to the
centre of discourses in the classical period, and the reading
revolution in the postclassical phase required a close understanding
of the text. This latter development required and produced the
normative commentarial order.
 In this postclassical Shāfiʿīsm we therefore have many textual
families produced by prominent scholars of the school as
commentaries, supercommentaries, summaries, glosses,
dissertations, etc. on a particular base text. In the thirteenth century,
Nawawī said that there were five “circulatory texts” (kutub
mutadāwala) which Shāfiʿī jurists had been teaching everywhere and
on which they had been writing commentaries and summaries.
Those texts were Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar, Shīrāzī’s Tanbīh and
Muhaḏḏab and Ghazālī’s Wasīṭ and Wajīz.23 The later textual history
of Shāfiʿīsm clearly shows that all these circulatory texts formed their
own lineages. They thus shaped the ways in which the school was
perceived and discoursed within and outside the fuqahāʾ estate,
especially through the expanding institutional frameworks of the
colleges and mosques, but also through the networks and clusters of
individual scholars.
A major limitation of Nawawī’s list is that it is from the thirteenth
century, and therefore it does not represent the evolution of the
commentarial order after him, especially the wider recognition of his
own works. In the late nineteenth century, two Orientalist scholars
endeavoured to categorise significant textual families of Shāfiʿīsm
involving Nawawī’s works, but we find almost nothing in common
between their categorisations and that of Nawawī.24 They enlisted
the texts circulated in the contexts with which they were most
familiar, in nineteenth-century East Africa and Southeast Asia.
Taking the textual longue durée of the school into consideration
across almost a millennium, therefore, I suggest a new
categorisation to identify the most prominent textual families. In this
venture, I depend on two main criteria: First, a text forms a family if it
makes any explicit or implicit claim of independence from the earlier
corpus. It should not state directly that it is a commentary or
summary of an earlier text. Second, the text was renowned along the
Indian Ocean rim through its direct or indirect textual progenies.
Based on these criteria, I find seven major families celebrated in the
textual worlds of Shāfiʿīsm: (1) the Tanqīḥ family; (2) the Tanbīh
family; (3) the Muhaḏḏab family; (4) the Wasīṭ family; (5) the Ghāya
family; (6) the Minhāj family; (7) the Fatḥ family. In naming a family, I
have chosen the title of the most famous text from that family; so a
family name is not necessarily the name of the “founder”.
In the following, I discuss these textual families in turn, focusing
briefly on their authors, style and reception among Shāfiʿī jurists.
Through a historical-anthropological evaluation of their kinship
relations as ancestral or descendant texts, we can comprehend
interconnections between texts that otherwise appear as an
overwhelming ocean. This assessment could also help us
understand the discontinuities and ruptures in the school’s long legal
intellectual tradition, and the overall precedence of some families
over others. Preparation of such genealogical trees of the texts and
usage of kinship terms are not uncommon among the Shafi’i jurists,
as a relatable textual tree in Figure 2.1 demonstrates.
Figure 2.1 A genealogical chart of Shāfiʿī texts as prepared by the
Yemeni-Indonesian scholar Sayyid ʿUthmān in 1881, Leiden
University Special Collections.
 Tanqīḥ Family
One of the earliest textual families in the school is that of the Tanqīḥ.
Its base text is Lubāb, written by Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad al-Maḥāmilī
(d. 1024), who was born and brought up in Baghdad and was
educated with many renowned Shāfiʿīs of the time, such as Abū
Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Isfarāyīnī (d. 1027). He served as a judge of the
Shāfiʿī school and was the author of many law books, apart from his
Lubāb.25 The Lubāb represents an earlier version of opinions from
the Iraqi group of Shāfiʿīsm against their Khurasani counterparts
(see Chapter 3 on this Iraqi–Khurasani divide). It used to be best
known among Shāfiʿī scholars in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and we see its recurrent citations in the writings of
towering figures such as Nawawī and Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Subkī.26 It
must also have been taught and discussed, at least in Iraqi circles.
But no text completely engages with the Lubāb until the fifteenth
century. This might be one reason why Nawawī did not count it
among the most widely circulated texts of his time. The situation
changed when Tanqīḥ al-Lubāb, its first known direct textual
progeny, appeared.
The Tanqīḥ is a summary written by an Egyptian judge of Iraqi
origin, Walī al-Dīn Aḥmad Abū Zarʿa (d. 1423), who left his position
to write, teach and give legal opinions. If the Tanqīḥ had not been
written, the Lubāb would have just been known as one of several law
books written in the early eleventh century, or may even have been
forgotten. Through its abridgement, the Lubāb received a new life
after four centuries, with many ensuing supercommentaries and
superabridgements.27 That is why I have named this group Tanqīḥ.
Among its progenies, one remarkable supersummary is by Zakariyyā
al-Anṣārī (d. 1520), who wrote an autocommentary for his
supersummary.28 This autocommentary attracted at least four
supercommentaries in the seventeenth century and two more in the
following centuries.
 Tanbīh Family
The Tanbīh family originates from the Tanbīh written by Abū Isḥāq
Ibrāhīm al-Shīrāzī, who is often identified among Shāfiʿīs as the
“shaykh of the jurists of his era”, a scholar with “superabundant
knowledge like an extravagant ocean”.29 Born in Firozabad, he
studied there and in Shiraz.30 Then he went on to Basra and
Baghdad and studied with scholars such as Abū al-Ṭayyib Ṭāhir al-
Ṭabarī (d. 1058), where he became his favourite student and
teaching assistant. Later he was appointed as a professor at a
mosque-college in the famous Murātab Gate of Baghdad. When the
royal college of Niẓāmiyya was established in 1066 he received an
appointment there. The founder of that college, Niẓām al-Mulk, is
said to have attempted to get Shīrāzī as the first teacher into the new
institute. Although Shīrāzī agreed at first, he declined later, for he
had doubts about the legal status of the land where the institute was
established. Niẓām al-Mulk eventually succeeded in persuading him
to take up the position. He taught there until his death. He became a
leader of the Baghdadi jurists, and the caliph wanted to appoint him
as the chief judge when a vacancy arose. But he refused the
position, writing in response to the caliph: “Are you not satisfied that
you yourself are ruined? Now you want to ruin me too with you?”31
Even at a time of fierce disputes between Khurasanis and Iraqis, the
Khurasani jurists recognised his distinguished stature. When he
visited Nishapur, bringing a marriage proposal from the then
ʿAbbāsid caliph, Muqtadī bi Amr Allāh (d. 1094), to the Seljūq
princess of Malik Shāh (d. 1092), the leader of the Khurasani faction
Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī is said to have walked in front of him as a
servant. When he was asked why he was doing that, Juwaynī
answered that it was the only position he deserved before Shīrāzī. In
the record of two ensuing debates between Shīrāzī and Juwaynī in
Nishapur, the former is said to have defeated the latter. Shīrāzī
differed from Juwaynī in many juridical points, as is mentioned in his
many works.32
The Tanbīh refers mainly to the dissertation (taʿlīq) of Isfarāyīnī,
mentioned earlier as Maḥāmilī’s teacher. About him Shīrāzī said:
“The leadership of both religion and the [material] world ends with
him.”33 This dissertation was a usual reference for the Shāfiʿī jurists
of the time. Nawawī writes: “You know, the axis of works written by
our Iraqi companions, or most of them, and of some Khurasani
groups, is the taʿlīq of Abū Ḥāmid [al-Isfarāyīnī]. It has around fifty
volumes, in which he has brought together many invaluable
details.”34 Shīrāzī does not however mention any direct linkage with
the text, except for using the term mukhtaṣar to introduce the Tanbīh.
The Tanbīh was written in less than a year, starting in October 1060
and finishing by the following September.35
The Tanbīh only discusses Shāfiʿī opinions and does not enter
into disagreements with other schools, even though its author was
an expert on differences between Ḥanafīsm and Shāfiʿīsm. Nor does
it go into detailed legal analyses. It states clearly in the opening lines
that “this is a condensed work on the basics of the Shāfiʿī school”.36
What the author had in mind was to write a short text useful for both
beginners and specialists in Shāfiʿī law. He wrote: “If a beginner
reads and comprehends it he will be informed into most of the legal
issues. If an expert looks into it he can recollect every point.”
Later textual history shows that the work was successful in
achieving its aim. The biographical dictionaries show that learning it
by heart at the beginning of one’s higher education was normative
among Shāfiʿīs. A Yemeni jurist wrote: “We used to learn the Tanbīh
as we would learn the Qurʾān.”37 Many Shāfiʿīs also wrote
commentaries, summaries and other texts on the Tanbīh. A recent
study lists forty-two commentaries, seven summaries, six poetic
renderings, four nuktas, two taṣḥīḥs, one taʿlīq and two taḥrīrs.38
Nawawī wrote one of the taṣḥīḥs in which he explains the most
dependable viewpoints of the school.39 His taṣḥīḥ was taken further
by many later Shāfiʿīs, including Isnawī (d. 1370) and Ibn al-Mulqin
(d. 1401), who all wrote commentaries or made other textual
engagements with it.40 Unlike Lubāb, it did not take centuries for
Tanbīh to be recognised by the Shāfiʿī jurists. Its first known
commentary comes from the twelfth century and at least fifteen
commentaries are known to have been written in the thirteenth
century and eighteen in the fourteenth century.41 In the nineteenth
century, one Dutch scholar brought out its translation and another
scholar the first edition of the text (see Chapter 8).42
 Muhaḏḏab Family
“If this book that I wrote had been shown to the Prophet he would
have said, ‘This is my Sharīʿa with which I am assigned’.” Such was
the confidence of Shīrāzī, the originator of the next textual family,
that of the Muhaḏḏab.43 Although he also wrote the Tanbīh, he
himself was very proud of this new text. The supposed motivation for
writing it was an accusation from a contemporary scholar who said:
“If al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfa united, Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī’s
knowledge would go away.” By this he meant that if the opponents
reconciled their disagreements, Shīrāzī’s expertise would be
redundant, since it concerned only the disagreements between their
schools. Through the Muhaḏḏab Shīrāzī wanted to show his
proficiency in all fields of the school and not just in disputed issues.44
He finished writing it towards the end of his life. It had taken him
fourteen years, whereas he had completed the Tanbīh in less than a
year.45 According to his one biographer, he performed prayers after
he had finished every paragraph (faṣl) of the book.46
The Muhaḏḏab was well received by later Shāfiʿīs and it was
taught, commented on and abridged by many of them. Its first
commentary appeared in the twelfth century in ten volumes.47 In the
thirteenth century three more commentaries appeared, including one
of twenty volumes, yet still incomplete, and another one by Nawawī,
who also failed to finish it, even after nine volumes.48 Nawawī’s
commentary, called Majmūʿ, is the most important and most popular
commentary among all these. The later history of the Majmūʿ
provides an illuminating example of our textual longue durée
paradigm. In the fourteenth century, the renowned Egyptian Shāfiʿī
jurist Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Subkī made an attempt to complete the
commentary. Yet he wrote only three more volumes. Later some
Ḥaḍramī and Iraqi scholars resumed the project, yet they were also
unsuccessful in finishing it. In the twentieth century, Muḥammad
Najīb al-Muṭīʿī continued from where Subkī had stopped and wrote
five more volumes, but before he could finish he was imprisoned in
Egypt. Another scholar, Ḥusayn al-Aqbī, wrote the eighteenth
volume, but was also unable to finish. After Muṭīʿī was released from
prison he restarted from where he had stopped. He wrote three more
volumes and published all twenty volumes together.49 From Nawawi
to Muṭīʿī it took about 700 years for a commentarial text to be
completed after various attempts across the centuries. Apart from
these commentaries, many more textual progenies of the Muhaḏḏab
family have been written on different genres since the twelfth
century.50 The text was identified as one of the most important
sources for Shāfiʿī muftīs for giving legal rulings.
The families of Muhaḏḏab and Tanbīh together assume a
notable lineage in the Shāfiʿī tradition, although the degree to which
they were accepted fluctuated over time. Shīrāzī’s legalistic
charisma within the school was advanced by two of his
contemporaries from the Khurasani division, Juwaynī and his student
Ghazālī. The textual lineage they began is another important family
that originates in the eleventh century, that of the Wasīṭ.
 Wasīṭ Family
The central text in this family is the Wasīṭ of Ghazālī, one of the most
famous scholars in Islamic history. Its core text is the Basīṭ, which
Ghazālī wrote during his early career teaching Shāfiʿī law at the
colleges of Nishapur and Baghdad.51 His major contributions in
substantive law are four interconnected works: the Basīṭ, which he
himself abridged into the Wasīṭ, again abridged into Wajīz, and used
as the basis for the Khulāṣa, the last of his juridical writings. The
Basīṭ was the outcome of his early desire to establish a career in the
legal circles of the period, which later he realised would be
superfluous. It motivated him to come up with a comparatively
shorter Wasīṭ. Even then he kept a soft spot for his first book,
commending it well for its “organisation, abundance of beneficial
information and refinement without pleonasm and ornamentation,
and its inclusion of essential issues”, and only those can read it who
have a “high degree of willpower and pure intention, eliminating
anything other than knowledge”.52 He justified the abridgement
projects by saying that the pure pursuit of knowledge had decreased,
laziness had become dominant, and most students and scholars
were seeking only shortened versions of texts.53 He explained how
he had abridged the Wasīṭ, removing the difficulties, weak rulings,
strange definitions, repetitions and loquaciousness of the previous
text, yet adding at least “more than one-third of one-tenth” (i.e. one-
thirtieth) of the rulings given in the Basīṭ.
 The Wasīṭ has been one of the favourites among the five early
circulatory texts of the school, whereas the Basīṭ did not attract most
Shāfiʿīs during or after Ghazālī’s time. The first step towards making
the Wasīṭ a classical text was taken by Ghazālī himself through his
autosummary Wajīz, which is considered to be the magnum opus
among his law books. A well-known endorsement was, “If Ghazālī
had been a prophet, his miracle would have been the Wajīz”, thereby
comparing it with the Qurʾān that was the miracle of the Prophet
Muḥammad.54 This summary of a summary emphasises Shāfiʿī
viewpoints, but it also briefly engages with the Mālikī and Ḥanafī
schools when they contradict the authentic views of Shāfiʿīsm. It also
incorporates offbeat Shāfiʿī opinions, using particular technical
phrases and symbols.
Some Islamic legalists oppose the view that the Khulāṣa is an
abridgement of the Wajīz.55 They are of the opinion, complicating the
textual genealogy, that it is a condensation of the Mukhtaṣar of
Muzanī mentioned earlier.56 Ghazālī himself suggests that it is a
critical summary of the Mukhtaṣar, but we can clearly see in the text
his direct dependence on the Wajīz in terms of the structure,
arguments and style (a later perception of this textual-intellectual
connection can be seen in Figure 2.1).57 The Khulāṣa is thus a more
precise intellectual definition in his legal thought that started with the
Basīṭ and advanced into the Wajīz. Ghazālī himself acknowledged
this progression into the Khulāṣa in a different context, where he
recognises it as his “fourth text” and the “shortest among the works”,
a processual abridgement of his own previous work as had been his
practice.58 We shall see this replicative process in prioritising items
in one’s intellectual development more clearly later for Nawawī with
the Minhāj.
Likewise, the Basīṭ is arguably a summary of Nihāyat al-maṭlab
by his teacher Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī, a leading scholar of the
Khurasani division of Shāfiʿīsm (as can be seen being
interconnected in Figure 2.1).59 His Nihāya is one of the most noted
commentaries on the Mukhtaṣar. He studied with his father who
himself wrote a commentary on the Mukhtaṣar and al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla
and was renowned for his contributions to legal hermeneutics.60
Juwaynī started to write the Nihāya during his stay in Mecca and
finished it while teaching at his hometown, Nishapur. It was
produced in forty volumes, according to Ibn al-Najjār, the historian of
Baghdad.61 Many specialists of Islamic law in the following centuries
have expressed a strong appreciation of this work. The historian Ibn
Khallikān (d. 1282) states rhetorically: “Nothing is written in Islam
equal to this.”62 Ghazālī, however, does not state that the Basīṭ is an
abridgement of any previous work. It must have influenced him, but it
is difficult to establish a direct link.
Ghazālī eventually tired of legal writing and of the law itself and
chose the path of mysticism. In his newly chosen spiritual path, law
had no further significance for him:

In the prime of my youth, I specialised in the discipline [of law]

with particulars of religion and this world and wasted a major
portion of my life … I composed many works in substantive law
and legal theory. Then I came to the science of the way of the
 other world and acquaintance with the inner secrets of
religion.63

Of all the texts we have mentioned only the Khulāṣa satisfied him: “I
have spent a large part of my life authoring books of the school and
organising it into Basīṭ, Wasīṭ, and Wajīz with overstatement and
exaggeration in classification and sub-classification. For the effort I
invested, Khulāṣat al-mukhtaṣar would have been enough.”64
The following generations nevertheless appreciated Ghazālī’s
contributions to Shāfiʿīsm and utilised his texts widely. The Wasīṭ and
Wajīz were two favourite texts in the thirteenth century, for Nawawī
counts them among the circulatory texts of the school. The Wasīṭ
was commented on by many scholars, including a sixteen-volume
commentary by his student, and another one by Ibn al-Rifʿa (d.
1310), who planned sixty volumes, but managed to pen only twenty-
six.65 He also abridged another commentary on the Wasīṭ, Baḥr al-
muḥīṭ by Najm al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Qamūlī (d. 1327), as Jawāhir al-Baḥr
al-muhīṭ. This abridgement was subsequently summarised by Sirāj
al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Yamanī (d. 1482) in Jawāhir al-Jawāhir, which also
attracted many commentators.66 Wajīz’s legacy was perpetuated
through Rāfiʿī’s commentary and its descendant works. Rāfiʿī wrote
two commentaries, an unnamed short one, and a long one in ten
volumes entitled Fatḥ al-ʿAzīz. The latter is widely known as the
ʿAzīz and has many textual descendants, including one by Nawawī
titled Rawḍa.
 Ghāya Family
All four textual families we have discussed so far originate with their
base-texts written in the eleventh century, but the Ghāya family
starts in the twelfth century. It stems from a book by Abū Shujāʿ
Aḥmad (d. 1197), known variously as Ghāyat al-ikhtiṣār, Taqrīb and
Matn or Mukhtaṣar Abū Shujāʿ. Abū Shujāʿ was born and brought up
in Basra in a family that had migrated from Isfahan. He taught Shāfiʿī
law for more than forty years in Basra and then he was appointed as
judge of Isfahan, but towards the end of his life he moved to Medina,
where he served in the Holy Mosque. He is said to have lived for 160
years.67 We do not know if he wrote any other work apart from the
Ghāya.
In the introduction to the Ghāya, Abū Shujāʿ says that his
colleagues asked him to write a mukhtaṣar for Shāfiʿī law that would
simplify legal studies and ease memorisation for beginners, the
reason many Shāfiʿī authors give as their motivation for writing. One
reason why the text became so successful among other Shāfiʿī
works could be the time and place of a blow against the
development of Shāfiʿīsm from an internal attack against Islamic law
by Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s dissatisfaction with the law at the end of the
eleventh century must have generated a general distrust towards the
discipline in scholarly circles. That may be why in the twelfth century
we do not see as many scholars engaging with it as there were in
the eleventh century. It must have deterred many from approaching
the discipline seriously, and hence very few scholars specialised and
excelled in it. The fuqahāʾ estates experienced a period of instability,
especially in its Shāfiʿī clusters. If not for law, the twelfth century is
significant for Islamic history in its contemporary political and cultural
landscape, with the growth of many important educational centres,
the counter-crusades of Saladin, and the establishment of his more
powerful kingdom centred in Egypt and Syria. All these
developments were mediated through the material of copious textual
production, but not in Shāfiʿī circles. Into this vacuum the Ghāya
came and it was the only text that the contemporary Shāfiʿīs could
grasp afresh at that time, making it popular in the centuries to follow.
Some traditional accounts take the Ghāya to be an abridgement
of the Iqnāʾ of Māwardī (d. 1058). The Iqnāʾ itself is an autosummary
of Māwardī’s own Ḥāwī al-kabīr, which is a commentary on
Mukhtaṣar of Muzanī.68 In the Ḥāwī al-kabīr we see a clear
statement about its relationship with the Mukhtaṣar, about which it
gives detailed notes on its wider receptivity and immense
contribution to the school. It authenticates the position of the
Mukhtaṣar in the school and counters many criticisms which had
been made against it, its author Muzanī, and the school in general.69
Nevertheless, Ghāya itself does not acknowledge its indebtedness to
the Iqnāʾ, or any texts for that matter, and its brief preface has only
the usual reference to the request from colleagues to write a short
mukhtaṣar in Shāfiʿīsm in order to help students to grasp the
school’s laws and memorise more easily.70
Although Ghāya was used and studied widely, the first known
commentary on it appeared only in the fifteenth century.71 That
century also witnessed the appearance of two more commentaries,
including a famous one by Muḥammad bin Qāsim al-Ghazzī (d.
1512). It was given two titles: Fatḥ al-qarīb al-mujīb and Qawl al-
mukhtār. This commentary and its core text Ghāya became two of
the most widely used Shāfiʿī primers in many educational centres,
and were strong competitors against the Fatḥ al-muʿīn of Malaybārī
that we shall discuss in detail in Chapter 6. Fatḥ al-qarīb also
attracted more than ten supercommentators, including some jurists
from Egypt, Indonesia and Yemen.72 One such supercommentary, by
the Egyptian scholar Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī (d. 1570), attracted more
than five supercommentators between the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries.73 Chapter 8 will explore the Orientalist
attempts in the nineteenth century to translate the core text of the
Ghāya and its commentary by Ghazzī into French, and a
supercommentary by Bājūrī into German.
 Minhāj Family
The base text of the Minhāj family is Muḥarrar, and this family is the
most important textual genealogy in postclassical Shāfiʿīsm, and
therefore the central focus of the following chapters. I shall explain
the trajectories of this family in detail in the next part. Here I provide
a brief overview on its base text. The Muḥarrar was written by the
Persian jurist Rāfiʿī, who was born and brought up in Qazwīn near
the Caspian Sea and was educated initially by his father and later by
other scholars.74 He hardly travelled outside Qazwīn for educational
purposes, except for one ḥajj pilgrimage to Mecca.75 Along with legal
texts such as the Muḥarrar and the aforementioned ʿAzīz, a
commentary on Ghazālī’s Wajīz, he also wrote two regional histories
of Qazwīn and the Hijaz. Even though he did not reside in Arab
centres of knowledge production and dissemination and was
physically unattached to any Arab networks of legal learning, he
secured a wide acceptance in Shāfiʿī circles. Many contemporary
Arab jurists appreciated his scholarly depth, giving him epithets such
as the “scholar of Arabs and non-Arabs”. The Shāfiʿī jurist Ibn Ṣalāḥ
(d. 1245) says: “I think I have not seen anyone like him in the non-
Arab countries. He was multi-talented, good-mannered and a
perfectionist.”76
Rāfiʿī connected himself to the textual tradition of Ghazālī and
tried to get back to the initial phase of Ghazālīan legal thought. The
Wajīz had a great influence on his intellectual pursuits, on which he
wrote two commentaries along with another text called Taḏnīb. In the
traditional textual history of Shāfiʿīsm, therefore, many scholars say
that the Muḥarrar is based on the Wajīz,77 while others say that it is
based on the Khulāṣa.78 But Rāfiʿī himself did not acknowledge any
particular text as the base for the Muḥarrar. He presents it as an
independent work, as the Basīṭ was presented with the Nihāya. In
the text, he does not indicate its title, author or even the purpose of
writing. All we have is a standard prayer for the work to be accepted
as a meritorious activity.79
The Muḥarrar was the result of an urge to revive the school.
Most people of his time had lost interest in learning Islamic law.
Legal thought per se had deteriorated, and the intellectual tradition
which had been maintained until the time of Ghazālī had died out.
He wanted to codify and prioritise the rich discursive tradition of the
school in a meaningful way. The text thus gave a new dimension to
the legal tradition by codifying multiple views of the school and by
identifying the most valid opinions. For him the twelfth century, in
which he himself and all his teachers lived a major part of their lives,
was clearly an irrelevance in terms of juridical thought and practice.
His disregard for the textual corpus of his teachers and colleagues
and his dependence on the works of the eleventh century
demonstrate this. Within a vacuum of legal intelligentsia the
Muḥarrar gained popularity in scholarly circles. An immediate
abridgement by Nawawī contributed to making it popular, but with
reservations.
If we follow the traditional account that the Muḥarrar is an
abridgement of the Wajīz (or the Khulāṣa), that makes the Minhāj
family an offshoot of the Wasīṭ family. A similar statement is also
made about the Fatḥ family, which is similarly connected to the
Minhāj family through the Tuḥfa of Ibn Ḥajar. This makes both the
Minhāj and the Fatḥ families offshoots of the Wasīṭ family. But from
what has been said about the Muḥarrar and the Qurra-Fatḥ together,
neither of them admit such a concatenation, which provides the
ground to consider them as distinct. I shall address the complexities
of these two texts in the fourth and sixth chapters respectively, along
with the nuances of the reception of both families through further
textual progenies. For the moment, suffice it to say that the textual
interconnectivity of Shāfiʿīsm from the Umm to the Minhāj represents
an archetype of legalist textuality in which Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar and
Ghazālī’s Wajīz had crucial roles. This tradition was furthered by the
Minhāj and its descendants into an advanced textual lineage, which
has been portrayed in several traditional “family trees” relating to the
text.
 Oceanic Circulations
The longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm was advanced through its prominent
textual genealogies coupled with the horizontal spread and vertical
institutionalisation that emphasised the centrality of texts to Islamic
juridical discourses. This text-centeredness in the fuqahāʾ estates
took concrete and formalised etiquettes in the circulation of its
authoritative texts in the central and oceanic Islamic lands.
The ijāza, the certificate to circulate or teach a text, and silsila,
the chain of circulators with valid ijāzas going back to the author,
sanctioned the authenticity of a jurist and legalistic engagements.
Such validated circulation chains increased over time, parallel to the
growth of textual corpuses. Whatever the ijāza is and whoever the
members in a Shāfiʿī silsila are, it all goes back to al-Shāfiʿī and his
Umm, mostly through Muzanī and his Mukhtaṣar. Within the textual
families of Shāfiʿīsm, some texts and their descendants became
more famous over time, whereas some moved into oblivion. It was
only because of the prominence of some of the descendants that a
few core texts were revived after centuries (as with the Tanqīḥ
family), only to fade away again in the textual longue durée. By
contrast, texts like the Minhāj rose into the position of an exclusive
authority in the school through written and unwritten textual
progenies, and this spread the notion that the base text could not be
learned or transmitted without depending on one or more
descendants. The later silsilas and ijāzas in Shāfiʿīsm could not
circumvent its authors or their oeuvre.
The circulation networks facilitated the movement of
manuscripts, the issue of ijāzas to teach them, and the promotion of
students into teachers. Some teachers became students, as when
many Ottoman judges reverted to students once they arrived in Arab
provinces from the sixteenth century on. The network also facilitated
interactions between different clusters of the same school and
estates from distant lands. This helped the dissemination of
discourses and disputes and attracted wider attention to many local
discourses. In this network of texts, ideas and debates not only
scholars participated but also the community at large. They had
substantial interests, motivated by diverse personal, religious, legal,
economic or even political reasons. The material basis of networks,
however, was economic, which often depended on existing trade
routes, caravans and other mercantile opportunities.
The interlinkage between the fuqahāʾ and traders contributed to
the economic advancement and consequent scholarly legalistic
integrity of the estate in a regional setting, and this was inseparable
from its transregional frame. It contributed directly to the circulation
networks of Shāfiʿīsm both materially and in thought. As for the texts
that form the core of the fuqahāʾ estate, the circulation of legal texts
by the jurists and law-enthusiast traders and migrants nurtured the
initial rise of fuqahāʾ estates in distant lands, such as South|East
Asia and Africa. For the historical trajectories of Shāfiʿīsm as a
dominant school in the coastal belts of all these regions, it would be
interesting to explore how the fuqahāʾ–tujjār (jurists–traders) links
facilitated the very physical mobility of books. From the tenth century
onward we have clear references to the circulation of books across
vast stretches of lands and seas.80
The Geniza records in Judeo-Arabic shed some light on the
maritime movement of texts, merchants who specialised in the book
trade, and the book markets of Cairo and other Mediterranean
towns. Both Hebrew and Arabic books related to religious and
secular topics were an important item of transregional trade, in which
Tunisia in the southern Mediterranean played an important exporting
role and Egypt an importing one.81 But, needless to say, “bibliophiles
were hunting after books everywhere”. The twelfth-century Jewish
merchant Nahray ben Nissim, who was a scholar himself,
specialised in the book trade, whereas Ibn ʿAwkal, who mostly
conducted large-scale businesses in other goods than books, had
occasionally transmitted scholarly works from the Jewish academies
of Baghdad to the Jewish communities of North Africa.
This mode of book circulation was not confined to the
Mediterranean trade but is also seen in the Indian Ocean. We have
Geniza references for an active book trade between Egypt, Yemen
and the Indian subcontinent from the thirteenth century onward. On 9
July 1202, Maḍmūn bin David from Aden asked his business partner
in Cairo: “And buy for me any fine copies of useful books you can lay
your hands on and kindly send them to me”; he also required “the
medical writings of my lord the Rayyis”, meaning Maimonides (1135–
1204).82 David’s contemporaries had often sent papers and books to
their colleague Abraham Ben Yiju in Mangalore (on the south-west
coast of the Indian subcontinent).83 It was not an exclusive
occupation for Jewish merchants, for Muslim and Christian traders
also engaged in similar businesses in the eastern and southern
Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean. Despite the division of the
Mediterranean into a Christian north and a Muslim south and east,
and of the Indian Ocean, the movement of all kinds of merchandise
created a larger economic unit through commercial interactions of
merchants and ideological interactions of scholars. Here books
played a remarkable role.84 Legal texts arguably protected
merchants when commercial contracts were concluded between
members of communities in all the trading centres of the Indian
Ocean, and the “reputation of a port of trade turned on the fairness
of its legal traditions”.85 What were those legal corpuses? How did
they arrive at a port? We have references, though limited, about the
circulation of Islamic legal texts across the Indian Ocean world from
the customs house records of Aden of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. More specifically, they mention particular jurists whose
textual circulation and exchanges were attended by merchants,
laypersons, court members and even the sultan.86
There were a vast number of texts of Islamic law, but perhaps
there was some specific reference to the import or export of Shāfiʿī
legal treatises. While the circulation of Shāfiʿī texts across the
Eastern Mediterranean is certain, we wonder if they ever reached
the rims of the Indian Ocean in South|East Asia and Africa. Certainly
there are references, though they are patchy for Southeast Asia and
East Africa before the sixteenth century, but we do have evidence of
Shāfiʿī textual-intellectual production and attention in the South
Asian coastal belts. One of the earliest Arabic texts written on the
Malabar Coast is a Shāfiʿī legal text entitled Qayd al-jāmiʿ by certain
Faqīh Ḥusayn bin Aḥmad al-Mahfanī in the mid-fourteenth century.87
This text concerns marital rules, procedures and requirements from
a Shāfiʿī viewpoint.88 The only details we have about its author is a
possible reference the contemporary Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa
makes to one Faqīh Ḥusayn while discussing a miraculous tree
found in the region.89 Local scholars believe that both references to
the jurist Ḥusayn are to the same person.90 At the beginning of the
text the author mentions that he wrote the work based on renowned
texts of Shāfiʿīsm. The question arises of how those texts could
reach a “remote” place like Malabar, that stood “outside” the centres
of Islamic law in general and of Shāfiʿīsm in particular. Did the books
travel to him, or did he travel to the books at one of the “centres”?
Either way, the Qayd gives us evidence for the circulation of Islamic
legal texts and scholars across the Indian Ocean world. We have
another similar text written possibly in fifteenth-century Sindh. It is
related to the Muḥarrar of Rāfiʿī, which attracted only two known
commentaries, and one, Kashf al-durar by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-
Sindī (d. 1490), is connected to South Asia.91 Again, we do not have
biographical details about this author, but his patronymic “Sindī”
identifies his place of origin or where he was based. Both the Qayd
and Kashf al-durar help us to comprehend the movement of Shāfiʿī
legal texts towards the rim of the Indian Ocean in South Asia prior to
the sixteenth century itself.
 Conclusion
To the fuqahāʾ estates in general and to the Shāfiʿī clusters in
particular the legal texts and their authoritative circulations were of
the utmost importance. The texts of eponymous founders and their
immediate students were the starting points for later scholars to
embark on new projects of studying and transmitting the ideas of the
school. In the gradual evolution of the school, several base texts,
commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic renderings
and so on were produced by connections between jurists. Some of
those became mutadāwala texts (found in the narratives of the
Shāfiʿīs like Nawawī) or textual families (the ones listed here),
because of the horizontal spread and vertical institutionalisation of
fuqahāʾ estates that monitored their birth and growth for centuries,
forming and following a longue durée of textual discourses. The ijāza
to transmit or teach a text, and the silsila with valid ijāzas going back
to the author authenticated jurists and their legalistic engagement. In
the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis, such certificates and transmission chains all
went back to al-Shāfiʿī and his Umm, mostly through Muzanī and his
Mukhtaṣar. The Umm thus stands as a matriarch for the clan of
subsequent textual families which emanated from the school.
Within the seven textual families of Shāfiʿīsm identified here,
those of Tanqīḥ, Tanbīh, Muhaḏḏab, Wasīṭ, Ghāya, Minhāj and Fatḥ,
we have discussed the first five families in detail but the sixth and
seventh ones only in passing, for those are to be discussed in detail
in the following chapters. Among those discussed here we can
identify several convergences and divergences which must have
contributed to their fluctuating fame and oblivion in the course of
time. While all the first four families have their base texts in the
eleventh century, two of which are written by the same author, we
can identify that century as an important phase in the Shāfiʿī
tradition. Nevertheless, their popularity was not built in that century
itself; rather some of them came to have their own families after a
long period of oblivion, as though in a “sleeping womb”, as we saw in
the case of the Tanqīḥ, which received wide attention in the fifteenth
century but faded back into oblivion. In contrast to this pattern, the
twelfth-century Ghāya and thirteenth-century Minhāj appealed to a
wider Shāfiʿī following, with considerable authority in the school
through diverse written progenies, pedagogical appeals and practical
functions across centuries.
The growth of textual families in the school from the eleventh
century onwards is directly connected to the prominence of a
postclassical commentarial tradition that would become the
normative textual order. Engagement with authoritative texts by
writing commentaries was not only a means to attract authority,
power and prestige, but it was also the most common way to
advance the ideas of the school through a contextualised reading of
the ancestral texts and through an improvement of the rulings for
changed contexts. A mere overview of these interconnected texts
presents us with some crucial continuities and also ruptures in the
school’s history over a millennium. The text-centredness and the
normative commentarial order thus fed one another, enhancing the
school’s textual longue durée and addressing immediate contexts
and legal necessities of individual jurists and their clusters.
The foregoing discussion shows the most important textual
repertoire that enabled the presence and persistence of the Shāfiʿī
school with a systematic overview of its corpora. The standardised
expectations of textual transmissions through silsilas and ijāzas now
could not circumvent the authors or their oeuvre from their place
among these noted families in Shāfiʿīsm. They also spread the
notion that the base text could not be understood, learned, taught or
transmitted without depending on one or more commentarial
descendants. A better comprehension of this corpus through a
connected and comparative analysis is therefore important for
understanding how and why the school gained momentum among a
large section of the Muslim community, and how and why specific
texts succeeded while others did not. What is more, beyond the
etiquettes of studying and transmitting a text, several other historical
entities contributed significantly to the very physical transmission of
books. The scholarly-mercantile network, or the fuqahāʾ-tujjār nexus,
in the central Islamic lands and oceanic littorals is important in this
regard. It was that network that initiated trade and transmission of
books across borders while also retaining the professionalism and
institutionalism of the estate and supporting it economically and
socially. In turn, the fuqahāʾ and their texts provided extra attention
to the nuances related to commerce and protected mercantile
interests at precarious moments in regional and translocal mercantile
exchanges. Some Shāfiʿī authors specifically led the way through
treatises they produced on the oceanic rim in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, or even earlier.

1al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, Dīwān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī, 1996),

159, trans. by Franz Rosenthal, “The Stranger in Medieval Islam”,
Arabica 44, no. 1 (1997): 51.

1Beatrice Gruendler, The Rise of the Arabic Book (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

2Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and

Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7.

3Muḥammad bin Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, Risāla, ed. Aḥmad Muḥammad

Shākir (Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Ḥalabī wa Awlāduh, 1938), passim; for
an example, see his discussion on those who are eligible to
conduct qiyās, 478–479.

4 Although the majority of the contents of the Umm concerns

substantive legal issues, it also has elaborate sections on legal
hermeneutics in the printed copies available today. A number of its
“treatises” discuss the hermeneutical foundations of fuqahāʾ, their
internal conflicts and differences, etc.; on the identities and
qualifications of fuqahāʾ in particular, see Muḥammad bin Idrīs al-
Shāfiʿī, Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib (Mansura: Dār al-
Wafāʾ, 2001), 9: 5–42.

5Devin Stewart, “The Doctorate of Islamic Law in Mamluk Egypt

and Syria”, in Law and Education in Medieval Islam: Studies in
Memory of Professor George Makdisi, ed. J. E. Lowry, D. J.
Stewart and S. M. Toorawa (Warminster: Gibb Memorial Trust,
2004), 45–90, with reference to Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī
ṣināʿat al-inshāʾ.

6 Although it was infrequent, many premodern and modern

scholars issued ijāzas to everyone alive at the time of issuance or
who resided in a particular region. Such global ijāzas are known
variously as ijāzāt al-ʿāmma, ijāzāt al-ʿumūm or ijāzāt li ahl al-
zamān. On this dimension as well as on the longue durée of the
ijāzas, see Garrett Davidson, Carrying on the Tradition: A Social
and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand
Years (Leiden: Brill, 2020), chapter 3.

7ʿUmar bin ʿAlī al-Jaʿdī Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt fuqahāʾ al-Yaman,

ed. Fuʾād Sayyid (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Sunnat al-Muḥammadiyya,
1957), 125–133.

8 Christopher Melchert, “The Formation of the Sunnī Schools of

Law”, in The Formation of Islamic Law, ed. Wael B. Hallaq
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 355.

9 Nawawī writes: “I took knowledge and preponderance from

Kamāl Sallār; he [took them] from Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad, author
of Shāmil al-Ṣaghīr. He says, ‘I took from ʿAbd al-Ghaffār al-
Qazwīnī, the author of Ḥāwī al-Ṣaghīr, who says, I took knowledge
from Abū al-Qāsim bin ʿAbd al-Karīm bin Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī
Rāfiʿī’”. In the actual text, all these names have some honorofic
titles and are followed by raḥim Allāh taʿāla (May Allah bless him!),
here removed for a smoother reading; see Yaḥyā bin Sharaf
Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ wa al-lughāt (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub
al-‘Ilmiyya, n.d), 1: 18.
10 He says that he studied with Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Faḍl,
who studied with ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Yaḥyā, who studied
with Ghazālī, who studied with Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī, who
studied with his father Abū Muḥammad Juwaynī, who studied with
Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī (d. 1026), who studied
with Abū Zayd Muḥammad al-Marwazī (d. 982), who studied with
Ibn Surayj, who studied with Abū Saʿīd al-Anmāṭī (d. 901), who
studied with Muzanī, who studied with al-Shāfiʿī. Nawawī, Tahḏīb
al-asmāʾ, 1: 18–19; even al-Shāfiʿī has a chain of teachers, and
that reaches back to the Prophet Muḥammad.

11 Nawawī gives a long list of his teachers in his own work, and
they include Kamāl al-Dīn Isḥāq al-Maghribī, Shams al-Dīn ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān al-Maqdisī, Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Irbilī, Abū al-Fatḥ
ʿUmar al-Taflīsī. Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ, 1: 18–19.

12Norman Calder, Islamic Jurisprudence in the Classical Era, ed.

Colin Imber, intro. and afterword Robert Gleave (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 22, passim.

13 Perhaps these categories can be applied to other disciplines of

Islam or other schools of law, but my analysis is based solely on
the Shāfiʿī textual tradition from the Levant and the Indian Ocean
littoral.

14 Some of these have particularly interested legal historians,

especially the Risāla, one of the first known Islamic jurisprudence
texts. Joseph Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory: The Risāla of
Muḥammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
15The main criticism came from Ahmed El Shamsy, “Al-Shāfiʿī’s
Written Corpus: A Source-Critical Study”, Journal of the American
Oriental Society 132 (2012): 199–220; also see Joseph Lowry,
“The Legal Hermeneutics of al-Shāfiʿī and Ibn Qutayba: A
Reconsideration”, Islamic Law and Society 11, no. 1 (2004): 1–41.

16 Shamsy, “Al-Shāfiʿī’s Written Corpus”; al-Shāfiʿī, Umm.

17 Ahmed Al Shamsy, “The First Shāfiʿī: The Traditionalist Legal

Thought of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Buwayṭī (d. 231/846)”, Islamic Law and
Society 14, no. 3 (2007): 326, referring to Ibn Abī Hātim al-Rāzī,
Ādāb al-Shāfiʿī wa manāqibuh, ed. ʿAbd al-Ghanī ʿAbd al-Khāliq
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1953), 64–65. My discussion
comparing Buwayṭī with Muzanī depends on this study, unless
cited otherwise. The student was Abū Ismāʿīl al-Tirmiḏī (d. 893),
who is buried near Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal’s grave. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy bin
Aḥmad Ibn al-ʿImād, Shaḏarāt al-ḏahab fī akhbār man ḏahab, ed.
ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Arnāʾūṭ and Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ (Beirut: Dār Ibn
Kathīr, 1988), 3: 159.

18 In the ninth century, people tended to follow a more ḥadīth-

centric approach in legal articulations, and Buwayṭī’s Mukhtaṣar
best catered for their needs. But the emergence of the Ḥanbalī
school with its stress on the ḥadīths led to the erosion of its appeal
among the ḥadīth-lovers. To those who tended to take a more
rationalistic approach, his work was less appealing than that of
Muzanī. On these aspects, see El Shamsy, “The First Shāfiʿī”.

19Christopher Melchert, “The Meaning of Qāla’l-Shāfiʿī in Ninth-

Century Sources”, in ʿAbbasid Studies, ed. James E. Montgomery
(Louvain: Peeters, 2004), 291–294.
20 These include works by Abū al-Ḥasan al-Jūrī (d. in or after 912),
Ibn Surayj, Abū Bakr Muḥammad bin Dāwūd al-Ṣaydalānī (d.
938), Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī (d. 951), Abū ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī (d. 961)
and Abū Ḥamid al-Marwarrūḏī (d. 972). ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Dayyib,
Introduction to Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī, Nihāyat al-maṭlab fī dirāyat
al-maḏhab, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Dayyib (Jiddah: Dār al-Minhāj,
2007), 223–224.

21Other such works as Gharīb al-ḥadīth of Ibn Quṭayba (d. 889)

and Ikhtilāf al-ʿulamāʾ and Sunna of Marwazī (d. 906) also
contributed to this doctrinal transition.

22Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, ed. Ibrāhīm

Ramaḍān (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1994), 259–265.

23 Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ, 1: 3.

24 L. W. C. van den Berg, “Het Mohammedaansche

godsdienstonderwijs op Java en Madoera en de daarbij gebruikte
Arabische boeken”, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 31 (1886): 518–555; Eduard Sachau,
Muhammedanisches Recht nach schafiitischer Lehre (Stuttgart:
W. Spemann, 1897), xix–xxiv. The only exception is Shīrāzī’s
Tanbīh, which is found in the lists of both Nawawī and Sachau. Cf.
Martin van Bruinessen, “Kitab kuning: Books in Arabic Script Used
in the Pesantren Milieu; Comments on a New Collection in the
KITLV Library”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 146,
nos. 2–3 (1990): 226–269.

25The Lubāb’s full title is Lubāb fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī. His other

important law books include the Tajrīd fī al-furūʿ, Majmūʿ and
Muqniʿ.

26ʿAbd al-Karīm bin Ṣunaytān al-ʿAmrī, “Ḥayat al-muṣannif” in

Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad al-Maḥāmilī, al-Lubāb fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī, ed.
ʿAbd al-Karīm bin Ṣunaytān al-ʿAmrī (Medina: Dār al-Bukhārī,
1995), 21–25.

27For a list of commentaries and summaries of Tanqīḥ, see ʿAmrī,

“Ḥayat al-muṣannif”, 34–37.

28The supersummary is titled Taḥrīr Tanqīḥ al-Lubāb and its

autocommentary is Tuḥfat al-ṭullāb. Leiden MS. Or. 6331.

29 Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ, 2: 173.

30 The following ṭabaqāts contain his anecdotes and biographies:

Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās
(Beirut: Dār al-Rāʾid al-ʿArabī, 1970), 119–31; Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-
Wahhāb bin ʿAlī al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyyat al-kubrā, ed.
Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Ṭanāḥī and ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-
Ḥulw (Cairo: Maṭbaʿa ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, n.d.), 4: 215; Aḥmad
bin Muḥammad Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, ed. al-
Ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-ʿAlīm Khān (Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿat Majlis Dāʾirat al-
Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1978), 1: 251–254.

31“alam yakfika an halakta ḥattā tuhlikanī maʿak?” cited in Subkī,

Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 4: 236.

32On the debates and differences of opinions among them, see

Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 4: 252–256, 5: 209–218.

33 Shīrāzī, Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ, 124.

34 Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ, 2: 210.

35 Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 1: 253.

36Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Shīrāzī, al-Tanbīh fī al-fiqh ʿalā maḏhab al-

Imām al-Shāfiʿī (Beirut: Markaz al-Khidmāt wa al-Abḥāth al-
Thaqāfiyya, 1983), 11.

37Nadā bint Muḥammad Kubah, “Kifāyat al-nabīh fī sharḥ al-

Tanbīh” (MA diss., Umm al-Qurā University, 2010), 91.

38 Kubah, “Kifāyat al-nabīh”, 97–100.

39 The text was entitled ʿUmda fī taṣḥīḥ al-Tanbīh.

40For an elaboration on the progenies of Taṣḥīḥ, see Yaḥyā bin

Sharaf al-Nawawī, Taṣḥīḥ al-Tanbīh, ed. Muḥammad ʿAqla Ibrāhīm
(Beirut: al-Reslah Publishing House, 1996), 1: 33–34.

41The first commentary is Tawjīh al-Tanbīh, written by Abū al-

Ḥusayn Muḥammad Ibn al-Khall (d. 1157). Kubah, “Kifāyat al-
nabīh”, 97–100.

42 Solomon Keijzer, Handboek voor het Mohammedaansch regt

(‘s-Gravenhage: Gebroeders Belinfante, 1853); A. W. T. Juynboll,
ed. Jus shafiiticum. At-Tanbîh auctore Abu Ishâk as-Shîrâzî quem
e codice Leidensi et codice Oxoniensi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1879).

43 Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 4: 228–229.

44 Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 4: 222.

45 Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ, 2: 174, quotes Shīrāzī saying: “I
started writing Muhaḏḏab on 455 [= 1063], and completed it on the
last Sunday of Rajab, 469 [= 26 February 1077]”.

46 Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ḏahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ,

ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ and Muḥammad Naʿīm al-Arqūsī (Beirut:
Al-Resalah Publishing House, 1996), 18: 459.

47It was written by one Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-ʿIrāqī (d. 1200).
Muṣṭafā bin ʿAbd Allāh Ḥajī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-
kutub wa al-funūn (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth ʿArabī, 2008), 2:
1912.

48 The twenty-volume commentary is Istiqṣāʾ li maḏāhib al-ʿulamāʾ

al-fuqahāʾ by ʿUthmān al-Hadabānī al-Mārānī (d. 1244). The third
commentator of the century is Ismāʿīl bin Muḥammad al-Ḥaḍramī
(d. 1277).

49Muḥammad Najīb al-Muṭīʿī, Preface to Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-

Nawawī, Majmūʿ sharḥ ̣ al-Muhaḏḏab (Jeddah: Maktabat al-Irshād,
1980), 1: 10–14.

50 For example, Abū Saʿd bin Abū ʿIsrūn (d. 1189) wrote a
dissertation with fawāʾid; Abū Bakr Muḥammad bin Mūsā al-
Hazimī (d. 1188) wrote on its ḥadīths; Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī wrote
on its appendices (zawāʾid) in a volume entitled Kāfī fī zawāʾid al-
Muhaḏḏab ʿalā al-wafī; and there are others. For a detailed list of
other textual descendants of Muhaḏḏab in other genres, see Ḥajī
Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, 2: 1912–1913.
51ʿAlī Muʿawwid and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, Introduction to Abū
Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Wajīz fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī (Beirut: Dār al-
Arqam, 1997), 65.

52Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Wasīṭ fī al-maḏhab (Cairo: Dār al-Salām,

1997), 1: 103.

53 Ghazālī, Wasīṭ, 1: 103.

54“law kāna al-Ghazālī nabiyyan, la-kāna muʿjizatuh al-Wajīz”,

Aḥmad Mayqarī Shumayla al-Ahdal, Sullam al-Mutaʿallim al-
muḥtāj ilā maʿrifat rumūz al-Minhāj, ed. Ismāʿīl ʿUthmān Zayn
(Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 631.

55Its full name is Khulāṣat al-mukhtaṣar wa naqāwat al-muʿtaṣar

(Riyadh: Dār al-Minhāj, 2007).

56 Muʿawwid and ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, Introduction, 73.

57Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Khulāṣa al-musammā Khulāṣat al-

mukhtaṣar wa-naqāwat al-muʿtaṣar, ed. Amjad Rashīd
Muḥammad ʿAlī (Riyadh: Dār al-Minhāj, 2007).

58Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qurʾān wa duraruh (Beirut:

Dār al-Jīl wa Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīda, 1988), 22.

59 A Shāfiʿī jurist called Bābilī says: “Certainly the Nihāya is a

commentary to the Mukhtaṣar of Muzanī which has been abridged
from the Umm. Ghazālī abridged the Nihāya into the Basīṭ”, cited
in Muʿawwid and ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, Introduction, 65.

60 His father’s name was Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh (d. 1046).
61Ahdal, Sullam al-mutaʿallim, 634, citing Ibn al-Najjār, Dhayl
Tārīkh Baghdad, 16: 44.

62Aḥmad bin Muḥammad Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān (Paris:

Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1868), 3:
168.

63Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā min ʿilm al-uṣūl, ed. Hamza bin
Zuhayr Ḥāfiẓ (Medina: Shirkat al-Madinat al-Munawwara, 1993), 1:
4–5 – emphasis is mine.

64 Ghazālī, Jawāhir, 22.

65The student was Muḥy al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Naysābūrī (d.

1153) and his commentary was entitled Muḥīṭ. Ibn al-Rifʿa’s
commentary was titled Maṭlab al-ʿālī.

66 Ahdal, Sullam al-Mutaʿallim, 632–633.

67For his biography, see Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 6: 15; Ibn

Qāḍī Shuhbah, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 2: 29–30.

68On the interconnection between al-Ḥāwi and Iqnāʾ, Ibn al-Jawzī

says: “Māwardī used to say: ‘I commented on (basaṭa) the law in
four thousand pages and I summarised it into forty.’ By the
commentary (mabsūṭ), he meant kitāb al-Ḥāwi, and by the
summary the kitāb Iqnāʾ”. Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam fī tārīkh al-
mulūk wa al-umam (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1992), 8: 199.

69 Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī Māwardī, Ḥāwī al-kabīr, ed. ʿAlī Muhammad

Maʿūḍ and ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
ʿIlmiyya, 1994), 1: 7–33.
70Aḥmad bin Ḥusayn al-Isfahānī [Abū Shujāʿ], Mukhtaṣar Abī
Shujāʿ al-musammā Matn al-Ghāyat wa al-Taqrīb (Jeddah: Dār al-
Minhāj, 2005), 11.

71 The commentary is Kifāyat al-akhyār by Taqiyy al-Dīn Abū Bakr

al-Ḥusaynī al-Dimishqī (d. 1426).

72Some of them are Aḥmad al-Qalyūbī (d. 1659), ʿAlī al-

Shabrāmalsī (d. 1676), Ibrāhīm al-Birmāwī (d. 1894), Ibrāhīm al-
Bājūrī, and Nawawī al-Bantanī.

73 For a list of commentators and supercommentators, see the

Introduction by Bassām ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Jābī to Muḥammad bin
Qāsim Ghazzī, Fatḥ ̣ al-qarīb al-mujīb fī sharḥ alfāẓ al-Taqrīb aw,
al-Qawl al-mukhtār fī sharḥ Ghāyat al-ikhtiṣār (Limassol: al-Jaffān
wa al-Jābī, 2005), 10–15.

74 For biography of Rāfiʿī, see Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ, 2: 264–

265; Ibn Ṣalāḥ al-Shahrazūrī, Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ al-Shāfiʿīyya
(Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 1992), 2: 784; Subkī,
Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 8: 281–293; Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah, Ṭabaqāt al-
Shāfiʿīyya, 1: 393; cf. Shirwān Nājī ʿAzīz, “Ḥayāt al-Imām Abū al-
Qāsim al-Rāfiʿī wa juhūduhu al-ʿilmiyya”, Majallat Kulliyat al-ʿUlūm
al-Islāmiyya 30 (2012): 292–331.

75 ʿAzīz, “Ḥayāt al-Imām”, 302.

76Ibn Ṣalāḥ al-Shahrazūrī, Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ al-Shāfiʿīyya

(Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 1992), 2: 784.

77 See for example Ahdal, Sullam al-mutaʿallim, 631 who in turn

refers to an eighteenth-century scholar Sulaymān al-Bujayrimī,
Ḥāshiyat al-Bujayrimī ʿalā Sharḥ Manhaj al-ṭullāb (Beirut: Dār al-
Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2000), 1: 15.

78Ḥabīb ʿAbd Allāh bin Ḥusayn Bil-Faqīh, Maṭlab al-īqāẓ fī al-

kalām ʿalā shayʾ min ghurar al-alfāẓ: bayān li muṣṭalaḥāt al-
Shāfiʿīyyat al-fiqhīyya (Tarim: Dār al-Muhājir, 1995), 34.

79He only writes: “I pray for Your blessings on what I have

embarked on to compose a mukhtaṣar in the commandments,
edited from pleonasm and elongation, cited from what the majority
has preponderated as wajhs and qawls … By Your great
beneficence, I request You to make this edition (al-muḥarrar)
comprehensible for those who utilise it and to accept it from me.
You are the one who listens and knows.” ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qazwīnī
Rāfiʿī, al-Muh̩arrar fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, ed. Muḥammad
Ḥasan Ismāʿīl (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005), 7.

80For example, in the tenth century, Ibn al-Nadīm mentions many

Indian texts being circulated among the Arabs. See his Fihrist, 32–
33, 303–304, 370–371, 421.

81S. D. Goitein, “Mediterranean Trade Preceding the Crusades:

Some Facts and Problems”, Diogenes 15, no. 59 (1967): 55, 61.

82S. D. Goitein and M. A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle

Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza: India Book (Leiden: Brill,
2008), 517.

83 Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 61, 562, 571, 576, 590.

84K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An

Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45; on the Mediterranean side
of the story, see Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World:
Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); on the
intersections, see Arnold Franklin, Roxani Eleni Margariti, Marina
Rustow and Uriel Simonsohn, eds. Jews, Christians and Muslims
in Medieval and Early Modern Times: A Festschrift in Honor of
Mark R. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

85 Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 12.

86For example, see Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Jāzim, ed., Nūr al-
maʿārif fī nuẓum wa qawānīn wa aʿrāf al-Yaman fī al-ʻAhd al-
Muẓaffarī al-wārif, Lumière de la connaissance. Règles, lois et
coutumes du Yémen sous le règne de sultan rasoulide al-Muzaffar
(Ṣanʿā: Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de
Sanaa, 2003–2005), 1: 513–514; 2: 124–129.

87 K. M. Muhammad, Arabi Sāhityattinu KēraỊattinṯe Saṃbhāvana

(Tirūraṅṅāṭi: Ashrafi Book Centre, 2012), 62–63.

88Faqīh Ḥusayn bin Aḥmad al-Mahfanī, Qayd al-jāmiʿ al-hādī:

mukhtaṣar fī aḥkām al-nikāḥ, Juma AI-Majid Center for Culture
and Heritage, Dubai MS. 679405. Ponnāni Makhdūmiyya Library
has two uncatalogued and unnumbered manuscripts with slight
variations. Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts of the
Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities enlists two other
manuscripts belonging to the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek in
Cologne (5 P 50 – 01 and 5 P 50 – 02).

89Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾib al-amṣār wa-ʿajāʾib al-
asfār, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-ʿUryān and Musṭafā al-
Qaṣṣāṣ (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-ʿUlūm, 1987), 574.

90 Muhammad, Arabi Sāhityattinu, 62.

91 Muṣṭafā bin ʿAbd Allāh Ḥajī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī
al-kutub wa al-funūn (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth ʿArabī, 2008), 2:
1613.
◈
“Where there is no text, there is no object of study, and no
object of thought either,” writes M. M. Bakhtin in his Speech
Genres and Other Late Essays. A sea of texts made people,
and an ocean of people made texts. A perennial
interconnection in the historic civilisations.
In the ship, observe this intertwining of books and
readers and writers. Between conceptions and communities.
Ideas shaped people, who transcribed them onto paper, while
the paper itself apprised those ideas.
The entanglement of books and people commands laws
in the ship, as much as in the littoral. A syair perahu (boat
poem) attributed to a sixteenth-century Malay mystic, Hamza
Fansuri, illustrates this better. With a twist of mystical
orientation, the poet imagines the contents of the textual
complex in the form of a ship that runs across the Indian
Ocean:

O wise and knowing youth,

Avail yourself of a rudder and a compass,
And also equip [your boat] with rigging –
Such is the way of perfection for man! […]
“Being of God” is the name of the boat,
“Knowledge of God” the name of its hold,
“Faith in God” the name of its rudder,
“Certainty in God” the name of its pilot.
“Ritual Purity” and “Ablution” are the names of its deck,
 “Unbelief” and “Wrongdoing” are the names of the
water in its bailing well.
“Trust in God” is its leadsman,
“Unity of God” is its anchor.1

The poet goes on to compare the Islamic teachings of

ethics and law with spiritual orientations in simplified maritime
terminologies. Is there a better way to comprehend the
religion for the oceanic communities than in the terminology
most familiar to them! Resonating such poetisation of law and
mysticism as a ship, a Malabari poet compared the whole
journey of life to ships in Arabi-Malayalam, a hybrid language
from south-west India. He compared and connected Sharīʿa
and mysticism in his poems and summarised the foundational
teachings of Islam, especially of its fiqh and taṣawwuf, in the
vocabularies of ship and navigation.
And they were not alone in this. Some intermediate and
advanced texts of the Shāfiʿī school did the same, such as
those entitled “Ocean of the School” (Baḥr al-maḏhab), “Ship
of Success” (Safīnat al-najāt) or “Sonorous Ocean” (Baḥr al-
muḥīt)!
The encounters between texts and people in the ocean
of law, in the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis, run much deeper and wider.
It goes beyond analogies of oceans, boats and fish. How and
why?
 3
Architecture of Encounters
◈

In the previous two chapters we discussed people in one and texts in

the other. Some subjects overlapped, so this chapter investigates
how they are related in the historical making of Shāfiʿīsm. The
people were not only authors, teachers, students and commentators
of texts but also promulgators and adherents of the ideas and the
school of thought presented in these texts. The texts were catalysts
for connecting and disconnecting people across geographical and
chronological barriers and were unifiers and dividers of the Shāfiʿī
community among themselves and in their relations to followers of
other legal schools. This chapter demonstrates the major trends in
the Shāfiʿī discourses in which the texts took centre stage as
producers and products, as causes and results of division and
cohesion, leading to the school’s expansion. This also shows us how
and why certain texts with genealogies from vast textual families
became significant in the longue durée of the school. We learn how
people and texts come into contact when there are internal and
external impulses to address the school’s past, present and future in
the postclassical period.
This line of enquiry requires a slightly closer analysis of some
texts and actors in the Shāfiʿī school. For this, I focus on the Minhāj
family mentioned in the previous chapter, and its trajectories and
genealogies before and after its composition. I take the Minhāj itself
together with its direct or indirect descendants Tuḥfa, Fatḥ, Nihāya
and Iʿāna. A closer look at these texts and the people who handled
them will help us understand the matters with which they were
concerned and those they dismissed when promulgating their texts,
especially when composing them or using them to produce a specific
set of juridical solutions, judgements, rooted in the Shāfiʿī school and
its own internal preoccupations.
Certain families, such as the Minhāj, played significant roles in
synthesising conflicts arising in the Shāfiʿī school, yet ironically also
contributing to further divisions. Simultaneously, they influenced both
the everyday religious lives of laypersons and the legal arguments of
the jurists, advancing their own interpretative community in which
divisions were blurred. The Minhāj, and by extension the other four
works, represent this historical continuum together with recurrent
ruptures in the school. An unbroken but non-linear thread runs
through this canvas of time and place from one end to the other. In
this Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of law, these texts enabled a network of texts
to connect geographically and chronologically distant nodal points.
This chapter addresses the questions of why I concentrate on these
families, and why on these five texts. My rationale for selections
explicates the reception of postclassical commentarial order and its
intellectual entanglements in the Indian Ocean and Eastern
Mediterranean, in which some of the texts advanced the internal
divisions and textual genealogies of the school and divided and
unified its adherents. I also take these texts together to present the
wider architectonic designs of Islamic legal texts in general and
Shāfiʿī texts in particular. A cumulative analysis such as this offers
stepping stones towards the following chapters, which take these
texts in turn to analyse exciting developments in the Shāfiʿī legal
cosmopolis.
 Encounters: Division and Cohesion
A major component for the survival of Shāfiʿīsm was its internal
dynamics, appealing to many fuqahāʾ as well as to the wider
community. Amidst the constant divisions and cohesions among its
textual authorities the school generally accommodated contrasting
viewpoints. There were agreements and disagreements, revisions
and refutations, and some debates even evolved into street-fights,
an unavoidable routine occurrence in the history of Islam. These
inherent oxymorons have paradoxically contributed to the
development of a constructive legal tradition over time and space.
Such a tradition of divided or unified discourses often originated from
a remote place in the circle of an individual scholar, in a cluster, or
with a treatise, and quickly spread across boards attracting wider
scholarly attention. It divided the members of the school into those
for and against the original text/fatwā/argument, and the ensuing
debate produced more discursive commentaries and treatises. The
texts are thus both advocates of such intellectual encounters against
their rivals as much as they are a repertoire of rival views, for the
audience of their time and the researchers of ours.
Internal conflicts within the micro-networks of Shāfiʿīsm caused
another stream to rise at a lower level that contributed to expansion.
The initial phase of this division in Shāfiʿīsm (which itself originated
from an intellectual unification of the “traditionalism” of Mālik bin
Anas with the “rationalism” of Abū Ḥanīfa) can be seen as early as
the ninth century, among two disciples of al-Shāfiʿī, Buwayṭī and
Muzanī. Each of their Mukhtaṣars based on al-Shāfiʿī’s Umm took an
entirely different approach in analysing Islamic law. While Buwayṭī’s
Mukhtaṣar took a traditionalist approach with more emphasis on
ḥadīths and transmitted knowledge, Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar followed a
rationalistic method. Their methodological conflicts were also
entangled in personal tussles. Even though Muzanī and Buwayṭī
were colleagues under al-Shāfiʿī in Cairo, they despised each other.
Muzanī was said to have joined Ḥarmala (d. 858) and al-Shāfiʿī’s
son Abū ʿUthmān (d. in or after 854) in a conspiracy against Buwayṭī
that led to the latter being imprisoned by the ʿAbbāsids until his
death in Baghdad. It was said that Buwayṭī made a dismissive
remark about Muzanī’s understanding of al-Shāfiʿī, saying “He was a
weak boy (kāna ṣabiyan ḍaʿīfan)” and poorly digested the teaching.1
This personal conflict notwithstanding, their different legal
hermeneutics were a catalyst in the shaping and spread of early
Shāfiʿīsm, for they both attracted followers who in turn contributed to
the expansion of micro-networks into macro-levels through their
constructive divisions.
The Buwayṭī–Muzanī division faded away in the long run as
Muzanī’s rationalistic perspective outlined in his Mukhtaṣar
dominated the Shāfiʿī clusters. In the tenth century, therefore, we
see that only his Mukhtaṣar was being taught across the eastern and
western spheres of Shāfiʿī influence. This situation changed in the
eleventh century, when another division sprang up among the Shāfiʿī
fuqahāʾ. This division has been identified in geographical terms, one
from Khurasan and the other from Iraq, instead of by what each sect
represented jurisprudentially, methodologically or analytically. The
existence of such a division has often been recognised in primary
literature but very few studies have elaborated on it.2 Fachrizal Halim
explained it partly, yet he does not say what constituted Khurasani
Shāfiʿīsm against its Iraqi counterpart.3 He suggests that the
Khurasanis had a more rationalistic approach than the Iraqis, who
prioritised a traditionalist line.
In the works of many Shāfiʿīs from the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries we see many references that put Khurasanis and Iraqis in
a reflectional symmetry. One of the leading jurists of postclassical
Shāfiʿīsm, Nawawī writes in his Majmūʿ on this division:

Our Iraqi companions are more reliable in transmitting al-

Shāfiʿī’s statements, his school’s principles, and our previous
companions’ opinions. Mostly their transmission is stronger than
the one by the Khurasanis, who are mostly better in their
behaviour, research, derivation, arrangement and in matters that
require a preponderance determination between two qawls.4

The distinct qualities he attributes to each group in this quote might

appear to be a promising definition, but they are neither definitive nor
determinant. All the qualifications could be interchanged for Iraqi and
Khurasani Shāfiʿīs, including the reliability of transmission that
Nawawī stresses.
Even so, a closer look into the texts produced by the Iraqi and
Khurasani jurists of the school in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries
does demonstrate that the Khurasani texts stand out in their
organisation, analytical pattern and methodological coherence. In
juxtaposition, the Iraqi texts pay extra attention to the statements of
previous jurists in the school, from the founding father al-Shāfiʿī to
his companions, their disciples, and systematic analogical reasoning
(qiyās) on the basis of their rulings. Two telling examples can be the
base texts of the two families discussed in the previous chapter: the
Muhaḏḏab of Shīrāzī and the Wasīṭ of Ghazālī. The former belongs
to the Iraqi group, while the latter belongs to the Khurasani
counterpart. In the Muhaḏḏab, Shīrāzī provides significant attention
to diverse statements of scriptural evidence and statements from the
early jurists of Shāfiʿīsm in order to substantiate his judgements,
whereas Ghazālī does not pay much attention in the Wasīṭ to the
scriptural evidence or early juridical statements, but rather goes into
ratiocinated analysis of legal issues by organising and structuring
them coherently.5 Having said this, we also should keep in mind that
this is not a straitjacket division without any overlay.
More importantly, a geographical labelling of the division in
terms of Khurasan and Iraq should not deceive us to overlook
methodological issues at the core of the debate. Identification of this
division in geographical terms has been the praxis since the
thirteenth century, but in no way this division is compartmentalised
on the basis of regions. This is even more important not only in
geographical patronyms (such as Shīrāzī, who otherwise might be
identified with Khurasan except he was a leader of an Iraqi group
and challenged his counterparts face-to-face), but also in terms of
increasing transregional mobility of scholars across borders. The
best example is Ghazālī himself, as he was born, brought up and
studied in Khurasan but followed a successful career in Baghdad.
Although there are some shifts in his methodological approach after
his relocation to Baghdad, especially to bring together the
Khurasani–Iraqi groups, his initial writings such as the Basīṭ and
Wasīṭ represented the Khurasani sub-school of Shāfiʿīsm. Another
telling example of this transregional mobility is Abū Shujāʿ, the
author of Ghāya, who grew up in Basra in a family that migrated from
Isfahan, taught Shāfiʿī law in Basra for more than forty years, and
served as a as judge in Isfahan. On the basis of such criss-crossing
of scholars, texts and ideas between Khurasan and Iraq, the
methodological and jurisprudential divisions cannot be contained
fully when we identify them only in regional terms.
The methodological division as articulated in the primary
sources by the Shāfiʿīs must have contributed to a healthy
advancement of the school. When Shīrāzī came to Khurasan, for
example, he engaged in a long debate with the leader of Khurasani
Shāfiʿīsm, Juwaynī.6 The biographical dictionaries give details of the
debate, which was centred on questions of a mistaken fixing of qibla
(the direction of the prayer) and the free will of a mature virgin lady in
respect of her marriage. On the second issue Shīrāzī gives her no
choice, and proves his point both by deductive reasoning and
scriptural evidence. Juwaynī counters this argument and
emphasises the possibility of multiple interpretations of the scripture
under question. In the debate, as recorded, Shīrāzī gets the upper
hand. Sohaira Siddiqui has recently studied their methods of
argumentation, rationalisation and interpretation of the evidence.7
On the basis of her analysis, the description of their differences as
given to us deviates from the binary characteristics Nawawī
suggested for the two groups.
Nawawī amalgamated the groups and came up with the most
valid arguments of the school, making a contribution from his side
that added lustre to his legacy among following generations. The
Minhāj represents a blueprint of this amalgamation of two divisions.
Nawawī’s works thus created some cohesion in Shāfiʿīsm and
arguably brought an end to the Khurasani–Iraqi division. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries his texts are the ones most read,
circulated, interpreted and commented on. But in the sixteenth
century the commentators on Nawawī’s works were divided into two
prominent groups, which can be identified as Cairo versus Mecca.
The former was led by Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī (d. 1596), while the
latter was headed by his colleague from al-Azhar, Ibn Ḥajar al-
Haytamī, who built up a successful career in the Holy City. If Nawawī
had mended an existing division of the school, his commentators Ibn
Ḥajar and Ramlī opened a new division.
The epicentre of this fresh split was Cairo, a city whose fuqahāʾ
estate had dominated the Shāfiʿī legalism in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, responding to different social, economic, religious
and political developments. The leading educational institution there,
al-Azhar University, performed an impressive role in the juridical
dialogues of the school. Both Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī had studied at al-
Azhar with Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, who formed a generation of Shāfiʿī
jurists around him.8 In this legalist enterprise Anṣārī was joined by
Ramlī’s father Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ramlī (d. 1550), whose educational
commitment as a student had attracted Anṣārī so that he allowed
only that student to edit his works during and after his life. From the
circles of Anṣārī and Shihāb al-Ramlī, the students Ibn Ḥajar and
Ramlī emerged as the most important scholars of the Shāfiʿī school,
together with an additional jurist, Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī. These three
together with their two teachers decided the future course of
Shāfiʿīsm. They are known collectively as “the Five Scholars”
(ʿulamāʾ al-khams) in the school’s history. Their significance is that
they led the so-called “Era of the Confirmers” (ʿaṣr al-muḥaqqiqīn)
that dates from 600 to 1000 of the Hijri era (roughly from 1200 to
1600 CE). The main contribution of the scholars in this era is tarjīḥ or
determination of preponderance, by prioritising and hierarchising the
contradictory views of previous scholarship within the school.
A few decades into his career, Ibn Ḥajar split from the Cairene
circle and drafted his own jurisprudential framework. Mecca
facilitated the growth and spread of his ideas with its new energy
from transregional intellectual and economic networks. He and his
colleagues made powerful avowals to single out their school as
intellectually dominant in the city. They Shāfiʿīsed Mecca as much as
the city influenced Shāfiʿīsm. This process, paradoxically, helped the
future advance of the school to South|East Asia and Africa. Believers
there considered Mecca to be synonymous with Islam, and now it
had become synonymous with their school. A major component in
this process was the massive migrations of the Ḥaḍramī and non-
Ḥaḍramī Yemeni Shāfiʿīs, who found great support from the
arguments of Ibn Ḥajar, with an emphasis on Arab ethnicity,
language and dress in Islamic identity.
 Ibn Ḥajar’s ideas influenced the scholars from the Indian Ocean
littoral, which included third- or fourth-generation Yemenis and others
in the diaspora, but they did not subscribe to those ideas completely.
They added their own voices and interpretations to the school,
affirming the significance of their lands to Islamic history as well as
finding ways to disentangle their everyday problems within the
Shāfiʿī framework. The Fatḥ of Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī is one of the
earliest texts available in that category. Written in sixteenth-century
Malabar, it highlighted a number of different issues the believers
faced in the non-Arab rims of the Indian Ocean. The text as well as
its author prompted a reimagination of an educational centre of Islam
outside the Middle East in line with the rise of “multiple Meccas”. It
also prompted recognition in Islamic law itself of the necessities and
priorities of considering the contemporary here and now. Such
attitudes contributed to its wider reception across the Shāfiʿī
cosmopolis as an intermediate textbook and a source of law, and in
the process the school itself expanded and influenced the Indian
Ocean Muslims.
The adherence of Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī and his Fatḥ to the
Meccan sub-school of Shāfiʿīsm as opposed to the Cairene sub-
school was overshadowed by its commentaries Nihāya and Iʿāna,
written by the Javanese-Meccan jurist Nawawī al-Bantanī and the
Egyptian-Hijazi scholar Sayyid Bakrī. Although these authors and
their texts furthered the ideas of the Fatḥ in particular and of
Shāfiʿīsm in general, they also catered for the new developments in
their time. In the wake of increasing attacks on the Islamic legal
tradition from the “Muslim modernists” and political “legal codifiers”,
the whole traditional community united as a single body, healing
many divisions that had existed in their long tradition. The Nihāya
and Iʿāna endeavoured to synthesise the geographical and legalistic
splits in the school. In a nutshell, the internal dynamics of a
mechanism of division inherent in the Shāfiʿī tradition furthered its
spread and survival in the Islamic world through constant textual
productions that stood within its overall framework and discursive
structure.
 Significant Genealogies
In the foregoing discussion, we can see that a multitude of texts
stood at the core of uniting and dividing the Shāfiʿī jurists over
several centuries. Which texts advanced such a discursive order of
the school? I address these questions by focusing on five texts
already mentioned in passing (the Minhāj, and its direct or indirect
progenies Tuḥfa, Fatḥ, Nihāya and Iʿāna) while emphasising their
standing among several other related and similar texts.
The five texts in focus represent the larger pattern of the
postclassical trajectories of Shāfiʿīsm. The relevance of the first two
texts in Shāfiʿīsm will be recognised by any follower or observer. The
Minhāj is the text that codified Shāfiʿīsm. No other text has attracted
so many commentators from within or outside the school in such a
wide range of ages and places. The Minhāj for Shāfiʿīsm is possibly
what the Digest is for Roman law. It is an abridgement of Rāfiʿī’s
Muḥarrar, a text that aimed to codify Shāfiʿī law by putting together
all existing literature into a coherent narrative, avoiding confusions
and ambiguities. It also gave new life to the almost benumbed legal
discourses in a time of turbulent politics and changing trends in the
way knowledge was put into practice. It adopted a communicative
form. Within each chapter and subsection there were multiple
categories, where each item was taken for discussion in turn. These
categories were mostly numbered or introduced with conjunctive
phrases, facilitating easier reading and making the content easier to
grasp.9
Most of the “books” and chapters in the Muḥarrar start by citing
a Qurʾānic verse or Prophetic saying, similar to the traditional
approach of the Umm and of Buwayṭī’s Mukhtaṣar. This style of
elaboration on or explanation of scriptures is what most traditionalist
jurists of Shāfiʿīsm wished to stress by conveying a sense that they
derive rulings and answers for the everyday problems of Muslims
from the Qurʾān and ḥadīths. But its author Rāfiʿī also took a
rationalistic approach on many occasions along with his personal
opinions. Such a balance between revelation and rationality in the
legal analyses helped him treat equally the existing divisions within
the school. His great admiration for the legal thought of Ghazālī is
reflected in the form and contents to various extents, but further
elaboration is here restricted by space. Suffice it to say for now that
its overall organisation, analytical pattern and amalgamation of
opposite views on a particular issue as visible in the Muḥarrar mostly
follow the works of Ghazālī.
The Muḥarrar had remarkable influence on the contemporary
fuqahāʾ estates of Iraq, Khurasan and Syria. During Nawawī’s higher
education in Damascus some twenty-five years after Rāfiʿī’s death, it
was a significant legal text noted for its freshness as it was circulated
and taught in the Shāfiʿī clusters. Nawawī found this manual the best
recent abridgement in Shāfiʿīsm: “Our companions,10 may God bless
them, have proliferated compositions, as long manuals and
abridgements. The optimum abridgement is the Muḥarrar of Imām
Abū al-Qāsim al-Rāfiʿī, may God bless him, that has concrete
opinions. It is rich with valuable knowledge, a pillar for confirming the
school, an accepted [work] for the law-giver and other aspirants.”11
He goes on praising the text, demonstrating his fascination towards
it. That explains why Nawawī was motivated to depend on this work
in his attempt to codify the school. Nevertheless, it stood out as a
prominent Shāfiʿī text only for very short time. It attracted only two
commentaries and three abridgements, far less than the numerous
commentaries and abridgements for its successor, the Minhāj.12
The imperfections in the Muḥarrar made way for ensuring the
legitimacy and legacy of the Minhāj and Nawawī within the Shāfiʿī
tradition. Although the latter expressed its appreciation for the
Muḥarrar, it also voiced many severe criticisms, so much so that its
rulings came to be seen as matters of speculation for Shāfiʿīs. They
eventually avoided engaging with the text. Furthermore, the Minhāj
was written just three or four decades after the Muḥarrar, giving little
time for commentators or abridgers to engage with it critically. Once
the Minhāj appeared, the Muḥarrar thus lost prominence in
educational institutions and legal circles where it had enjoyed a
certain amount of fame, though short-lived. It retained some limited
currency in the personal practices of Shāfiʿīs. Subordinate opinions
of the second or third rank, though not eligible for fatwā when a first-
rank ruling is available, could be followed in personal preferences.13
Whoever was familiar with the viewpoints of the Muḥarrar, either by
reading them or by learning them from a teacher, could follow them
when needed, although such practices must have been rather
limited. The Minhāj was the star text of the school, attracting the
attention of thousands of students and teachers and hundreds of
commentators and abridgers as I explain in the next chapter.
The Tuḥfa is the most renowned commentary of the Minhāj. As
for its position in the school, although traditional scholars may not
disagree with me, they might also point out that I should add two
equally important commentaries. These would be the Nihāyat al-
muḥtāj of Ramlī and the Mughnī al-muḥtāj (henceforth Mughnī) of
Khaṭīb Sharbīnī. All three are sister texts, born in the same century
and in turn indebted to two other texts from the Minhāj family: the
commentary Kanz al-rāghibīn by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Maḥallī,
and the summary Manhaj al-ṭullāb by Anṣārī. Both Maḥallī and
Anṣārī had studied or worked at al-Azhar and had headed the
fuqahāʾ estate there during their careers, attracting numerous
students, colleagues and followers and deeply engaging with the
Minhāj. Maḥallī’s commentary clarified many linguistic absurdities,
and attracted fifteen supercommentaries, while Anṣārī’s abridgment
aimed at avoiding loquaciousness, and attracted eight
commentaries, including one by himself (Fatḥ al-wahhāb). Both their
works on the Minhāj and the Minhāj itself provided a focus point for
the Shāfiʿī legal aspirants in Cairo and elsewhere to explore the
Islamic legal tradition in changing times and places. The making of
the Tuḥfa and its sister texts owes much to this atmosphere of
change.
The influence of Anṣārī and his student-cum-colleague Shihāb
al-Ramlī in the making of the three “Minhājis” is remarkable. Ibn
Ḥajar was more inclined towards the legal hermeneutics of Anṣārī
while Sharbīnī and Ramlī preferred those of Shihāb al-Ramlī. In their
engagement with the Minhāj, they each wrote separate
commentaries long after their student days when they had become
leading figures of the fuqahāʾ estates at different places and
institutions. The Tuḥfa of Ibn Ḥajar was the first of the three. He
started to write it in 1551 in Mecca and finished it within eleven
months. Sharbīnī started with Mughnī in 1552 but he took almost five
years to finish. Ramlī took ten years to complete his Nihāyat al-
muḥtāj, from 1556 to 1566.14 We can note many typological,
methodological and theoretical similarities and differences exhibited
by the individual authors in these three commentaries. These
differences in prioritising a teacher’s opinions and adding one’s own
viewpoint are part of a wider debate in the context of academic
trajectories. They show how the Minhāj and Shāfiʿīsm were
connected over time to the contemporary social, economic, political
and cultural spheres.
The Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, the last of the three, was written to
correspond with the Tuḥfa and the Mughnī. In its preface Ramlī
explained his methodology for writing the commentary.15 He refers to
earlier commentaries of the Minhāj, only a few of which he finds
worthwhile. He appreciates Maḥallī’s commentary at length, whereas
the works of Sharbīnī and Ibn Ḥajar are referred to generally as
writings by “our eminent contemporary colleagues”.16 Yet throughout
the text he differs in many of his opinions with those of Ibn Ḥajar in
Tuḥfa. The other commentator, Sharbīnī, was born and brought up in
Sharbīn at Dakahlia, from where he moved to Cairo.17 He studied
with Shihāb al-Ramlī, but scholars differ as to whether he also
managed to meet Anṣārī. Amongst his other teachers was the
prominent scholar Aḥmad al-Burullusī, who had the famous
cognomen Shaykh ʿAmīra and wrote a popular supercommentary for
Maḥallī’s commentary on the Minhāj. Whenever he resumed writing
the Mughnī he is said to have visited the grave of the Prophet
Muḥammad seeking blessings. He depended on the lecture notes
and opinions of Shihāb al-Ramlī.18 The influence of the Mughnī and
Nihāyat al-muḥtāj was historically limited to the Egyptian Shāfiʿī
cluster, whereas the Tuḥfa appealed to Shāfiʿīs in the rest of the
world more than any other commentaries on the Minhāj did. It is one
of the most celebrated texts in the Indian Ocean littoral and its
impact can be seen in the texts produced there.19
Shāfiʿīs from the maritime littoral will certainly recognise the
significance of the three remaining works, the Fatḥ, Nihāya and
Iʿāna. The reason for selecting these texts is to break away from the
approach to Shāfiʿīsm in particular and to Islamic law in general
which is centred on the Middle East. The majority of the Muslim
population has been living outside Arab lands since the ninth century
and the largest Muslim country in the world now identifies with the
Shāfiʿī school. That being so, we are obliged to investigate their
contribution to Islamic law, and whether they have in fact been
passive receivers of an Arab version of Islam and its laws. Such
questions motivated me to choose the Fatḥ, a text written by a
Malabari scholar in the sixteenth century and one of the most
circulated intermediate textbooks across the school’s cosmopolis.
The Fatḥ’s base text is the Qurra by the same author. I had
counted them as an independent textual family, similar to the Minhāj
family, but their relationship with each other is rather complicated.
The Qurra is a much smaller text, no bigger than a pamphlet if
compared to the multi-volume texts usual in the tradition of Shāfiʿīsm
and of Islamic literary corpuses in general. It is even smaller than the
Minhāj, which was itself considered to be a short text. It can be
classified as an “independent” work, as it does not explicitly
acknowledge on which text it is based or from which it is intellectually
derived. The texts mentioned so far were long enough for us to be
able to identify indebtedness to previous works on the basis of their
content, structure and arguments, but the Qurra is too short for us to
do that. The issues on which it focuses are not so different from any
other Shāfiʿī legal discussion, though there are some evident
analogies to the content of earlier texts. We see it as an “indirect
abridgement”, and its “originality” is in making a context for specific
situations implied by the contents. The commentary on the Qurra,
the Fatḥ, is from the same author and gives us more chance to trace
its genealogy. It is a work connected explicitly to the intellectual
spectrum of previous works, particularly the Tuḥfa and the Minhāj,
and the author says he depended primarily on the works of Ibn Ḥajar
to write it. The Fatḥ thus forms a separate family, with the Qurra as
its base text and with subsequent commentaries and
supercommentaries as progenies. Even so, it can be considered as
an extension of the Minhāj family, for it is connected to and deeply
influenced by Ibn Ḥajar’s oeuvre on the one side, and on the other it
has a wide reputation among traditional Shāfiʿīs as an abridgement
of the Tuḥfa.20 In fact, the Fatḥ belongs to the same legalistic
network of the Tuḥfa, as the later history of the school demonstrates.
In this sense, while the family proximity of the Minhāj may not be
evident in physical terms, intellectually it is. In the text we find many
direct citations from the Tuḥfa, although it often arrives at different
judgements. It also follows patterns of legal analysis in the Tuḥfa,
and in vocabulary choice and viewpoints. In form, style and structure
the Qurra has other antecedents in the school, being so concise,
such as the Muqaddima of Bā Faḍl. Its overall method raises
problems for both general readers and specialists, but an
autocommentary from the author does much to help. For several
reasons that explained in the sixth chapter, the Fatḥ became one of
the most important textbooks used across the Shāfiʿī worlds by
intermediate students. If a textbook can be said to have authority, the
Fatḥ holds that position in many parts of the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis.
The later reception and legacy of the Fatḥ are explicit in two
commentaries (broadly conceived) on it from the nineteenth century,
the Nihāya and Iʿāna. There are plenty of other commentaries for the
Fatḥ, but I have selected these two for particular reasons. The
Nihāya was written by a scholar of Javanese origin and the Iʿāna is
by an Egyptian, but both authors were based in Mecca. Both texts
reflect developments in the traditional intellectual realms of their
time, especially the syntheses of intellectual divisions and geo-legal
differences within the school. It is only with a juxtaposed reading of
these texts that such nuances can be revealed. The two texts do not
have a linear connection with the Fatḥ and its base text the Qurra.
The Nihāya of Nawawī al-Bantanī is a commentary on the Qurra,
whereas the Iʿāna is the Qurra’s supercommentary via the Fatḥ. In
that sense, the family relationship of the texts could be described as
aunt and niece, to use kinship metaphors. They derive from the
same enate, which is the Qurra, and they visibly belong to the same
Fatḥ family and by extension intellectually to the Minhāj family.
Many commentaries were written on the Fatḥ (and the Qurra) in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From nineteenth-century
Mecca alone we have four remarkable works: Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn of
ʿAlī al-Ḥaḍramī, widely known as Bā Ṣabrīn (d. 1887), completed on
Saturday 15 November 1845; Tarshīḥ al-mustafīdīn (henceforward
Tarshīḥ) of ʿAlawī al-Saqqāf (1839–1916); the Nihāya of Nawawī al-
Bantanī; the Iʿāna of Sayyid Bakrī. All these authors and texts seem
to reflect the situation in Cairo three centuries earlier, when Anṣārī,
Ramlī, Ibn Ḥajar and Sharbīnī wrote commentaries on the Minhāj.
Now in Mecca, these new Shāfiʿīs engaged with the Fatḥ-Qurra in
the same spirit. Of course the circumstances then were much
different from what they had been in sixteenth-century Cairo. Mecca
had become a larger epitome of the contemporary Muslim world,
bigger than the “new” city or region it used to be for Ibn Ḥajar and his
assumed student Zayn al-Dīn Jr. Moreover, there was hardly a
common source of inspiration for the four “commentators of the
Fatḥ”. ʿAlī Bā Ṣabrīn, for example, had finished writing Iʿānat al-
mustaʿīn five years before the author of the Iʿāna was even born.
Of these four commentaries, Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn is the earliest. Its
author ʿAlī Bā Ṣabrīn was a Ḥaḍramī who was born in Tarīm and
studied in Egypt and Mecca. He taught at Jeddah for some years
before he returned to Ḥaḍramawt. He reinstated the Yemeni legalist
tradition through his works.21 He must have studied the Fatḥ in
Mecca, since it was widely taught there and in the Hijaz at large.22
Among his teachers were Indians and Jāwīs.23 In the introduction to
the Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn he elaborates on his intention when he
decided to teach the Fatḥ.

When I decided to teach it for a few colleagues, God made the

situation and atmosphere perfect for me and for them. But I
could not find any materials on it, I mean, explaining its
meanings. I do not know if anyone has written anything on it
ever or spent time on it. It deserves to be expounded for what it
has presented … and it is one of the best texts to contemplate
among plenty of other texts, especially for its being the mainstay
of the school and for the clarity of its insinuations.24

He goes on to explain his methodology and sources for writing it. As

a manuscript his text was widely circulated during his lifetime.25 It
was utilised by many scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in their legalistic engagement. We find citations from it in
renowned supercommentaries of the Tuḥfa. Yet the work has never
been printed and so it is circulated only in manuscript form.26
The author of the next commentary, the Tarshīḥ, was ʿAlawī al-
Saqqāf. He was born and brought up in Mecca and became an
important figure among the ʿAlawī Sayyids in the city. He wrote many
other works, including one on the Sayyid lineage titled Ansāb ahl al-
bayt, and another on the history of hierarchising disputes by Shāfiʿī
texts and scholars.27 The latter text is an abridgment of Muḥammad
bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī’s Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya, but he made
additions, including inserting the title of his own commentary on the
Fatḥ as one of the noted texts of the school.28 In the introduction to
the Tarshīḥ he explains the relevance of the Fatḥ and the need for a
new commentary. He says that a few scholars have recently
attempted to clarify meanings and oddities in the Fatḥ, but these
could leave the reader confused, as the original text is too concise
and precise and a recent commentary is misleading.29 This reproof
was primarily targeted at the Iʿāna. The authors were colleagues in
Mecca but apparently did not like each other.30 The book is also
written in a form for it to be printed, unlike earlier texts which were
primarily designed to be circulated as manuscripts. He explains that
the structure of the text in its printed form would show the original
text at the top of the page, and his commentary underneath. After
the Iʿāna, the Tarshīḥ became one of the most reliable commentaries
on the Fatḥ for teachers and students in the institutions of Shāfiʿīsm.
This wider receptivity might be due to the fact that it was printed in
the late nineteenth century, facilitating a wide circulation along
scholarly networks.
Why did I choose the Nihāya and the Iʿāna out of four
commentaries written almost at the same time and in the same
place? The Iʿāna is important because of its wider acceptance and
higher status among Shāfiʿī jurists. Anyone who knows the Fatḥ also
knows this commentary, even if they might not know its base text,
the Qurra, or other commentaries.31 Also it represents the linguistic,
ethnic and political identities of two other commentaries, Tarshīḥ and
Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn, in contrast to the Nihāya. The Nihāya is an
idiosyncratic commentary in the sense that it was written by a
Javanese scholar who primarily studied in Indonesia before he built
a successful career in Mecca. A close reading of the Iʿāna and
Nihāya thus demonstrate a synthesis of different regional and
cultural pedigrees in the nineteenth-century Shāfiʿī cosmopolis, in
contrast to the diversion furthered by the Fatḥ in the sixteenth
century in the Indian Ocean rim.
The five texts together represent the large body of postclassical
Shāfiʿī commentarial tradition. They generated and demonstrated
diverse cohesions and divisions in the school while advancing its
expansion from a micro-network in ninth-century Cairo to large
transregional networks spread across South|East Asia and Africa in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The momentousness of the
texts in the school, from the clan matriarch Umm and its abridgement
Mukhtaṣars to their distant successors Fatḥ, Iʿāna and Nihāya, thus
provide us a rich and interconnected repository to understand the
layered process of juridical articulations and circulations in the
heartlands and oceanic littorals of Islam. What then is the nature of
the Shāfiʿī commentaries: what are their contents and major
discussions, how are they organised, and what do they look like? We
turn to these questions now.
 Architectonic Design
The legal texts in the postclassical Shāfiʿī school followed an almost
similar architectonic design in the form, structure and organisation of
the chapters and content. They differed from the textual architecture
and organisational pattern of al-Shāfiʿī’s Umm in the classical period.
In both periods, the texts start with a discussion of ritual laws,
whether it is the Umm or the works in the Minhāj family, but they
diverge into different topics and structures to discuss the themes of a
chosen priority.32
Ghazālī’s works had an overarching impact on the organisation
of the Shāfiʿī texts. His substantive legal corpus, the Wasīṭ family,
introduced a quadripartite division of the entire Islamic legal
discussions: rituals (ʿibādāt), commerce (muʿāmalāt), marriage
(munākaḥāt) and crimes (jināyāt). Ghazālī organised his texts Basīṭ,
Wasīṭ and Wajīz into these four major sequential sections, and later
scholars followed this pattern in their works, not only the progenies
of the Wasīṭ family but across familial divides. Some core texts
coined their own variations but largely this remained as the standard
organising pattern of the school’s texts.33 In the sixteenth century,
Ramlī wrote about the rationale behind this sequential organisation
and division of all the legal discussions in a hierarchical manner:

It is beyond doubt that the divine laws are related to rituals,

commerce, marriage or crime, because the purpose of the
prophetic mission is to regulate the situations of humankind in
 this world and the next. This regulation is achieved only by
addressing entirely their powers of reason, desire and anger. …
Among them the most important are the rituals because of their
high status, then comes commerce because of its utmost
necessity [in everyday life], then marriage because it is next in
position for necessity, then crimes, because of their rarity
compared to the previous ones.34

This quadripartite division of laws, however, does not include all the
themes discussed in the Shāfiʿī texts. The sections on laws of
inheritance, war, hunting and slaughtering, food and judicial
procedures do not strictly fall into any of these four divisions, and
therefore we find discussions on these topics dispersed in different
sections, mostly as independent chapters, but sometimes as parts of
other chapters. The authors arrange them as they decide, though
many of them follow similar patterns. Inheritance laws may come
between commercial and marital laws, while the others come after
criminal laws.
The Minhāj and its textual descendants mostly follow this
organisational style, for it in turn depended on the Muḥarrar, whose
author Rāfiʿī was highly influenced by the juridical undertakings of
Ghazālī, as mentioned. Neither text names or demarcates the four
sections as such, but they follow this sequence of organisation in
their division of the contents. Both texts comprise around seventy
“books” (kitāb, pl. kutub) of uneven length, which are mostly sub-
divided into multiple chapters (bāb, pl. abwāb) with subtitles (faṣl, pl.
fuṣūl).
 The themes discussed in the Minhāj and its textual
predecessors and descendants include almost every legal theme
commonly found in premodern legal texts. They are categorised as
“books”, and each “book” and its chapters discuss laws ranging from
rituals to slavery. The Minhāj starts with books on purity, prayer,
congregational prayer, funerary rituals, compulsory charity, fasting,
retreat to the mosque, and hajj pilgrimage, all of which are part of
ritual laws. Then it continues with books on sale, sale by advance,
security, bankruptcy, partnership, power of attorney, avowal, loan,
usurpation, pre-emption, partnership and joint-stock, farming leases,
contract of hiring, occupation of unused lands, endowment, gifts,
things found, foundlings, jobs, inheritances, wills, deposits,
distribution of booty and profits of war, and distribution of taxes, all of
which constitute commercial laws. Then it has books on marriage,
dowries, favours and disobedience, repudiation, divorce, return to
marriage, oath of continency, harmful comparison, redemption,
imprecation, waiting period, absolution, fostering relationships and
maintenance. All of these are marital laws. Then it brings in criminal
laws with books on crimes against the person, blood money, cases
of crimes against the person, rebels, apostasy, fornication,
defamation, amputation, beverages, homicide and responsibility of
damage, military expeditions, poll-tax, armistice, hunting and
slaughtering, sacrifices, foodstuffs, racing and shooting competitions.
Then it discusses procedural laws with books on oaths, vows,
administration of justice, witnesses, claims and evidence. In the final
part, it has books on slavery laws, with separate treatment of
manumission, testamentary manumission, enfranchisement by
contract and freedom based on maternity.35
Most of these books have several chapters and subsections,
especially in the ritual laws, but several do not have any separate
chapters, as in the sections on commercial, marital and criminal
laws. For example, in the first book on purity, there are chapters on
causes of impurity, ablution, moistening footgear, bathing, impure
materials, dry ablution and menstruation, whereas the last books on
slavery laws do not have separate chapters but have only
subsections. Within these books and chapters the Minhāj covers all
potential legal topics and issues known at the time. Some specialists
of Shāfiʿī textual tradition have enumerated the total number of legal
problems (masāʾil) it analyses and say that there are 70,000
problems explicitly discussed, and many more implicitly, to be
identified after examining the minute details of the text.36
Minhāj’s direct commentaries follow this textual architecture, but
the Fatḥ (and its base text as well as the commentaries) is different.
Instead of using a “book”, it uses a “chapter” (bāb) to divide different
segments, and they are more limited in number. Whereas the Minhāj
had more than seventy books, the Fatḥ has only around twenty
chapters. Each chapter, however, has numerous subchapters and
subsections. This organisational division makes it easier to follow the
skeletal structure of the text. By way of an example we note that
under its first chapter, which is on the prayer, it brings together
discussions on purity and impurity, and different forms of prayers,
such as congregational, collective and funerary prayers. It uses the
term faṣl to mark major subsections, which were categorised as
chapters in the Minhāj. Under a faṣl it mostly uses the term farʿ
(literally, “subdivision”) to discuss related subthemes, but
occasionally uses other terms: “remark” (tanbīh); “bonus” (fāʾida);
“maxim” (qāʿida); “conclusion” (tatimma). These segments discuss
directly or indirectly related legal or extra-legal issues.
While most Shāfiʿī texts open their discussions with a section on
ritual purity, the Fatḥ started its discussion with a chapter on prayer.
It brings in discussions on purity as a prerequisite to prayer and
therefore as a subtheme of the laws of prayer. This change from the
school’s usual textual architecture made Fatḥ’s commentator Sayyid
Bakrī write as follows in his Iʿāna: “He started the text with [a
discussion on] the prayer, going against the preference of the earlier
and later jurists in prioritising the chapter on purity and related
discourses, because the prayer is the most important among the
divine laws and most meritorious among physical rituals after the two
testimonials.”37 The Fatḥ differs from the Minhāj in several other
places in arranging the chapters or themes. Even so, its overall
structure is very much within the sequence of the quadripartite
division of the Shāfiʿī school.
Besides the physical structure of the texts, the intertextuality and
textual connectivity within these texts as well as other texts within the
school are worth a comment. Despite recurrent engagements with
previous opinions, we find hardly any reference in the Minhāj to a
particular text or individual scholar when an opinion is cited. It is
difficult to determine who actually said something or where it was
said. The author felt the expressions “it is said” or “in a ruling there
is” were enough. Even with his usage of the word naṣṣ, which should
refer to a statement by al-Shāfiʿī himself, we are not told to which
text, let alone to which chapter or section, he refers. Some
commentators have tried to provide details of the references, but not
always successfully, as many texts on which Nawawī depended
were lost over time. The use of special categories and terms in the
Minhāj to indicate different opinions on each issue collects many
opinions in order to build up a conclusive selection of the “most
evident” or the “most legitimate” viewpoints of the school. That would
not have been possible if the author had not had access to all the
literature of the school and independence to engage with the norms
of both the school and the fuqahāʾ estate.38 It should be noted that
these terms for systematisation (or more convincingly terms of
customisation) became the accepted terms for discourse in the
Shāfiʿī tradition.
A noteworthy difference in the Tuḥfa is in its mode of “textual
connectivity”; that is, the relative frame of reference with regard to
the preceding Shāfiʿī textual corpus. When it cites an opposite or an
authentic viewpoint of a scholar it usually refers to the scholar alone
without mentioning from which particular text it is taken. This is
something that we also see in the Minhāj itself. A serious reader then
has to find out in which text of that particular scholar such an
argument has been made. This was an important catalyst in the birth
of commentaries, supercommentaries or marginalia, which
endeavour to provide exact citations, but it is a challenging process
called taṣḥīḥ or taqrīr. This general trend in the Tuḥfa changes in two
contexts: first when it refers to Nawawī; secondly when it refers to its
author’s other works. In both situations it provides the title of the text
in which the argument is presented. The Fatḥ primarily refers to the
works of Ibn Ḥajar, especially his Tuḥfa, and it prioritises his oeuvre
over other contemporary scholars, and the teachers in chains going
back to Nawawī and Rāfiʿī. The major sources for the Iʿāna and
Nihāya are various commentaries and supercommentaries of the
Minhāj and Tuḥfa, as is elaborated in subsequent chapters.
To refer to the textual interconnectivity, the Shāfiʿī texts
accommodated different semiotic strategies utilising the possibilities
of manuscript culture in which specific letters, signs and quotes were
normally written in a different colour, usually red, than the main body
of the text, usually in black. In the Wajīz, Ghazālī explains his own
scribal techniques as he utilised red signs of single letters to indicate
the opposite view to that of the school stated in the text. Illustrating
this semiotics, he writes in the preface that he identified the schools
of Malik, Abū Ḥanīfa and Muzanī and the distant views of the
companions with specific Arabic letters written in red above the
words.

‫م‬ ‫ح‬
Thus mīm ( ) is the sign for Malik, ḥāʾ ( ) is the sign for Abū
‫ز‬
Ḥanīfa, zin ( ) for Muzanī. With these signs above the words, I
indicate their opposite views on the[specific] legal problems.
‫و‬
And a wāw ( ) in red above a word is for an uncommon view or
[al-Shāfiʿī’s] opinion egressed from the companions, and a dot
between two words separates two legal problems.39

These letter and sign codes indicate a larger terrain of discursive

tradition in Islamic law that would help us understand a counter-
narrative built into the main body of the texts. Just by reading these
signs in between the lines, one could construct a processual
contrarian substratum, independent of the main structure of the text
and standing opposite to the authenticated Shāfiʿī positions. Some of
these features also spread to the printing culture in which the
publishers utilised different design patterns to indicate base texts,
commentaries and supercommentaries. Two common patterns of
commentarial printed texts were, first, to provide the base texts in the
margins, the commentaries at the top of the page and
supercommentaries on the bottom; second, to give the base text and
the commentary in the margins and the supercommentary in the
main body of the text. In such patterns, the base text was
differentiated with parenthesis, and the main body contained more
than one supercommentary.
 Conclusion
This chapter has unravelled the interlinked trajectories of Shāfiʿī
jurists and texts to see how the tradition moved along the long
history through particular streams of textual productions and juridical
thoughts influencing one another. In their diverse roles related to law,
from adjudication and law-giving to teaching and writing, the jurists
stood as promulgators of specific legal texts and their ideas.
Similarly, the texts took centre stage in connecting and disconnecting
Shāfiʿī jurists across borders of time and place with simultaneous
internal divisions (along the lines of traditionalism against
rationalism, Khurasan against Iraq, Cairo against Mecca, oceanic
littorals and Islamic heartlands) and external cohesions (in relation to
other legal schools, such as Mālikīsm and Hanafīsm). In the long
history of Shāfiʿīsm, both texts and jurists are thus producers and
products of the school’s discursive expansion and their continuous
negotiations are pregnant with consequences on the ways in which
specific laws were interpreted and reformulated.
The texts both caused and synthesised conflicts in the Shāfiʿī
school. The trajectory of the Minhāj is the best example in this regard
as it mended an existing division in the school, but its own
commentators were divided on how to interpret the text and the law
at large. More commentaries and supercommentaries would repeat
this course a few centuries later, showing that the text–jurist
entanglements were reflected in the absorbing arena of a textual
longue durée. These jurists and texts were not obviously catering for
themselves or producing their own replicas; rather they concurrently
influenced both the everyday religious lives of laypersons through a
community of interpreters and legal arguments of the jurists. By
doing so, the texts and the jurists blurred the internal divisions
outwardly and made themselves relevant over several centuries and
across diverse lands. The variegated chronological and geographical
boundaries as well as the strategies for maintaining internal divisions
and external cohesions simultaneously make the Minhāj, Tuḥfa,
Fatḥ, Nihāya and Iʿāna outstanding texts worthy of closer analysis.
Among the plethora of Shāfiʿī texts within and outside the
Minhāj and Fatḥ families, any text may be unrelated to another
geographically, chronologically or methodologically, but all five texts
are related to one another genealogically, legalistically and
intellectually, cutting across borders of time and place, from
thirteenth-century Damascus to nineteenth-century Java and Mecca.
This textual complex represents the wider architectonic designs of
Shāfiʿī texts with a non-linear but unbroken thread running through
the canvas of the Shāfiʿī legal cosmopolis. There, the texts enabled
a network of comparable and connectable continuities and ruptures
in this long period and in widespread locations. A text was
continuously being debated and discussed in minute detail, which
produced a supplementary set of works, which in turn led to another
corpus. All of them not merely displayed an intellectual debt but often
showed direct genealogical dependence through progenies,
participants, personal contacts, certificates and chains of
transmission with a specific set of juridical solutions and judgements
rooted in the Shāfiʿī school and its own internal preoccupations. In
the following pages, we shall explore the continuities and changes in
this long textual tradition, with closer attention to each text, its author,
its socio-religious context, reception and legacy, in order to
understand the perceptible mechanisms of this textual longue durée
across the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis interconnected by degrees of
intellectual separation.

1 Hamza Fansuri (ascribed), Syair Perahu, as cited and translated

in V. I. Braginsky, …And Sails the Boat Downstream: Malay Sufi
Poems of the Boat (Leiden: Department of Languages and
Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, 2007), 306–307, 314–
315.

1Ahmed El Shamsy, “The First Shāfiʿī: The Traditionalist Legal

Thought of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Buwayṭī (d. 231/846)”, Islamic Law and
Society 14, no. 3 (2007): 304, 311 – on Muzanī’s role in the
conspiracy, referring to: ʿAlī bin al-Hasan Ibn ʿAsākir, Tārīkh
madinat Dimashq, ed. Muḥy al-Dīn al-Amrawī (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr,
1995–2001), 53: 359–360; cf. Christopher Melchert, “The Meaning
of Qāla’l-Shāfiʿī in Ninth-Century Sources”, in ʿAbbasid Studies,
ed. James E. Montgomery (Louvain: Peeters, 2004), 296–297.

2For some earlier references to this division, see Christopher

Melchert, The Formation of the Sunnī Schools of Law, 9th–10th
Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 100; Eric Chaumont, “al-
Shāfiʿīyyah”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; George Makdisi,
The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the
West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 116–117.
3Fachrizal Halim, Legal Authority in Premodern Islam: Yaḥyā b.
Sharaf al-Nawawī in the Shāfiʿī School of Law (New York:
Routledge, 2015).

4Nawawī, al-Majmūʿ sharḥ al-Muhaḏḏab, ed. Muḥammad Najīb

Muṭīʿī (Jeddah: Maktabat al-Irshād, n.d.), 1: 112.

5For example, compare the first two chapters of Wasīṭ and

Muhaḏḏab on purity law. Shīrāzī, Muhaḏḏab fī al-fiqh al-Imām al-
Shāfiʿī, ed. Muḥammad al-Zahīlī (Damascus: Dār al-Qalam &
Beirut: Dār al-Shāmiyya, 1992), 1: 39–87; Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī,
Wasīṭ fī al-maḏhab, ed. Aḥmad Maḥmūd Ibrāhīm (Cairo: Dār al-
Salām, 1997), 1: 107–140.

6 Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb bin ʿAlī al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-

Shāfiʿīyyat al-kubrā, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Ṭanāḥī and ʿAbd
al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-
Ḥalabī, n.d.), 4: 252–256, 5: 214–218; on the question of qibla,
see 5: 209–214.

7Sohaira Siddiqui, “Jadal and Qiyās in the Fifth/Eleventh Century:

Two Debates between al-Juwaynī and al-Shīrāzī”, Journal of the
American Oriental Society 139, no. 4 (2019): 923–944.

8 For his biography with an emphasis on his contributions to

traditional knowledge circulations, see Matthew B. Ingalls, The
Anonymity of a Commentator : Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī and the
Rhetoric of Muslim Commentaries (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2021).
9 Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī, al-Muḥarrar fī al-fiqh al-
Shāfiʿī, ed. Muḥammad Ḥasan Ismāʿīl (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
ʿIlmiyya, 2005).

10 By “our companions” (asḥābunā), Nawawī refers to his fellows

in the Shāfiʿī estate; though the term asḥāb usually connotes the
immediate disciples of al-Shāfiʿī, the connotation varies according
to the text or the author.

11Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa ʿumdat al-muftīn, ed. Muḥammad

Ṭāhir Shaʿbān (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 64, Princeton Garret
1388Y, fol. 1b; Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 3a; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 2a;
Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 1; Mecca FS 21, fol. 0b; Mecca FS 98, fol.
1b; Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Aḥmad bin
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥaddād (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya,
2000), 1: 74–75.

12 One commentary is Kashf al-durar fī sharḥ al-Muh̩arrar by

Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bin Yūsuf al-Sindhī al-Ḥiṣnkayfī (d. 1490),
and another by Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī al-Shīrazī (d. 1502). The two
abridgements, apart from the Minhāj of Nawawī, are the Ījāz by Tāj
al-Dīn Maḥmūd bin Muḥammad al-Kirmānī (d. 1404) and another
by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī bin Muḥammad al-Bājī (d. 1314). Muṣṭafā bin
ʿAbd Allāh Ḥajī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa al-
funūn (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth ʿArabī, 2008), 2: 1613.

13Muḥammad al-Kurdī, Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya fī man yuftā bi-

qawlih min aʾimmat al-Shāfiʿiyya, ed. Bassām ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-
Jābī (Limassol: Dār al-Jaffān wa al-Jābī & Damascus: Dār Nūr al-
Ṣabāḥ, 2011), 29, 39–40, 67, passim.
14 Taqiyy al-Dīn Abū Bakr bin Muḥammad Ḥiṣnī, Kifāyat al-akhyār
fī ḥall ghāyat al-ikhtiṣār ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Rashīd al-Khaṭīb
(Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2007), 632.

15 Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Aḥmad bin Ḥamza al-Ramlī,

Nihāyat al-muḥtāj ilā sharḥ al-Minhāj. King Saud University Riyadh
(hereafter KSU Riyadh) MS. 3687. This manuscript of the third
volume was written by one ʿAbd Allāh al-Munʿim bin ʿAbd Allāh bin
Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh bin Abī Bakr Ibn al-Suwaytī in 1612,
just sixteen years after Ramlī’s demise. For the full printed text,
see Ramlī, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, printed with supercommentaries of
ʿAlī al-Shabrāmalsī (d. 1676) and Aḥmad al-Maghribī al-Rashīdī
(d. 1685) (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 8 vols.

16 Ramlī, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, 1: 11–13.

17 ʿAbd al-Ḥayy bin Aḥmad Ibn al-ʿImād, Shaḏarāt al-ḏahab fī

akhbār man ḏahab, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Arnāʾūṭ and Maḥmūd al-
Arnāʾūṭ (Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1991), 10: 561–562; ʿAlī Bāshā
Mubārak, Khiṭaṭ al-jadīda li Miṣr al-Qāhira wa mudunihā wa
bilādihā al-qadīma wa al-shahīra (Būlāq: Maṭbaʿat al-Kubrā al-
Amīriyya, 1888), 12: 127–128.

18Shams al-Din Muhammad bin Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī, Mughnī al-

muḥtāj sharḥ al-Minhāj li al-Nawawī, KSU Riyadh MS. 6048. This
manuscript is written by a certain Najm al-Dīn in 1572, just three
years after the death of Sharbīnī. Thus the copyist must have
copied it from the original manuscript.

19Its legacy can be compared to that of Blackstone’s

Commentaries on English common law.
20 Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Kōya al-Shāliyātī, al-ʿAwāʾid al-dīniyya fī
talkhīṣ al-Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya, ed. ʿAbd al-Naṣīr Aḥmad al-
Shāfiʿī (Cairo: Dār al-Baṣāʾir, 2010), 72.

21One telling example is his Ghāyat talkhīṣ al-murād min Fatāwā

Ibn Ziyād, a text based on the legal clarifications of the sixteenth-
century Yemeni scholar Ibn Ziyād’s text. On his other contributions
and a detailed biography, see Aḥmad bin Hummām bin ʿAlī al-
Qanawī, Manāqib al-Shaykh ʿAlī bin Aḥmad Bā Ṣabrīn, MSS.
Ẓāhiriyya no. 364: 10; Yūsuf al-Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir wa al-
durar fī ʿulamāʾ al-qarn al-rābiʿ ʿashar (Beirut: Dār al-Maʻrifa,
2006), 1: 881.

22On the details of Fatḥ being an important textbook in the Hijaz

and other places, see Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir, 165, 407, 526,
527, 1475, 1619, 1659, 1826.

23 Muḥammad Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh Bāḏīb, Juhūd fuqahāʾ

Ḥaḍramawt fī khidmat al-maḏhab al-Shāfiʿī (Amman: Dār al-Fatḥ li
al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr, 2009), 2: 984.

24 They include Faqīh ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Bakhsh al-Hindī, and Aḥmad

bin Muḥsin al-ʿAṭṭās, the muftī of Johor. ʿAlī bin Aḥmad bin Saʿīd
al-Ḥaḍramī, Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn ʿalā Fatḥ al-muʿīn, KSU Riyadh MS.
9, fol. 1v.

25 For example, see manuscripts preserved at KSU Riyadh (MS.

9) and recorded at the Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīyya (1: 531). The
former was copied on 17 June 1853 (10 Ramadan 1269), seven
years after it was first written, and it travelled through a number of
hands in the nineteenth century before it reached the collection.
The same goes for the one at the Dār al-Kutub (today the Egyptian
National Library and Archives).

26 I was able to locate one manuscript in Malabar at the Azhariyya

Library of Aḥmad Kōya al-Shāliyātī in two volumes. Photocopies of
the Shāliyātī-manuscript are preserved at religious educational
centres in the region. Other manuscripts are in Cairo and Riyadh,
the later has been digitalised and available at https://al-
mostafa.info/data/arabic/depot/gap.php?file=m015450.pdf (last
accessed on 28 June 2020).

27For the details of his other works, see Khayr al-Dīn al-Zarkalī,
Tartīb al-aʿlām (Beirut: Dār al-ʿIlm li al-Malayīn, 2002), 4: 249;
Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir, 1: 872–873.

28ʿAlawī al-Saqqāf, Mukhtaṣar al-Fawāʾid al-Makkiyya fī mā

yaḥtājuhu ṭalabat al-Shāfiʿīyya, ed. Yūsuf ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
Marʿashlī (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2004), 63.

29ʿAlawī al-Saqqāf, Tarshīḥ al-mustafīdīn bi taṣḥīḥ Fatḥ al-Muʿīn

(Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Musṭafā al-Bāb al-Halabī, 1970), 2.

30ʿAlawī al-Saqqāf, Mukhtaṣar al-Fawāʾid al-Makkiyya, 63;

especially see the editor’s footnote which clearly names the Iʿāna
and notes the bitter relationship between the authors.

31 For example, one anthropologist who conducted surveys in

more than twenty-five madrasas in Tanzania notes that the
commentaries Iʿāna, Tarshīḥ and Fatḥ “are more popular than the
original” Qurra. Gerard C. van de Bruinhorst, “Raise Your Voices
and Kill Your Animals”: Islamic Discourses on the Idd El-Hajj and
Sacrifices in Tanga (Tanzania): Authoritative Texts, Ritual
Practices and Social Identities (Leiden: ISIM and Amsterdam
University Press, 2007), 115.

32 The first volume of the Umm as available today in print starts

with a jurisprudential discussion, but once it comes to the
substantive legal discussions, it also starts with ritual laws.

33 ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Ibrāhīm Abū Sulaymān, Tartīb al-mauḍūʿāt al-

fiqhiyya wa munāsabatuh fī al-maḏāhib al-arbaʿa (Mecca: Jāmiʿat
Umm al-Qurā, 1988), 59–69.

34 Ramlī, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj.

35 Princeton Garret 1388Y; Leiden Or. 2227; Leiden Or. 1600;

Mecca FS 21; Mecca FS 98; Yaḥyā bin Sharaf Nawawī, Minhāj al-
ṭālibīn wa ʿumdat al-muftīn, ed. Muḥammad Ṭāhir Shaʿbān (Beirut:
Dār al-Minhāj, 2005); Yaḥyā bin Sharaf Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥaddād (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-
Islāmiyya, 2000).

36 Aḥmad Mayqarī Shumayla Ahdal, Sullam al-mutaʿallim al-

muḥtāj ilā maʿrifat rumūz al-Minhāj, ed. Ismāʿīl ʿUthmān Zayn
(Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 619.

37Abū Bakar Shaṭā aka Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn (Cairo:

Maṭbaʿat al-Āmirat/al-Mīriyya, 1883), 1: 21.

38 See Subkī’s comment on Nawawī’s rich library in his

introduction to Nawawī, Majmūʿ, 10: 4–5.

39Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Wajīz fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, ed. ʿAlī

Muʿawwid and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Arqam, 1997),
1: 105–106.
Part II
◈
◈
The ship plies the Eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth
century. In a while, it is going to be anchored in a Levantine
port. The captain and the crew negotiate whether to anchor at
Tyre, Akko, Jaffa or Gaza. Out of many options and a
compromise to stop at some of these places for a short visit,
the captain decides to anchor at Dor for longer. From this port
many passengers could venture further inland, following the
Via Maris, an ancient and still surviving route, identified now
as the Salah al-Din Road, after the Ayyūubid sultan who
traversed Egypt and Syria two centuries earlier with his
armies on the march between Cairo, Damascus and
Jerusalem.
From Dor, you can travel north-eastward to Damascus or
south-eastward to Jerusalem. Either way you follow the “Way
of the Philistines”, another name for this old international
coastal highway.
For now, let us travel to Damascus as most people do.
Once you cross Hazor and travel a day or two over well-
maintained roads, you arrive at the prosperous city of
Damascus. A city at the core of the Mediterranean trade,
despite being a few miles away from the coast. It was the first
place of rest for sojourners before taking the magnificent Silk
Road. If you come from the other direction, after travelling
along the Silk Road, Damascus was the last place of rest
before heading to the Mediterranean.
 The city’s highly fabled and valued steel offered you
several commodities to load onto the ship, together with
many kinds of dried fruits, grains, cloth, glass, etc. For its
riches and treasures, Damascus has historically been a
hotbed for Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and
Ottoman aspirations for wealth and power. They have all
made the city one of the oldest continuously inhabited places
on earth.
In the thirteenth century, Damascus narrowly escaped
the Mongol conquests that had plagued most places nearby.
When those places struggled, Damascus flourished with a
miscellany of cultures, intellectuals, poets, authors,
storytellers, etc.
Among them, you would find a scholar called Nawawī, a
man capable of affecting the course of your ship now headed
onward. He was bookish, in every sense of the term. If you
visited him, he would throw a book at you for you to read, so
that you would not waste your time and his time nattering.
There in his chamber in the middle of the city, he was busy
recapitulating the corpora of laws written before him in the
school of al-Shāfiʿī. He was codifying them and preparing
canons.
Despite his intractability, let us try to follow him. If we are
lucky we may even persuade him to come to our ship with his
story. What he did for the school echoed the work of his
contemporary Thomas Aquinas for Canon law on the
northern side of the Mediterranean, and what Zhu Xi had
done for Chinese classics and Confucianism a century earlier.
In the pandemonium of the city, can you hear his soft
voice?
 4
The Code
◈

“A text that revolutionised the Shāfiʿī school of law” is the best way to
characterise the law book Minhāj, the central subject of this chapter.
Soon after it was written in Damascus in the thirteenth century, it
acquired an immense popularity among Shāfiʿī jurists, to an extent
that no other text of the school ever achieved. In the following
centuries, it not only influenced but also framed the very ways in
which they spoke of their school. It inspired generations of jurists in
their legal-textual praxis, leading to the production of a copious
amount of commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic
renderings, etc., which continues to today. Its story presents an
interesting phenomenon in the histories of Islamic law, law and Islam
at large. This chapter explores its inception and trajectories. It asks
why so many jurists engaged with the text and what made it so
idiosyncratic that it influenced the textual discourses of such a large
community across centuries. We shall examine to what extent and
by what means it managed to shape the Shāfiʿī school in the
postclassical period, especially in certain parts of the Mediterranean
and across the Indian Ocean.
The thirteenth century was a period of drastic worldwide
changes following the large-scale Mongol invasions, the crusades
and the collapse of several long-existing kingdoms. As increasing
globalisation came into play, several new and unexpected characters
began to take centre stage while it lowered a curtain for many
entities. In the Islamic world, the high culture of existing aristocrats
and scholars underwent a series of crises. In the inner core, the
usual remnants of socio-political expansions had been shattered.
Thousands of lives had been lost. Not only had architectural edifices
tumbled down, but cultural institutions, such as colleges and
libraries, also suffered inestimable ruin. The colossal manuscript
collections of Baghdad were devastated while those elsewhere
blossomed. How was it that some were damaged by the wider
catastrophes in the Middle East, and others were protected and
flourished? As a text written at the wake of such dramatic events, the
story of the Minhāj provides some answers.
The Minhāj owes its production and reception to the institutional
dynamics that the fuqahāʾ estate encouraged in the Islamic world,
reacting to changing social, religious, economic and political
conditions. Thanks to its time and place in the thirteenth-century
Arab world, or more precisely in late-thirteenth-century Damascus, it
was infused with normative requirements which continued through
the longer tradition of Shāfiʿī legal discourses, and it catered to the
specific expectations of its time. This dimension facilitated its
extensive transmission, which in turn stimulated the longer
discursive tradition of the Shāfiʿī clusters, bringing about
standardised, hierarchised and systemised legal rulings, notions and
norms. It represented an author’s life-long project to codify and
canonise the school’s law through multiple works. The final product
was a fine-grained text of Shāfiʿī law, a code that condensed many
canons of the school and outshone all other previous codes.
The text stood at the forefront in changing the ways in which
Shāfiʿī law was interpreted, perceived and transmitted. Its innovative
accommodation of several legal devices, its application of new
jurisprudential methodologies, and its rectification of many
inaccuracies in earlier texts became significant for the school’s future
journeys. It upheld a strategy of juridical prioritisation in its
engagements with existing laws rooted in the longer textual tradition
of the school over more than five centuries. This strategy was
strongly influenced by its socio-cultural and politico-economic
contexts, which are identified in this chapter as the politics and
economy of prioritisation. Giving attention to its discussions of war
and trade against the background of the contemporary crusades and
the Mamlūk counter-crusades, we can identify the political aspects of
its prioritisations. We can recognise the economy of its citations if we
pay attention to its oceanic mercantile rulings. The author’s evident
familiarity with the mercantile worlds of the Mediterranean must have
motivated him to take a more “ocean-friendly” approach. Such a
strategy of juridical prioritisation involving the long tradition of the
school made impacts on the broader worlds of the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean through its commentaries and other textual
progenies.
 I shall begin with an overview of the author’s life and
contributions to the Shāfiʿī school of law, and then analyse the
internal and external features that contributed to the popularity of the
Minhāj, especially its jurisprudential techniques and methodological
innovations. Contextualisation of its rulings against the prevailing
social and economic background help us dissect the politics and
economy of its juridical prioritisation. Eventually I shall map the
circulation of the text across the Eastern Mediterranean and
demarcate its journey to the Indian Ocean. Throughout the chapter,
as elsewhere in the book, I cross-refer to its many manuscripts and
printed editions in order to understand the force of the original
formulations as well as the diverse readings adopted by its
audiences over the centuries.1
 the Author
Nawawī, the author of the Minhāj, is the most important figure in the
postclassical Shāfiʿī school. He was born and brought up in Nawā at
the south-western tip of present-day Syria.2 After his initial education
in his hometown he moved to Damascus at the age of eighteen to
pursue higher studies. He arrived in the city just seven years prior to
the final fall of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in 1258 at the hands of the
Mongols. After his arrival he consulted different scholars seeking
admission to and accommodation in a better institution. He finally
settled at the Rawāḥiyya College, which had been built by a wealthy
merchant for the purpose of teaching Shāfiʿīsm.
Nawawī studied with many renowned scholars in the city,
covering religious disciplines such as Qurʾān exegesis, ḥadīth, law
and jurisprudence, and extra-religious disciplines such as grammar,
logic, literature and linguistics. He specialised in law and ḥadīth, and
is said to have written about fifty works in these two disciplines,
though only around twenty are now available to us. He was known
among his contemporaries for his ability to learn things byheart and
to dedicate his entire time to learning. Following the common
practice of the time, he memorised many noted works, including
such aforementioned classical Shāfiʿī texts as Shīrāzī’s Tanbīh and
Muhaḏḏab, and Ghazālī’s Wasīṭ. After finishing his education, he
practised as a private scholar in Damascus, writing books, giving
legal opinions and teaching students independently. Before his
demise at the young age of forty-four, he was appointed as head of
the Ashrafiyya College, a premier institute in the city.
Nawawī is often glorified among later scholarly circles due to
their admiration for his works and lifestyle. During his stay and
studies at the Rawāḥiyya, he is said to have refused to accept a
stipend and consumed only food brought to him by his father.3 After
his education, hagiographers note that if a visitor came into his
chamber he would give the visitor a book to read so that neither
would waste their time. They also describe his exceptional lifestyle
along with some miraculous achievements.4 One such miracle is
directly related to his lettering of books and it places him above his
intellectual predecessor Rāfiʿī. The story goes that while he was
busy writing, the light went out, but suddenly his right index finger
began to shed light to enable him to continue writing. A similar story
is told about Rāfiʿī too. The light went out while he was writing, but
then a nearby date palm shed light for him. The narrator Ibn al-Naqīb
compares the two narratives, and says that Nawawī’s is more
impressive than Rāfiʿī’s because fingers would not usually provide
light but a date palm could, if used as firewood or the like.5 It is not
for us to judge the reality of these stories so much as to see the
Shāfiʿī clusters attempting to rank Nawawī and his intellectual
engagements above other high-ranked scholars.
During his short life he contributed some magna opera to
Shāfiʿīsm, all of which became prime references for later scholars,
who considered his legal opinions as “the maḏhab” or the official
view of the school. Among his legal texts, three works are
noteworthy: Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn, Majmūʿ and Minhāj. All three are
either a commentary or an abridgement of a previous text: the
Rawḍa is an abridgement of Rāfiʿī’s ʿAzīz (a commentary on
Ghazālī’s Wajīz); the encyclopaedic Majmūʿ is an unfinished
commentary of the Muhaḏḏab by Shīrāzī; and the Minhāj is an
abridgement of Rāfiʿī’s Muḥarrar. He also wrote other legal works,
but they have not attracted as much attention.6
He seemed to have possessed a private library with outstanding
collections in law and ḥadīth. He talks about copying down the works
he studied at the college or with independent teachers. This helped
him establish an initial collection of his own, with additional texts he
acquired. Although we do not know how comprehensive or extensive
it was, the personal library arguably made him one of the more
privileged scholars of his time in Damascus. We can assume its
depth and breadth on the basis of his extensive cross-references to
the preceding and contemporary works of the school and beyond.
That assumption can be strengthened on the basis of the fact that a
contemporary catalogue of the Ashrafiyya Library contains very few
known texts of the Shāfiʿī school.7 If such a prestigious college
library, where he also worked, did not contain the majority of the
works he cites, we can imagine the lengths he went to possess or
access those resources. His efforts to collect and utilise such works
also led to his later recognition in the school. A few decades later,
the Egyptian jurist Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 1344) commented upon
the impressive collection of law books Nawawī had at his personal
disposal.8 Subkī was trying to finish one of Nawawī’s incomplete
commentaries, and he confessed that he could not do justice to the
work for he did not have access to all those works.
 Personally Nawawī led a modest life with almost no income or
patronage for a long period of his career. He fasted most of his life
and ate only a tiny evening meal after the night-time prayers and
drank a cup of water before dawn. During his education he
depended on his father for food. His father brought him dry bread
and figs from the agricultural land he owned in the village. When he
was asked why he took no food from Damascus, Nawawī replied
that the city’s lands are filled with religious endowments which legally
should not be used for cultivation. He also added that the food from
there was grown on a sharecropping system, the legitimacy of which
was questioned by jurists.9 He wore little decent clothing and rarely
cleaned himself. He remained unmarried, for he believed that
marriage would distract him from the pursuit of knowledge. This
ascetic way of life meant that he did not have to depend on anyone
from the nobility for patronage, and that also contributed to
constructing his legacy among the fuqahāʾ estate. Towards the end
of his life he took up a position as head of the famous Ashrafiyya
College, yet there too he refused to take a single penny as salary.10
Whether he was working independently or affiliated to a college,
he was always a steadfast member of the fuqahāʾ estate. In his
case, the distinctions and interactions between an individual, estate,
society and state were very clear. In a bitter epistolary exchange with
the sultan of his time that is discussed in detail later in this chapter,
he managed to consolidate a consensus with other renowned
scholars in the city who were also either affiliated with other Sunnī
schools or held positions in the central mosques and institutions.11
He could and did amass their support through his constant
association with other jurists and scholars in Damascus. His
reputation for modesty, righteousness and straightforwardness as a
jurist motivated them to extend their support to him, not only when
standing against the sultan, but also while he was collecting books
and authoring texts.12
Although Nawawī himself rarely found or sought out political and
economic patronage, his works found immediate support among the
noble households of Damascus. Ruling and civil elites patronising
educational institutions and independent scholars was a general
praxis of the time in the city. For most scholars, too, this was
important as it secured their academic and personal ventures in
teaching or writing. Nawawī tried to escape from any system of
power into the comfort of the estate, but his teaching at the college
and his transmission of books could not escape the attention of
existing households, which craved power and status through
patronising any form or product of knowledge. If not during his
lifetime, afterwards his works were glorified not only for their content
but also for metaphysical attributes, such as baraka (talismanic
power). A family who inherited his books is said to have kept two of
them for blessings (li al-tabarruk).13
 Career of the Minhāj: Processes of
Codification
Nawawī is known as the editor (muḥarrir) of the Shāfiʿī school,
because he examined its rich and diverse juridical tradition,
hierarchised one contrasting view over another, and stated the
official and preponderant viewpoints.14 His works stand as proof of
this long process, especially the Minhāj as its culmination. The text
has attracted most of the followers and observers of the school.
Many factors contributed to this, some internal and others external. I
shall examine the internal factors first, looking into its contents,
methodologies and the narrative style that the author followed to
codify the school’s viewpoints.
The Minhāj can be seen as a logical progression from his legal
writings and thought patterns. In the Majmūʿ, he placed equal
emphasis on revelation, disputes and the maḏhab (the official view
of the school); in the Rawḍa, he eliminated revelation while
sustaining the disputes and official views. In the Minhāj, he
eliminated revelation and most disputes to concentrate on the
maḏhab.15 By doing so, he made the latter a refined code of the
school. While the Majmūʿ and Rawḍa can be identified as part of his
canonisation attempts, the Minhāj is a code built upon the canons.
Contrasting and criticising many viewpoints put forward by the
Muḥarrar, the Minhāj tried to provide the most reliable legal opinions
on issues. In the Muḥarrar, Rāfiʿī had made an attempt to write such
a broadly conceived editorial work, but in the opinion of Nawawī it
contained many erroneous arguments, citations, among other faults.
He explained what he felt about the inaccurate statements raised in
the Muḥarrar against the authentic opinions in the school and how
he would deal with them.16 He rectified those by writing an
abridgement which led him to being celebrated as the editor of the
school.
The best juridical text is one which is presented most
systematically. The Minhāj arranged hierarchically legitimate
opinions within Shāfiʿī legal thought, which by that time had
developed extensively with many contradictory rulings on the same
issues. Its task was to prioritise these contradictory viewpoints by
giving preference to the rulings of one particular scholar or group of
scholars over another scholar or group. This was done on the basis
of intellectual integrity and commitment to the opinions of the
founder, al-Shāfiʿī. It achieved this goal by a closer examination of
the vast amount of literature produced over a period of about five
centuries.
Nawawī presented his findings and arguments using specific
technical terms that connote the opinions of an individual scholar or
a group of scholars. These are elaborated in the introductory lines of
the Minhāj:

Wherever I use the terms al-aẓhar (the more manifest) or al-

mashhūr (the well-known), it is a reference to [the existence of]
two or more qawls. If the dispute is strong, I say al-aẓhar,
otherwise al-mashhūr. Wherever I use the terms al-aṣaḥḥ (the
more valid) or al-ṣaḥīḥ (the valid), it is a reference to two or
more wajhs. If the

Figure 4.1 Cover folio of an early Minhāj manuscript, Leiden

University Special Collections, Or. 2227.
 Figure 4.2 A comparable cover of another early Minhāj
manuscript, Princeton University Library, Garret 1388Y.

dispute is strong, I say al-aṣaḥḥ, otherwise al-ṣaḥīḥ. Wherever I

say the maḏhab, it indicates two or more ṭarīqs. Wherever I say
the naṣṣ it refers to a text of al-Shāfiʿī and signifies the
existence of a weak wajh, or a derived qawl. Wherever I refer to
the new view (jadīd), the old view (qadīm) is its opposite; and if I
refer to the old view, then the new view is its opposite. If I say
wa qīla (it is said), this indicates a weak wajh and the valid or
the more valid view is its opposite. Wherever I say, according to
a qawl, then the preponderant one is its opposite.17

This “paraphernalia of disputes”, as Norman Calder calls it, indicated

by many technical terms, shows on the one hand the richly multiplied
contrasting views within the school, and on the other hand how
important it is to read and understand the multiple layers of Shāfiʿī
discursive tradition as contained in the Minhāj. By accommodating
these many contradictory and complementary views, the Minhāj
wanted to achieve three goals: first, categorise different strands of
opinions; second, hierarchise multiple views; and third, prioritise the
most dependable view of different categories which often cut across
hierarchies. There are four categories: (i) the views of al-Shāfiʿī; (ii)
the views of his disciples; (iii) the views of other previous scholars;
(iv) the views of the author. These categories are then hierarchised:
(i) naṣṣ or statements of al-Shāfiʿī without contradicting himself; (ii)
qawl or al-Shāfiʿī’s views with contradictions; both naṣṣ and qawl are
sub-hierarchised as new and old views; (iii) wajh or opinions
expressed by the companions of al-Shāfiʿī; (iv) ṭarīq or disputes
among the companions of al-Shāfiʿī in citing the maḏhab; (v) qultu or
the personal views of the author. The order of prioritization is: (i)
naṣṣ or the uncontradicted opinion of al-Shāfiʿī; (ii) aẓhar or the
strong qawl; (iii) mashhūr or the weak qawl; (iv) aṣaḥḥ or the strong
wajh; (v) ṣaḥīḥ or the weak wajh; (vi) wa fī qawl kaḏā or the view
contradictory to qawl; (vii) wa qīla kaḏā or the view contradictory to
wajh; (viii) qultu or the personal view.18
This “paraphernalia of dispute” not only set a trend in later
Shāfiʿī legalism, but it also became crucial in understanding the
intellectual tradition of the school. The naṣṣ of al-Shāfiʿī, sub-
hierarchised as old and new views, is either found in al-Shāfiʿī’s own
writings or is narrated by two respective sets of his students. The old
views emerge from his book Ḥujja and Imlāʾ and are recounted by
his four students.19 The new views can be found in his Umm and two
Mukhtaṣars by two of his students, Buwayṭī and Muzanī. Apart from
these two, other disciples also have narrated his new opinions.20
Generally, the new opinions should be prioritised over the old ones,
but Shāfiʿī scholars have often gone against this rule (on at least
eighteen occasions), as did the Minhāj on twenty-eight occasions by
mentioning the old view.21 Its use of the term naṣṣ implies that later
scholars took a view which is opposite to the opinion of al-Shāfiʿī,
and that their opposition is weak and cannot be taken into account.
The same can be said in the case of other hierarchised opinions,
such as wajh or ṭarīq, although the degree of validity and recognition
changes contextually. In fact, the Minhāj itself often prioritises such
weak opinions over stronger ones, for reasons discussed later in this
chapter.22
This scheme of hierarchisation and prioritisation in the Minhāj
involves differentiation through inequality and equalising.
Hierarchisation denotes sequentially positioned categories of
unequal weight. Each item in this hierarchy claims a position for
itself. Religious attributes along with the juridical notions of a prior
time, text, context and institutionalisation help sustain the hierarchy.
But the prioritisation seeks the possibility of equalising opinions and
stands for equalising hierarchies beyond any temporal, textual or
institutional sequence. The context of the text and the author
demands equalisation beyond sequentiality and timelines. That is
what actually makes the system of criteria of the Minhāj a historical
product of its particular context, inasmuch as it endeavours to stand
within a long tradition.
 The systematic approach to the paraphernalia of disputes
facilitates placing its own standpoints at the top of the legalist
progression of the school but in a humble way. This is clear from the
overlap of both naṣṣ and qultu in hierarchisation as well as in
prioritisation. In prioritising contradictory views it always ranked the
opinions of al-Shāfiʿī himself or his immediate disciples highly. But
that did not restrain Nawawī from expressing his personal opinions,
which he frequently does, using the terms qultu (I said) or aqūlu (I
say) at the beginning; at the end he uses wa allāhu aʿlam (and God
knows best) as a mark of humility. Even when he had accumulated
many contrasting viewpoints on an issue within the school, in the
end he pushed ahead with the most dependable opinion, sometimes
along with his own personal opinion.
All these components made the Minhāj a primary reference text
in Shāfiʿī circles, giving a practitioner of law many hierarchised
viewpoints on the same issue. This aspect also indicates how legal
thought within the school developed through opposing discourses
over centuries, long after its so-called classical phase. It is true that
the Minhāj stresses the opinions of al-Shāfiʿī on an issue, but it also
accumulates the viewpoints of his disciples and jurists from the
second, third, fourth and even the seventh generation after him.
Through this approach it relies not only on the scholars of the
classical period, but also gives similar weight to later scholars of the
school. One example of this development of legal thought up to the
thirteenth century is the following discussion of deciding whether
water is polluted:
 A dead insect without flowing blood would be exempted [from
the impure things]. It would not corrupt liquid objects, according
to the mashhūr. Likewise in a ruling there is (wa kaḏā fī al-qawl):
this is an impurity so slight as to be appreciable. I say, this ruling
is the aẓhar; and God knows best. The running water is like
stagnant water. In the qadīm, it would not be impure without a
change. Two qullas [of water] are approximately 500 Baghdadi
pounds, according to the aṣaḥḥ. The effective adulteration of
purity or impurity is [with a change in] taste, colour, or smell. If
someone confuses pure water with impure, he should
investigate, and should purify himself with what he thought is
pure. It is said, if he is able to [get water] with no doubt about its
purity, then it is not [lawful]. The blind is like the sighted, in the
aẓhar. If [someone is confused between] water and urine, he
should not investigate, according to the ṣaḥiḥ. Instead, he
should mix the contents of two [vessels] and then should do
ablution with dust.23

In these lines, we notice how the Minhāj puts together contrasting

viewpoints, expressed by different legal scholars at different points of
time and place, in order to make a logical progression with a
conscious process of prioritising over any hierarchies. Before the
aẓhar, he places a contradictory view of wajh indicated by “it is said”.
After that there is a contradictory view from a different hierarchy,
reconciling the sequence of the argument. The underlined words
specify that there is an opposite view to what is mentioned, and it is
up to the practitioner to choose whether to agree with what is or is
not mentioned, though without opposing the legal tradition in any
way.24
The contrasting views of the Muḥarrar and Minhāj could be
illustrated well by an example. In a discussion related to the penance
owed if someone misses obligatory fasting in the Arabic month of
Ramaḍān, the Muḥarrar states:

If someone missed fasting in one or more days of Ramaḍān and

died before he could do it due to his persistent illness, there is
no need [for someone else] to do it for him and do penance for
him. If he died after he could have redone it, then his guardian
(waliyy) should not fast on his behalf according to the new view.
Instead, it should be requisitioned from his residual property with
a mudd of food for each day.25

The Minhāj puts it in a different way:

Someone who missed anything from Ramaḍān and died before

he could recompensate, then there is no redemption for him and
no sin. If he died after he could recompensate, his guardian
should not fast on behalf of him, according to the new view.
Instead it should be requisitioned from his residual property with
a mudd of food for each day. The [ruling of] vow (naḏr) and
atonement (kaffāra) are only like that. I say, the old view is the
aẓhar here. And, the guardian is every relative, according to the
“authentic” view (mukhtār). If a stranger fasted with the
permission of the guardian, it is valid; not independently in the
aṣaḥḥ. If someone dies owing a prayer or retreat to the mosque,
 it would not be done on his behalf and no requisitioning. In the
retreat to the mosque there is a qawl; and God knows best.26

Minhāj’s additions involve personal opinions based on previous

standpoints, and update the limited perspectives of the Muḥarrar on
those issues. We can also notice how it prioritises the old view over
the new one, in contrast to the approach of the Muḥarrar. Similar
alterations can be seen throughout the Minhāj. The “beneficial
valuables” it claims to add to the Muḥarrar are thus important, as
they were elaborated in the preface:

Those include emphasis on some conditions in some problems

which are omitted in the original; ascertaining some statements
of the Muḥarrar against the preferred viewpoint in the school, as
you will see in detail if God wishes; replacing his [Rāfiʿī’s]
strange or unusual incorrect wordings with more clear and
precise glittery phrases; explaining two qawls, two wajhs, two
ṭarīqs, naṣṣ and hierarchies of dispute on every occasion.27

These additions, especially the last one, make the Minhāj a text that
takes the reader into the details of discursive legal tradition that
evolved within the school from the late eighth to the thirteenth
centuries.
The Minhāj’s stated objective was to “abbreviate [the Muḥarrar]
to about half” and “smooth memorisation”, and this was achieved in
an impressive manner. Unlike many previous works in Shāfiʿīsm, the
Minhāj does not beat around the bush with multitudes of
metaphorical and allegorical phrases and terms. It rather comes
straight to the point with succinct summaries of legal rulings. It also
shows consistency in its use of specific Arabic terms instead of
resorting to customary synonyms: qawl and wajh for example have
specific meanings. The phrases indicating a contraindication for a
ruling in an issue are summarised with “…wa illā falā” (…if not, it is
not); or, in other words, if the conditions are not met, it is not allowed
or legalised. Nawawī emphasises his strict and confident use of
terms: “Whatever extra terms and such things you get more than
what is there in the Muḥarrar, you rely on them; those are inevitable.”
He also applies this to his other additions in the Minhāj, such as
chant (ḏikr, pl. aḏkār) or prayer: “You count on it. I have confirmed it
from the trustworthy ḥadīth-texts.”28
At the same time, there are many lacunae in the organisation of
contents, structure of sentences (some are illustrated in the above
translations), usages and juridical problems, which often make it
difficult to comprehend, even for a specialist reader. Experts can
struggle with its core technical terms, lexical items or sentence
structures. Some commentators and abridgers have attempted to
clarify them, and for this reason Anṣārī’s abridgement, Manhaj al-
ṭullāb, became another successful text in the school.29
In short, the scheme of hierarchisation and prioritisation that the
Minhāj incorporated into its juridical arguments has given it a
prominence over the similar approaches taken by such preceding
texts as the Muḥarrar. Through its systematic and consistent use of
the paraphernalia of disputes, it has put together contrasting
viewpoints of Shāfiʿī jurists across centuries in order to provide the
preponderant and dependable views of the school. Within his own
oeuvre and other texts in the school, Nawawī thus made the Minhāj
a sophisticated code of the school by eliminating scriptural and
discursive traditions and providing the rulings directly and
hierarchically.
 Politics of Prioritisation
In the existing historiography of Islamic law the substantive texts
have not generally been taken as a source for socio-historical
analysis.30 The reason for this is that there are comparatively few
references to a specific place or time for proscriptions in the normal
tradition of Islamic legalism. Scholars have demonstrated that the
fatwās offer many possibilities for social historians. Yet the
substantive legal texts have not yet been taken as a source for
socio-political, cultural history, nor have they been analysed to see
how they reflect changes in society. Certainly such texts are rooted
in and reflective of their historical contexts, even if they display a
universal outlook and the discursiveness of the longue durée. Here I
adduce a few examples of specific rulings related to the political
sphere of the Minhāj, which in turn reveal some of the external
factors that influenced its making.
In the section on war and trade in the Minhāj we can identify the
influence of ruptures in Shāfiʿī legal thought that substantiate a
discontinuity in putting forward or prioritising certain legal rulings
over others, and also substantiate continuity in particular issues.
With regard to wars, al-Shāfiʿī took for granted the problematic term
“jihād” as a monolithic phenomenon in the section entitled Kitāb al-
jihād wa al-jizya (“Book of War and Taxation”) in his Umm.31 His
student Muzanī replaced the term with siyar (literally “procession” or
“march”), a broader term that includes many forms of war, including
jihād. Only a war against aggressive non-Muslims constitutes a
jihād, whereas attacks on non-aggressive non-Muslims or on
aggressive Muslims fall into different categories. A time when the
Muslims were fighting each other under the leadership of Ayyūbids
or Mamlūks, and also battling against the crusaders, must have
motivated the Minhāj to follow the categorisation of Muzanī, which
was reinvented by Ghazālī and Rāfiʿī.
What stand do Nawawī and the Minhāj take in the ongoing
wars? Nawawī did not take part in the crusades or in the fights
between the Ayyūbids in Syria and the Mamlūks in Egypt. Instead he
thought it was not a scholar’s responsibility to take part in war as
long as the state maintained a stable army. He wrote this in a letter
of protest to the Mamlūk sultan Baybars, who pestered scholars for
not participating in the wars. Nawawī retaliated:

I am not worried about your threats or about anything bigger

than that … It is mentioned in [your] reply [to my previous letter]
that jihād is not an exclusive duty of the military. We also do not
claim it is. But jihād is a communal obligation. If the sultan
maintains a fixed army, and they have bread and salary from the
government treasury, other subjects are exempted [from
jihād].32

This is a very bold and clear statement against civil participation in

the ongoing wars and the state’s attempt to lure its subjects into
physical and financial support.33
Was his attitude towards the crusades and the stability of the
Mamlūks with the decline of Ayyūbids reflected in the Minhāj? Both
historical contexts have influenced its legal conclusions through a
process that I identify as the “politics of prioritisation”. By this I mean
that the text prioritises certain rulings over those put forward by an
earlier text when addressing the immediate context. Such
prioritisation has an influence on the temporal context of politics, war,
trade, culture and society. Many details, including the philological
formulations, selection and rejection of terms and phrases,
argumentation structures and additional information similar or
dissimilar to an earlier text, all enhance the politics of prioritisation.
For example, in the section on war it chooses not to use the
Qurʾānic verses “fight against the polytheists collectively” and
“fighting has been made obligatory to you”, as cited in the
Muḥarrar.34 Though the Minhāj generally avoids citing the Qurʾān or
ḥadīths, it occasionally does do so for the sake of its own
validation.35 In the context of the author’s reluctance as well as many
of his colleagues to fight against the crusaders, this is significant.
Furthermore, the Muḥarrar raises a question about the legal position
of war during the time of the Prophet Muḥammad, whether or not it
was an individual or a communal obligation, whereas the Minhāj
directly states that it was only a communal obligation. Hence, the
text implies that it is not obligatory on every individual as long as
some people in the community undertake this.
Beyond these formulations, selections and silences, the
prioritisation in its scheme of hierarchisation also demonstrates
contextual temporalities. On many occasions the Minhāj deals with
different categories or terminologies of the Muḥarrar as a single
category. After a military victory, a protected person (ḏimmī) is
allowed to participate in an agreement on taxation (jizya), into which
they can insert a clause on their right to maintain an existing temple
or church in the new Muslim land. The Muḥarrar says if they do not
insert such a clause, the ashbah opinion is that they should be
prevented from constructing or maintaining their places of worship in
the Muslim lands. But if the land belongs to them according to the
treaty, the aẓhar opinion is that they should not be prevented, but
should be allowed not only to maintain an existing place of worship
but even to build a new one. According to the aṣaḥḥ opinion, the
Muḥarrar adds further that they should be prevented from building
any equivalent structure near a Muslim one. If they commit
blasphemous activities against Islam, such as condemning the
Qurʾān or Muḥammad, according to the aqrab (“closest”) opinion the
conditions for the treaty will have been broken, but otherwise not.36
All these four rulings, that could connote different priorities for the
Muḥarrar, have been identified in the Minhāj under a single category
(aṣaḥḥ).37 Occasionally we see the opposite, when a single term of
the Muḥarrar has been put under different categories in the Minhāj in
a way that caters to its paraphernalia of disputes and politics of
prioritisation.
Philological nuances show a noteworthy side of its politics. One
can argue that choice of words in a legal text and context is bound
up with political inclinations. Keeping in mind Nawawī’s strongly
worded opposition against his (and other ordinary subjects’)
participation in state-initiated wars, we can find further nuances in his
statement of rulings on war. Many issues that the Muḥarrar presents
as “not allowed” or “allowed” have been replaced in the Minhāj as “it
is forbidden” or “it is meritorious”. The Muḥarrar uses the expression
laysa lahu, “not in one’s purview”, to stop a debtor who has reached
a deadline for repayment going on jihād without permission from the
creditor, whereas the Minhāj makes it ḥarām “prohibited”.38 As
regards forbidding jihād without the permission of Muslim parents,
the Muḥarrar says it is not sanctioned (lā yajūz).39 There are
theological implications for these legal terms. Prohibition (ḥarām) is
one of the five foundational Islamic commandments (aḥkām) that are
sinful and avoiding them are mandatory. But if someone does
something categorised as what is not in one’s purview or is not
allowed, it is not necessarily sinful.
All these contradictions show on the one hand the terminological
integrity of the Minhāj in relation to earlier text(s), as discussed.40 On
the other hand, they also explain the politics and subjectivity implied
in its schemes of hierarchisation and prioritisation. Once we look into
the parallel primary sources from thirteenth-century Damascus or the
Middle East in general, we understand that the Muslim involvements
in the counter-crusades were not as simple as has been portrayed in
previous literature. The historiography of crusades tends to show the
Middle Eastern Muslim world as a single block against Christendom,
ready to engage in the conflict at any point. The reluctance of
Nawawī and his colleagues from the fuqahāʾ estate to participate in
the war is a clear illustration of another side of the Mediterranean
Muslim attitude to the crusades. Minhāj’s prioritisation of certain
rulings over others provided a chance for some to disengage from
the battle. Such politicised prioritisations and disagreements reflect
dissenting voices within the Islamic world during the crusades while
standing within the broader framework of Islamic law.
From another point of view, Minhāj’s was not a lone voice.
During the lifetime of its author, the text was recognised among
scholars along with his known stand on the crusades and its position
on the laws of jihād. This shows that its arguments chimed with a
large audience that did not support or participate in war. We should
keep in mind that this was the time of the seventh, eighth and ninth
crusades and the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt. As Nawawī defended himself
in legal terms that jihād is only a communal obligation, the text’s
legal rulings on prohibitions, allocations and prioritisations acted as a
tool to legitimise reluctant Muslims’ abstention from war, to rule
against immodest behaviour towards non-Muslim subjects, or to
maintain societal norms and values even in the thick of the war. In
the later years of discursive tradition the text also had its influence as
a prominent point of reference in fatwās and practices of scholars,
militia and laypersons. Its juridical opinions were often consulted by
the counter-crusaders, including sultans. Since the Mamlūks mostly
followed the Shāfiʿī school as now codified by Nawawī in the Minhāj,
its rulings held significance in the ongoing wars.41
 Economy of the Prioritisation
While writing the Minhāj did or could Nawawī have turned his eyes
away from the prevailing economic contexts? Does the text reflect
the commercial issues and did they determine its juridical
conclusions? The place of the Minhāj in the context of the maritime
space of the Levant or the Eastern Mediterranean shore is rather
important. After the collapse of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate at the hands
of the Mongols, the Ayyūbids and Mamlūks fought each other to
control Egypt and Syria, and the crusades that had started two
centuries earlier were continuing even more viciously than before. All
this political and military unrest had affected the economy of the
region, which relied greatly on trade. Indeed, the Rawāḥiyya College
where Nawawī was located had been established by a rich merchant
whose wealth came from maritime trade.42 If we read the Minhāj’s
discussions on trade against this background, we cannot help but
notice some contextual influence on its judgements and articulations.
Similar to the politics of prioritisation in the text, there is also an
“economy of prioritisation”. It concerns ruptures in the Shāfiʿī
tradition by putting forward new laws or prioritising certain legal
rulings over others which are highly influenced by the requirements
of the contemporary economic context.
Trade as such has been a concern of Shāfiʿīsm from the time of
the Umm, a text which spends more than a thousand pages on
commercial laws.43 Even so, its early jurists arguably took stricter
attitudes towards economic transactions as practised in society and
disregarded the practical needs and realities of commerce. This
contrasted with the Ḥanafī school, one dubbed as a “medieval
Islamic law merchant”, because of its absorption of trade practices
within its ambit through diverse ḥiyal or “legal devices”.44 In the
postclassical period, the Shāfiʿī attitude changed, especially in terms
of maritime laws, and the Minhāj reflects this change. The cases
related to trade with unbelievers and maritime commerce illustrate
such ruptures. In Islamic law al-Shāfiʿī is the first scholar to set the
theocratic-geographical category of the “abode of Islam” (dār al-
Islām) against the “abode of war” (dār al-ḥarb) and the “abode of
treaty” (dār al-sulḥ).45 This was a classification that had enduring
consequences in the theoretical elaborations of later generations of
jurists, not only in relation to war but also to other aspects including
trade.
Many early Shāfiʿī jurists ruled that Muslims could engage in
proprietary partnerships only with Muslims in specific realms.46 But
in the Minhāj, Nawawī redefines this and includes everyone who
lived in a dār al-Islām, whether Christian or Jew, as long as they do
not express enmity to Islam and pay the poll tax.47 In this category,
the Minhāj even includes apostates and converts, who would
otherwise be sentenced to death.48 Many jurists do not agree with
him on this opinion. Yet this deviation of the Minhāj owes as much to
the realities of Mediterranean trade in his time as to the intrusions of
the Mongols overland. The frequent onslaughts by and occasional
alliances with the Mongols had a huge impact on the cultural and
economic realms of Islam that stretched from the Mediterranean to
the South China Sea and beyond. Although the Mamlūks managed
to make an alliance with one section of the Mongols, the Golden
Horde established by Batu Khan (d. 1255), their increasing influence
around the Black Sea, and by extension in the Persian Gulf and
Mediterranean, was beyond the control of Mamlūks.49 The new
commercial axis from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea which
developed in the late thirteenth century became crucial to the overall
existence of any community that lived around the sea, from the
Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. The legal deviations of Nawawī
are thus hardly surprising, and they become more explicit once we
look into his treatment of maritime trade.
In the network of transcontinental maritime trade, once we
compare and contrast the contents of the Muḥarrar and Minhāj,
some discontinuities catch our attention. Although the predominant
framework of the Minhāj follows the legal narrative theme of
traditional writings, including those of al-Shāfiʿī, Muzanī, Juwaynī,
Ghazālī and Rāfiʿī, it also occasionally differs from their viewpoints.
Familiarity with the oceanic world was comparatively less for the
earlier scholars, since they lived at a time when the Muslim
prominence in the sea was only evolving. But when we come to the
Minhāj and most of its commentaries and supercommentaries the
scenario drastically changes, since it was a period when maritime
trade and travel had increased unprecedentedly with strong
participation of “Muslim Mediterraneans” and the Indian Ocean being
labelled as an “Islamic Sea”.50 A simple example of this increasing
“oceanic turn” in the Islamic legal corpus, at least in Shāfiʿī texts, is
how the Minhāj brings the sea into a discussion of a traveller’s
obligations for prayer.51 Neither the Muḥarrar nor its predecessors in
Shāfiʿīsm mention a believer praying when travelling overseas,
whereas Nawawī clearly states that the seafarer must follow the
same rules as on an overland journey, with an additional ruling that
the speed of the journey does not alter the concession.
The oceanic dimension is clearer when we look at his
discussion on the right to cancel a transaction before both parties
leave each other. This legal right, called khiyār al-majlis (the option
of withdrawal during the contracting session), is rejected in the
Ḥanafī and Mālikī schools, but is permitted by the Shāfiʿīs. The
Minhāj dedicated a chapter to this right but did not engage with its
rejection in other schools or related discourses, following its usual
practice. In the Majmūʿ, Nawawī provides an elaborate justification
for the Shāfiʿī position. The issue of maritime trade was the reason
for the Ḥanafīs to reject the appropriateness of khiyār al-majlis by
raising the status of parties conducting business on a voyage. In
those circumstances they would not part from each other until the
ship reached shore, and that might take up to a year. But for Nawawī
such a long voyage is not a justification for suspending the normal
concession, and in the Minhāj he succinctly states that the
customary right of khiyār is maintained however long it takes for the
parties to go their separate ways: “If they stay for long, or stay and
move, khiyār endures for them. The departure depends on
custom.”52
By specifically mentioning moving location together and the
dependence on customary practices to define the parameters of
togetherness and separation, Nawawī accommodates what is
appropriate during an ocean voyage, when it would take an
unusually long time for separation. In the Majmūʿ, he elaborated on
this issue after citing two ḥadīths that allow the khiyār as long as the
parties have not separated:

The people of Kūfa transmitted the ḥadīth to Abū Ḥanīfa. But

Abū Ḥanīfa said, “This is not always the case. How would you
explain it if the contract is on a ship?” Ibn al-Madāʾinī said that
God asks someone about what he says. Al-Qāḍī Abū al-Ṭayb
and associates said that Abū Ḥanīfa and Mālik objected to all
the ḥadīth above. Mālik said that only Ibn ʿUmar narrated the
ḥadīth. Abū Ḥanīfa said that they could not accept it since it
does not explain the case while the contract is on a ship,
because both parties could not be separated. Mālik said, “The
practice among us in Medina contradicted the ḥadīth. The jurist
of Medina did not acknowledge the practice of khiyār al-majlis.”
The view of Mālik is that he would leave any ḥadīth that
contradicts the practice of the people of Medina. But our
associate said that these ḥadīths are all ṣaḥīḥ. Therefore Abū
Ḥanīfa’s and Mālik’s refusal to accept these ḥadīths is
unacceptable, since it is equal to discarding the correct, trusted,
and elaborated practice.
As for the objection of Abū Ḥanīfa regarding the case while on
a ship, we would say that the khiyār of parties continues as long
as they still remain together on the ship, even if [the voyage]
lasts for a year or more. I have already explained the case and
the evidence from the ḥadīth above. As for Mālik’s position, he
derived his isolated opinion from other jurists. Therefore his
 opinion to abandon the ḥadīth that contradicts the practice of the
people of Medina cannot be accepted. How can this view be
justified given the fact that the jurists who narrated the report
[about khiyār al-majlis] were no longer present at the time of
Mālik, or during the period before him when they were
concentrated in Medina or Hijaz? The fact is that the jurists who
narrated the report were already spread all over different
locations with each of them carrying parts of the report. They did
not share the report with each other, yet they transmitted the
same report. How can Mālik insist that each Muslim follow the
jurists of Medina? This issue has been thoroughly discussed in
the field of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). It was also not true that the
jurists of Medina were in agreement regarding the non-existence
of khiyār al-majlis. One of the prominent jurists of Medina, Ibn
Abī Ḏaʾib, who was one of Mālik’s contemporaries, disagreed
with Mālik about this case. He expressed his disagreement to
the extent that Mālik would repent of holding his opinion. How
then can agreement of the jurists of Medina be justified?53

With his strong criticism of the legal theory of the Mālikīs, who
always prefer the practices of Medina, and on the judgments of Abū
Ḥanīfa, Nawawī pushes to maintain the legitimacy of the right of
khiyār. When applied in maritime trade it always involved a long-term
investment. Entangling it with those uncertainties clearly stems from
his understanding of actual practices of maritime trade as well as his
expertise in legal theory. He has strong evidence from ḥadīths for his
argument, and he believes that the Mālikīs and Ḥanafīs ignore that
evidence, just as they refute “the correct, trusted, and elaborated
practice”.54
In contrast to the earlier Prophetic tradition forbidding ocean
voyages unless they involve holy war or pilgrimage,55 we now notice
how legal rulings underwent changes, conceptually accommodating
maritime situations, including those involving mercantile affairs. The
legal texts in the thirteenth century thus endeavour to justify
scholarly involvement in trade, and the Minhāj is an excellent
example in this regard. The continuities, discontinuities and ruptures
in mercantile affairs on the Mediterranean have an impact on the
juridical conclusions of the Minhāj, and its arguments in effect
accelerated the spread of the school along the coastlands. The
evolving Islamic legal system took into account the increased
mobility of traders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Indian
Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds. The predominance of Muslim
merchants influenced the legal conclusions of the Minhāj in particular
and Islamic legal corpuses in general.56 Its discussions related to
maritime trade, navigation, jettison and other aspects of oceanic
mercantile practices reflect this change further.57 One example is in
its discussion of a collision between ships and the consequent
responsibility of the captains:

A collision between two ships is regulated by the principles set

out with reference to riders, so far as concerns their captains, at
any rate where ships and cargoes belong to them. If the ships
are loaded with goods belonging to other persons, each captain
owes the charterers half the damage sustained by each of them.
 Finally, in a case where neither the goods nor the ships belong
to the captains, these latter are liable for half the value both of
the ships and of the goods committed to their charge.58

The text goes on to discuss jettisoning goods when a vessel is in

danger of shipwreck. It first requires everything to be cast into the
sea when the lives of the crew or the passengers are threatened.
Then it describes further legal scenarios regarding the responsibility
for compensation for the jettisoned goods, especially if they
belonged to an absent third party.
On the treatment of Muslim and non-Muslim traders during a
war, the Minhāj mostly follows the rulings of the Muḥarrar. Even so, it
disagrees with the Muḥarrar on the issue of besieging or attacking a
non-Muslim dwelling or settlement if a Muslim or a merchant is there.
In a discussion on jizya taxation both texts say that a non-Muslim
trader should be conditionally allowed to enter the Hijaz (Mecca,
Medina, Yemama and the surroundings, places which are usually
prohibited to non-Muslims) for up to three days even if the goods are
not important.59 But a difference emerges in terms of prioritisation in
the unexpected situation of an attack. The Muḥarrar says an attack
is allowed even in that situation according to the aẓhar opinion, while
the Minhāj makes it a more powerful maḏhab opinion.60 Why this
change?
Despite many interruptions due to the crusades, trade continued
in and around the Mediterranean. Most traders abstained from the
ongoing wars in order to secure their economic interests. In general,
at least in the Islamic world, the fighters did not want to intimidate the
merchants. The standpoints of the Minhāj and the Muḥarrar in
maintaining the status quo demonstrate that they did not want to
change the existing norms of war in relation to the traders, despite
their religious affiliations. As for the particular disagreement in
prioritisation seen in the Minhāj, if we look deeply into the context in
which it was written, we can understand that there were temporary
ups-and-downs in the Mamlūks’ position towards Christian
merchants and Mongols. Between the fourth crusade (1202–1204)
and the recovery of Constantinople (1261), the Egyptian and
Byzantine mercantile connections were interrupted.61 Traders as
such were considered to be part of the problem. The same attitude
was extended to a few Mongols when the warriors began to engage
in trade or the traders took to military activities, spies disguised
themselves as merchants, or merchants combined their profession
with espionage.62 Thus, the Minhāj’s focus on a harsh stand makes
sense. It also makes it clear elsewhere that a spy should not be
given legal protection, while other non-believers are obliged to be
given protection if they seek it.63
The politics and economy of prioritisation, visible in the Minhāj
and its subtle deviations from the existing legal perspectives, stand
in close proximity to the approaches of a pragmatist. As
demonstrated through the examples, Minhāj’s viewpoints are
contextually motivated, subtly anti-foundational and accommodative
of alternative perspectives, furthering its principal concerns of
codifying and systemising Shāfiʿī law. These factors are arguably
linked to a legal-pragmatic view on the issues it deals with. Any
pragmatist would do the same in the prevailing intellectual norms of
the socio-cultural world, to be useful to the wider society. Such subtle
deviations within the Islamic legal tradition provide more chances for
future enquiries in order to see how and why a jurist decides to take
a different path when dealing with substantive laws.
 Unification of Two ṬarῙqs
A major contribution of Nawawī as reflected in the Minhāj is his
unification of a long-existing division in the school. Chapter 3 pointed
out that the conflict-ridden intellectual tradition of Shāfiʿīsm helped it
to grow and spread over time and space. By the time the Minhāj had
been formulated the predominant division was between the
Baghdadi/Iraqi and the Khurasani/Persian streams of the school.64
Earlier we quoted Nawawī’s Majmūʿ, which differentiated between
Khurasanis and Baghdadis in terms of their general characteristics
and methods. It can be quoted again for the details it provides
concerning a possible framework of division:

Our Iraqi companions are more reliable in transmitting al-

Shāfiʿī’s statements, his school’s principles, and our previous
companions’ opinions. Mostly their transmission is stronger than
the one by the Khurasanis, who are mostly better in their
behaviour, research, derivation, arrangement and in matters that
require determining preponderance between two qawls.65

This contrast between the two groups is rather fluid since the
features stated are applied to both groups interchangeably in the
biographical dictionaries of Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿīs.
Nevertheless, Nawawī provides an entry point to further enquiry on
the division if we read this passage closely. The Baghdadis were
more concerned with the foundations and principles of the school
and its eponymous founder, whereas the Khurasanis were more
interested in the later developments and new attempts at
interpretation. Nawawī attempted to amalgamate both streams by
providing the most valid rulings and bringing an end to the
Khurasani–Baghdadi division.
A major motivation for this process of amalgamation and
codification was a contemporary urge from both the legal estate and
the political system to limit the “official” Sunnī schools into a
manageable number, which had been initiated under the rule of the
sultan Baybars. With the multiplication of independent legal schools
and sub-schools, a conclusive judgement or ruling on a matter had
become unattainable and the available corpus of authorities was
incomprehensible for most schools and their followers. Attempts to
limit the range of legal opinions within Islam have been in the air
ever since the eighth century.66 At various points the ʿAbbāsids
made moves towards a codification process, but this had no
success. The Shīʿī Ismāʿīlī dynasty of the Fātimids and the caliphate
of Almohads initiated codifications for their individual legal affiliations
in the tenth and twelfth centuries respectively.67 The Ayyūbids and
then the Mamlūks also made a few attempts, only to evoke both
protest and support from different members of the estate. This
motivated the scholars of each school to “rectify” their legal system
and make it more practical and explicable. In the thirteenth century,
the Shāfiʿī scholars were busy with the same project. The question
before them was how to define what Shāfiʿī law actually was, since it
was spread across many texts and versions. In the Muḥarrar, Rāfiʿī
tried to give an answer by setting out opinions within the school
hierarchically. But Nawawī found his work imprecise and imperfect.
 The usage of the term “muḥarrar” as the title of Rāfiʿī’s book,
and the later legacy of Nawawī among the Shāfiʿīs as “muḥarrir of
the school”, possibly reflect a drive towards canonisation and
codification in their time, at least as the traditional narratives
portrayed them and their contributions. Majd al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Salām
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1255), a contemporary Ḥanbalī jurist and
grandfather of the celebrated Islamic scholar Taqiyy al-Dīn Ibn
Taymiyya (d. 1328), also entitled his legal text Muḥarrar.68 The term
“muḥarrar” is grammatically derived from the verbal noun taḥrīr,
which has various meanings associated with liberation,
independence, renewal, redaction and editorship. As an active noun,
muḥarrir would mean “liberator”, “reviver”, “editor”, and muḥarrar is
the corresponding passive form. Nawawī defined the word as
“refined and confirmed” (muhaḏḏab wa al-mutqan).69 All this would
indicate that Sultan Baybars’ recognition of four Sunnī schools as the
only legitimate legal systems in his kingdom and his appointment of
chief judges for each of the schools must also have emerged from
this existing codification and canonisation drive as much as his
actions must have encouraged every school’s jurists to canonise and
codify the viewpoints of their respective schools.
Coming from Damascus, without by default siding with the
divisions of Baghdad or of Khurasan, Nawawī was favourably placed
geographically to take a neutral stand in the debate between the two
ṭarīqs. The Muḥarrar was accepted in Damascus, together with
Shāfiʿī works from Iraq and Egypt, which shows that the city’s Shāfiʿī
cluster kept an open mind in the existing debates, or at least was
reluctant to side with either group. For Nawawī, the legal thoughts of
Baghdad and Khurasan were inseparable and both traditions
presented some correct and some incorrect interpretations of the
founder’s teachings. He utilised this advantage of the city with the
Minhāj and other legal texts, by subscribing through them to the
foundations of the school and not to any sub-school. We note that
Nawawī’s trajectory and his location in Damascus when dealing with
a split between Khurasan and Baghdad is analogous to the trajectory
of the school’s founder. The experience of al-Shāfiʿī about five
centuries earlier, when he moved to Egypt, involved doing away with
the predominant Ḥanafī rationalism in Iraq and the Mālikī
traditionalism in Medina. An obvious difference is that al-Shāfiʿī had
first-hand experience of both the debates and the places, whereas
Nawawī’s understandings were more text-based and transmitted
through lines of teachers.
In the Minhāj, Nawawī does not directly engage with this
discursive division of the school. In other works, especially in his
Majmūʿ, he elaborates on different opinions of scholars, either from
the stream of Khurasan or of Baghdad, and tries to prioritise one
ruling over another on the basis of his own research to establish it as
the opinion of the school or its founder. He does not go into such
debates in the Minhāj but rather sticks to one final judgement. Those
who were familiar with his other legal texts would find it easy to
understand why in the Minhāj he judges a ruling to be aṣaḥḥ or
maḏhab over other opinions, and to understand why he chooses the
ṭarīq of the Khurasanis or the Baghdadis for that ruling. The detailed
discussions in the Majmūʿ and Rawḍa demonstrate their positionality
as canons of Shāfiʿīsm, while the straightforward amalgamated
statement of the ruling in the Minhāj demonstrates its position as
unified code of the school.
In this respect, the Minhāj also exhibits a transregionality in its
legalistic judgements, one that enabled it to stand above two
regional ṭarīqs which had adhered to particular streams of thought
and tradition for at least two centuries. This situation complements
the existing debates on globalisation in the thirteenth century, and
proves that geographical boundaries faded away in transregional
religious legal discourses. A scholar from Qazwīn near the Caspian
Sea engages with a text written in eleventh-century Baghdad, and
another scholar from the shore of the Eastern Mediterranean furthers
the discourse. The intellectual concordat is thus not mere religiosity
in terms of a monolithic faith. Rather there is a continuity and
unification of scholarly discourse cutting across social, political and
cultural differences, a process which intensified in the highly
globalised spirit of the thirteenth century. This broader spatial canvas
also contributed to its wider reception and circulation among the later
Shāfiʿīs.
 Pedagogical Contexts
The Minhāj primarily succeeded in the Islamic world as a most
dependable textbook and foundational reference for the Shāfiʿī law.
How did it achieve this status at a time of drastic transition when the
region and aristocrats and scholars were undergoing a series of
crises after the Mongol invasions and during crusades?
The norms and modes of both the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic
legal institutions in general certainly played a crucial role in the
acceptance of the Minhāj. However, more crucial to this success
were its specific context and form that expedited its sub-
transdiscursivity. It was written after the caliphate’s collapse, an
important dimension that enabled the later scholarly communities
living in a decentralised political world to relate more easily to its
legal opinions. The context of internal political turmoil in which it was
written continued in the Muslim world in the following centuries, even
though there were attempts to centralise and monopolise the Islamic
political sphere under one caliphate. A few highly centralised political
entities rose in different parts of the Islamic world (for example, the
Ilkhanate in Central Asia), but the absence of a generally acceptable
caliph and increasing infighting became the norm of the Muslim
community. The contextual influences on the legal formulations and
conclusions of the Minhāj, as evident in its political economy of
prioritisations, thus appealed to later generations.
 Relatedly, the elegant form that we discussed earlier also
attracted a wide readership. The best jurist is the best systematiser
so the best legal text is the one most communicative to students and
followers. Both Nawawī and the Minhāj were the best in this regard,
and therefore they satisfied the needs of later jurists through
systematic hierarchisation, prioritisation of the finest opinions within
the school, and rectification of mistakes in prior texts.
Added to this are the crucial components of the increasingly
institutionalised madrasa system and high professionalisation of the
discipline (fiqh) and its sub-discipline (Shāfiʿī fiqh). The
institutionalised educational setting of madrasas and the
professionalisation of the judiciary and law-giving sought precise
texts more than elaborate ones to commit to memory and use at the
“right” points. The contemporary Islamic scholarly culture involved
particular texts being taught, reread and consulted for legal rulings,
with an emphasis on exact wordings and phrases through
memorising them entirely or partially. The concise and elegant form
of the Minhāj was thus preferred over prior texts, especially as it also
brought together the contrasting opinions with the authoritative voice
of the school. We certainly know that many other legal texts were
also taught, but the Minhāj survived across centuries because of its
greater precision compared with earlier texts of the school. Most
earlier works were grandiose, to the extent that they could not be
taught in an amount of time reasonable for the student or the
teacher. The Minhāj in that sense was very precise, straight to the
point with a minimum of verbosity, and more up-to-date than other
existing short texts.
 The author himself was attentive to the pedagogical function of
the text. It is clear in its full title, which can be translated as “Pathway
to Aspirants and Support for Law-givers”. This addresses not only
students but also teachers, judges and muftīs. In other words, it aims
to reach all the members of the fuqahāʾ estate interested in being an
audience for Shāfiʿī law.70 Furthermore, it criticises the prior text
Muḥarrar for its ineffectiveness for educational purposes: “It is one of
the most important or the most significant [work] sought. But it is too
thick to memorise for the majority of contemporaries, save some
exceptional folk. So I thought of abbreviating it to about half of its
size in order to help memorisation, and I also add to it from beneficial
materials, if God wishes.”71
The Minhāj has been taught in Islamic educational centres since
the late thirteenth century and still continues to be one of the most
significant texts that a student of Shāfiʿī law can learn. In nineteenth-
century Yemen, for example, it was widely taught and studied.
Brinkley Messick has provided a detailed picture of this, one which
portrays the text’s journey across the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis. He says
that it was one of the maḥfūẓāt that a student had to memorise
entirely once they graduated from primary education in Qurʾān
schools.72 It was often the first text that a student had to study after
the initial stage of memorising the Qurʾān. Many students learned it
from their parents. These practices continued up to the late twentieth
century, through intensive exercises in memorisation. Students
mostly learnt it by heart together with the Ghāya of Abū Shujāʿ,
although the latter gradually became less central in many places. In
Yemen, the Minhāj enjoyed its prominence the longest, and because
of this students from other parts of the oceanic rim came there to
study the text. In Ḥaḍramawt there were several specialist scholars
for the text, and many East African students, such as the renowned
ʿAbd Allāh Bā Kathīr (d. 1925) from Lamu, learnt it with these
teachers. There were more than ten specialists of the text at a time,
and some students ventured to study the same text with several of
them.73
 Constructing the Legacy
Well into the twentieth century, the Minhāj enjoyed the crucial status
of a canon in the Shāfiʿī textual tradition that no other Shāfiʿī text, or
possibly any Islamic legal text for that matter, had ever achieved.
The text was celebrated immediately after its release, and by the end
of thirteenth century it had acquired high prestige in Shāfiʿī clusters.
This was rooted in multiple factors, initiated by diverse jurist-
teachers, and advanced by several commentators. Through the
mutual interests of institutional dynamics and the legal discursive
tradition via textual transmission it became the most prominent text
of the school and among its jurists, who accepted it as the
foundation text on which any legal discussions should be based.
A first attempt towards canonising the Minhāj was made by
Nawawī himself. Following the tradition of writing guides to
renowned books or classics of earlier scholars, he wrote a short
guide to his own text entitled Daqāʾiq al-Minhāj or “Minutiae of the
Minhāj”. In it he explained his selection of words and phrases
showing disagreement or agreement with the Muḥarrar.74 Over the
course of time, this short text became essential supplementary
material for students and it was circulated widely in the Shāfiʿī
cosmopolis. Also in his own lifetime, the Minhāj attracted a number
of scholars and students. A famous grammarian of the time
expressed his enthusiasm for memorising the entire text, while many
others also memorised it. A few of his contemporaries wrote
appreciative poetic reviews which were collected by his student Ibn
al-ʿAṭṭār.75
The Mamlūk historian Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī
(1428–1497) notes that whoever memorised the text was honoured
with the title “Minhājī”. He says: “I do not know if any other text has
yet achieved this distinction.”76 Several other scholars and jurists of
Shāfiʿī law made numerous statements, all which demonstrate the
canonised status of the Minhāj in the Islamic textual tradition since
the fourteenth century. A poet says: “Scholars have authored and
abridged, but they have not / produced anything like the Minhāj in
what they have abridged.”77 A poem ascribed to the fourteenth-
century historian and jurist Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Subkī reads:

No scholar wrote the likes of the Minhāj

The laws of the past, nor pathways
Firmly beheld, to absorb it
Is sufficient for an enquiring wit.78

Another writes:

In sharḥ Nawawī’s Minhāj contained

Sharīʿa and the rules strained
Singular among its kind, indeed
To all other commentaries it accedes.79

There are also many rhetorical statements, such as “one who reads
it is equal to one who has read such foundation texts of Shāfiʿīsm
from the Muḥarrar back to the Umm of the leader of the school”, and
“one who reads the Minhāj is [certainly] exhilarated”.80 Although the
original authors or owners of these statements are not known, they
were widely circulated in Shāfiʿī circles, pointing to the significance
of the Minhāj within and beyond the school.
It is therefore no surprise that we see a profusion of
commentaries and abridgements on the Minhāj. Scholars have listed
more than eighty full commentaries, fifteen partial or unfinished
ones, ten specifically for inheritance law, ten abridged manuals and
more than a hundred supercommentaries, along with many other
types of commentaries written in poetic styles.81 Besides the
complete commentaries, there were partial commentaries, which
were either unfinished projects or commentaries only on the
Introduction, Conclusion, or particularly contentious sections or
chapters, such as inheritance law. The contributions of poet-
scholars, who made poetical versions of the entire text or of
particular sections, supplement the large literary corpus. A series of
intellectual appendages continue to appear as translations and
audio, visual and virtual commentaries.
All this makes a varied legal literary corpus, including
dissertations, minutiae, annotations, commentaries,
supercommentaries, epilogues, excerpts of scriptural evidence and
ḥadīths, abridgments, poetisations and linguistic analyses. They all
relate to the Minhāj and can be identified as a “sub-transdiscursive”
process that followed the “transdiscursive” position of the Umm.82 It
is doubtful whether there is any other text in Shāfiʿīsm that has been
read, taught, commented on and abridged so much over centuries,
including foundational texts such as the Umm and its abridgement of
Muzanī.
Why were so many such engagements made with this text? An
answer can be found in a passage from Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Subkī:

[Nawawī] might have changed a word from the words of Rāfiʿī. If

one observes closely, he would avert this [attitude] and would
say, “He has not succeeded in summarising, and has not come
up with the proper meaning.” But once we explore further, we
realise that he has got it right, and expressed it with decisive
discernment. This cannot be in the text without his clear
intention, unsurprisingly. The summariser might have changed a
statement of the original for something like this. But the surprise
lies in a change whereby rationality testifies that he has not
thought of it, yet he got it correct. The examples are plenty.83

This brings us to an overlooked historical reality about how and to

what extent the Shāfiʿī school functioned after the so-called classical
phase of Islamic law. Works written at such an early stage were no
longer relevant for the changing times and spaces in the expanding
world of Islam and the Muslim communities, a time when a text such
as the Minhāj appealed more.84 Its appearance made all earlier legal
texts outdated, including the works of al-Shāfiʿī himself and his
immediate disciples. In the conventional narrative of the Muslim
jurists the tradition of legal scholars can be divided into two
categories: the predecessors (mutaqaddimūn), those who lived until
400 of the Hijri era (roughly around 1000 CE), and the successors
(mutaʾakhkhirūn), those who lived after 400 of the Hijri era. The
predecessors were much more advantaged in their independent
investigations and diverse methodologies with access to a number of
different source materials. But the successors had to depend on
works written and handed down by the predecessors that followed
the transdiscursive texts of the Umm. This argument has dragged
out in many debates, but they are not our present concern. Suffice it
now to say that Nawawī belonged to the second category. Thus his
work was significantly based on previous scholarship, not only from
the predecessors but even from the works of some successor
scholars. He tried to combine all those legal opinions in order to
identify the best ruling. This process itself required much attention
and a vast knowledge of the literature written in the school over four
centuries. He was successful in satisfying such necessities when he
wrote the Minhāj. Because of this, for the practitioners of Shāfiʿīsm,
the earlier works written in the first four centuries of Islamic law did
not matter in their day-to-day practices or discourses. This so-called
classical or golden phase of Islamic law was important only in the
historical narrative for the early development of law and it was not to
be taken as ultimate sources of law for rituals, courtroom
procedures, law-giving, law-making, etc. All that mattered for such
occasions were the opinions provided by works such as the Minhāj
and its commentaries. The Shāfiʿīs believed that it was not right to
depend on earlier scholars’ texts, those on which Nawawī had
depended in his writings.
In the later centuries of Shāfiʿī jurisprudential thought, we notice
that scholars advanced a hierarchy for the most dependable and the
less dependable opinions when there were contradictions.85 In that
hierarchy, Nawawī’s opinions stood above any previous or later
scholars. The most valid opinion is when Nawawī and Rāfiʿī (usually
known as the Two Shaykhs of the school) have the same rulings.
Nawawī would be given preference if Rāfiʿī had an opposite opinion.
When Nawawī expressed different opinions, especially if there are
contradictions in different works, his later works are preferred.
Accordingly, his last work, Taḥqīq sharḥ al-Tanbīh, his penultimate
work, Majmūʿ, and his antepenultimate work, Tanqīḥ, would be taken
in order to arrive at his final opinion whenever they contradicted the
Minhāj. These last three works are commentaries and are
incomplete, in contrast to his earlier works, including the Minhāj,
which are abridgements and are complete. Within these abridged
manuals scholars preferred the Rawḍa over the Minhāj. Minhāj’s
opinions have priority only if they contradict his earlier works, such
as the Fatāwā, Sharḥ Muslim, Taṣḥīḥ al-Tanbīh and Nukta. There are
small chances of such contradictions within his texts, but there are
occasions on which his later works contradict the earlier ones.
The idea of such a dating of the works of Nawawī and of giving
priority to the later ones over the earlier ones in Shāfiʿī legalist
circles has been opposed by Norman Calder, who wrote: “It is not
necessary to think that he [Nawawī] wrote and completed any one of
these works prior to starting the next. Rather he developed them in
parallel.” “He did in fact complete this work after he had completed
the bulk of the other two [the Majmūʿ and Rawḍa].”86 Calder’s
evidence for this argument is simply that Minhāj’s conclusions follow
from the studies and surveys of the preceding works. While the other
two works are incomplete commentaries and the Minhāj is an
abridgement and complete, it would not be right to assume that he
had followed the surveys. The long-standing practice among the
Shāfiʿīs of prioritising these two works on the Minhāj was made on
the basis that these two represent later opinions, not only in terms of
content or form, but also for the time of writing itself and the ways in
which they reflect an internal logic and therefore an advancement in
the author’s thoughts.
 Commentarial Peregrinations
The Minhāj had a good reception in the worlds of the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean through numerous textual progenies. With
regard to the text itself, we have discussed how commentary writing
had become a normal practice as an independent and original
scholarly work, and how and why the Islamic legal pedagogy
required its participants to follow this pattern.
In order to appreciate the foundational features of the
commentarial tradition, we need to recognise two factors: the
functional modes of textual discursive tradition and the typologies
that the Minhāj constructed in the thirteenth century. The Islamic
discursive tradition historically maintained a set of discourses
together with its own rationality, styles of reasoning, concerns and/or
regulations embodied in the texts, practices and institutions.
Therefore, “anyone wishing to argue within the Islamic tradition must
start with them, even if only to argue against them”,87 and that
applied to the commentators in the same way. Regarding the
typology of the Minhāj, it brought an intellectual revival in the whole
setting of the school itself from which no later scholar could easily
break away. The previous frames of the school set in the eighth to
tenth centuries were no longer germane, and those which emerged
in the thirteenth century became far more persuasive. The
contribution of Minhāj-like texts in the thirteenth century stood within
the parameters of an established framework and facilitated a
conversation within the otherwise “conservative” divine law of Islam.
In making such an attempt, the previous foundational principles of
Islamic law and related texts of earlier scholars stood at the centre.
The possibility of a conversation with that tradition generated
historical continuity, discontinuity and ruptures in the legal textual
culture. This simultaneous engagement with a long tradition and an
awareness of present contexts was legitimised by the specialists of
jurisprudence in the following centuries, as we see when Nawawī’s
opinions became the most dependable ones in the school. The
writing of the Minhāj and its reception epitomise this phenomenon
and that is a significant dimension that made the text so much more
important to later scholars than any previous texts.
Underlying all these developments in the popularity of the
Minhāj was the transition of the Shāfiʿī legalist centre from Khurasan
and Baghdad to the Eastern Mediterranean regions. Following the
dominance of the Shīʿī Fāṭimids at the end of the tenth century, and
for a number of other reasons, the epicentres of Shāfiʿīsm had
moved from Egypt to Baghdad and Khurasan. But in the immediate
aftermath of the Mongol invasions both those cities and their
surroundings were almost entirely destroyed politically and culturally.
Cairo and Damascus advanced into this vacuum and attracted a
large number of scholars. The acceptance of scholars such as
Nawawī and texts such as the Minhāj led to the development of
Damascus as a strong centre of the school, outshining all the others.
The arrival of new students to study the Minhāj and other texts by
Nawawī, either with the author himself or with his students, led to the
appearance of new “text families” and “text specialists”.88 Along with
other features of Islamic knowledge networks and educational
systems, these textual communities contributed to the hermeneutics
of reading the Minhāj differently through numerous commentaries
and abridgements. This led to the predominance of the Damascus
cluster of Shāfiʿīsm over the Khurasan–Baghdad clusters from the
late thirteenth to the late fourteenth centuries.
The quantity and diversity of texts in circulation that related to
the Minhāj, transcending geographical and chronological boundaries,
reveal its remarkable sub-transdiscursivity. It attracted numerous
scholars of the Shāfiʿī school, who communicated with it constantly
according to their specialisations and their geographical and
chronological priorities. This also illustrates a number of different
historical realities of the textual culture of Islamic legal tradition.
Within the fuqahāʾ estate and its Shāfiʿī clusters in Damascus and
Cairo there were individual scholars who specialised in particular
texts in their teaching and commentaries. For the Minhāj, scholars
such as ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Jamāʿa (d. 1367), Sirāj al-Dīn
ʿUmar al-Mulqin (d. 1401) and Muḥammad al-Bakrī al-Ṣīddīqī (d.
1545) were distinguished experts on its various complexities. They
wrote multiple commentaries (Bakrī al-Ṣīddīqī wrote four
commentaries) incorporating revisions in style, presentation, content
and focus. They also guided contemporary and future generations of
scholars on how differently it could be read philologically, politically,
socially and culturally as well as on its primary legal concerns. Most
of these individual specialists of the Minhāj became centres for
interpretations in the spheres of teaching, law-giving, judicial
procedures and everyday rituals. Not only the students or teachers
of the Minhāj relied on such textual experts of their time, but even
judges, writers and law-givers approached them.
What is even more intriguing is the emergence of text-specialist
families for the Minhāj in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Specialising on the text, certain kinship groups not only found it a
source of social status but also a source of income through teaching,
copying, law-giving and clarifying doubts. As the sources conversed
together fluently, the fame and acceptance of individual specialists of
the Minhāj led to the recognition of family experts. One such was the
Bulqaynī family in Cairo: a grandfather, father and son all engaged
with the text at various points of time.89 The families of Qāḍī
Shuhbah in Damascus and Bakrī al-Ṣīddīqī in Cairo are other
examples.90 Many such text-specialist families for the Minhāj made
not just one commentarial contribution but dealt with it repeatedly,
catering for the increasing demands of the fuqahāʾ estates in their
respective regions.
Most of the commentators and abridgers of the Minhāj were
based in and around Damascus, Cairo and Yemen, especially as the
text began to replace the older texts in educational spheres.91 The
members of Shāfiʿī clusters of the Yemeni, Egyptian and Syrian
fuqahāʾ estates engaged with the text by copying, teaching, learning
and commenting. The majority of Minhāj’s progenies written before
the sixteenth century came from these regions. One list states that in
the fourteenth century it attracted ten commentaries, in the fifteenth
century thirty-five, in the sixteenth century fifteen, in the seventeenth
century six, and in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries ten.92 This
list is only representational and not exhaustive, for the enormous
commentarial corpus from the Indian Ocean littoral, varying from
supercommentaries and marginalia to summaries, glosses and
translations, continues to be uncollated or uncatalogued.
 Conclusions
The success of the Minhāj as a comprehensive code of the Shāfiʿī
school of law illuminates the ways in which the school, and Islamic
legal history at large, evolved in the postclassical period. Embedded
in the larger commentarial mode of juridical advancements of the
time, Nawawī codified the school’s diverse opinions while
synthesising the existing divisions. His own detailed engagements
with the broader textual corpus of the school in his other works
provided material for him to bring out a concise, comprehensive and
coherent work that would address larger pedagogical and juridical
requirements. He did all this without any patronage from the state or
from civil or military elites. He collaborated with, and stayed under
the umbrella of, an effective fuqahāʾ estate in Damascus, which
recognised his scholarly stature and helped ensure that his oeuvre
survived and succeeded.
The story of the text and its author in that specific historical
moment also tells us about the importance of the thirteenth century
as a period when there was an increasing globalisation. Following
the Mongol conquests, the collapse of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate the rise
of decentralised kingdoms including the Ayyūbids and the Mamlūks,
and the ongoing crusades, the contemporary Muslim intelligentsia
explored ways to standardise itself through a more organised form of
religion. The Mamlūk ruler Baybars’ limited allocation of and support
for four Sunnī schools in the kingdom was one step representing this
search for standards. Whether or not influenced by such official
prescriptions, the Muslim leadership, including its jurists and
intellectuals, endeavoured to provide their own answers to the
predicaments of the new world order of politics, economy, disaster,
war and religion. Many jurists participated in canonisations and
codifications of Islamic law, according to their thoughts about the
correct and appropriate form of their religion. In the Shāfiʿī school,
this answer was provided by Nawawī through his Minhāj, a text that
would become an ultimate and perfect legal code for the adherents
of the school.
Several internal and external features contributed to the
popularity of the Minhāj. Internally, its jurisprudential techniques and
methodological innovations were key in its reception. Through
standardisation, hierarchisation and systemisation, it codified the
diverse and opposing viewpoints that had evolved in the school in
the preceding five centuries. In the process, it also addressed its
specific social and economic contexts of the ongoing crusades,
decentralised state-building and involvements of traders in
Mediterranean politics as much as in trade. The text’s strategy of
engaging with such specific socio-cultural and politico-economic
contexts is part of its “politics and economy of prioritisation”. This
concept helps us analyse the substantive legal texts as a source for
social, cultural and economic history, instead of discarding them as a
dry, useless, positive legal corpus. Overall, the Minhāj’s synthesis of
divisions, corrections of earlier texts and attentiveness to specific
political and economic contexts made the text authoritative,
encouraging more jurists, students and teachers of the school to
depend on it more than on any other text.
Externally, the text also catered for a specific demand from the
contemporary educational sphere. The academic institutions, which
by then had become an integral part of a normative order of fuqahāʾ
estates, strongly demanded an authoritative and authentic text that
could be memorised, studied and taught in a short time. There was
nothing more suitable than the Minhāj. It was taught word-by-word,
during which teachers implied multiple possible meanings
appropriate to their own time and place. This process of teaching
and learning required interpretations by a teacher and consequent
intellectually digested articulations by a student when there was no
satisfactory clarification in existing legal literature. Such an increased
use in the madrasas and colleges encouraged teachers and
graduates to write commentaries on it according to the inclinations of
their disciplines and their changed social, cultural and political
contexts. This led to the production of voluminous textual progenies
while making the code a canon of the school. The Minhāj’s future
journey through several commentaries and supercommentaries is
thus an interesting phenomenon owing to the wider circulatory
networks of scholars and texts across the Mediterranean and the
Indian Ocean.
In view of the vast circulation of Islamic legal texts, it is worth
returning to a discussion we raised earlier regarding the question of
possible references to the circulation of Shāfiʿī legal treatises across
the Indian Ocean rim before the sixteenth century. We reiterate that
we have evidence from the South Asian coastal belt for Shāfiʿī
productions of intellectual texts, but not from other parts of the rim.
One of the earliest Arabic texts written in Malabar is a Shāfiʿī text
entitled Qayd al-jāmiʿ by an obscure author, Faqīh Ḥusayn bin
Aḥmad, about whom we do not have many details.93 It deals with
issues of marriage and divorce according to the Shāfiʿī school.
Another Shāfiʿī text possibly comes from fifteenth-century Sindh, and
it is precisely related to the Muḥarrar, the predecessor of the Minhāj.
It is Kashf al-durar, by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Sindī, and it is one of
only two known commentaries on the Muḥarrar.94 We do not have
any biographical details about this author either, but his patronymic
Sindī may indicate an ancestral affiliation with Sindh. Both Qayd and
Kashf al-durar are evidence for the circulation of Shāfiʿī legal texts
along the Indian Ocean rims of South Asia prior to the sixteenth
century. From Southeast Asia, the earliest Shāfiʿī legal text we get is
from seventeenth-century Aceh, Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm by Nūr al-Dīn al-
Ranīrī.
What about the circulation of the Minhāj itself in these regions?
We have no direct evidence for any textual transmissions related to it
in South|East Asia or Africa up to the mid-sixteenth century. We see
many jurists from these areas increasingly engaging with the text
since then and the number increases dramatically in the following
centuries. Among this cornucopia of commentaries the ones by Jalāl
al-Dīn Maḥallī, Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī and Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī
appealed to numerous supercommentators. As we saw with Minhāj’s
incorporation of maritime trade, the commentaries and
supercommentaries also engaged with legal implications of new
situations, mobility and products which were appearing at the end of
the fifteenth century. Many of the commentators led their lives in
coastal townships, and we find a good amount of evidence for their
scholarly-mercantile interconnections, not only in theoretical
discourses but also in actual situations. So we have to ask how this
code and its commentaries reached there and communicated with
the fuqahāʾ estates there after three centuries of having been written
down. The next chapter turns to such questions.

1 There are dozens of manuscripts of the Minhāj available in

different collections across the world. I could access about thirty of
them, of which I use here five unique manuscripts unused in the
existing critical editions: Princeton Garret 1388Y (dd.
736AH/1336); Leiden Or. 2227 (dated 808/1406); Leiden Or. 1600
(dd. c. 1140/1728); Mecca Fiqh Shāfiʿī (henceforth FS) 21 and
Mecca FS 98. Two important critical editions have used eight
manuscripts in total; the latest one by Muḥammad Ṭāhir Shaʿbān
has used four: Aḥsāʾ (dd. 785/1383); Paris Arabe 1002 (dd.
860/1456); Ẓāhiriyya 3647 (dd. before 789/1387), ʿUbaykān
Riyadh (dd. 745/1344), while a slightly older edition by Aḥmad bin
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥaddād used five manuscripts: besides Ẓāhiriyya
3647, it used Ẓāhiriyya 9558 (dd. 731/1331; Tarīm Aḥqāf Bā ʿAlawī
1109 (dd. 1432); Tarīm Aḥqāf Ribāṭ 126 (dd. 918/1512) and
Ẓāhiriyya 1944 (dd. 1084/1673). Another older critical edition by L.
W. C. van den Berg in his French translation used four other
manuscripts. A full list of such printed editions and manuscript
copies would be too long to include here.

2 For details on Nawawī’s life, the most important source is a

biography written by his own student: ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār,
Tuḥfat al-ṭālibīn fī tarjamat Shaykhinā al-Imām Nawawī, Tübingen
University Library (hencforth Tübingen) MS. Ma VI 18; ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn
ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfat al-ṭālibīn fī tarjamat li al-Imām Muḥy al-Dīn,
ed. Abū ʿUbayda Mashhūr Āl Sulaymān (Amman: Dār al-
Athariyya, 2007); cf. Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb bin ʿAlī al-Subkī,
Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Ṭanāḥī and
ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat ʿĪsā al-Bābī
al-Ḥalabī, n.d.), 8: 395–400; Aḥmad bin Muḥammad Ibn Qāḍī
Shuhbah, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, ed. al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-ʿAlīm Khān
(Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿat Majlis Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya,
1978), 2: 194–200; Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Suyūṭī,
Minhāj al-sawiyy fī tarjamat al-Imām al-Nawawī, Tübingen MS. Ma
VI 19 and its printed edition by Aḥmad Shafīq Damaj (Beirut: Dār
Ibn Ḥazm, 1988); Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī, al-
Manhal al-ʿaḏb al-rawī fī tarjamat quṭb al-awliyāʾ al-Nawawī, ed.
Aḥmad al-Farīd al-Mizyadī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2005);
ʿAbd al-Ḥayy bin Aḥmad Ibn al-ʿImād, Shaḏarāt al-ḏahab fī akhbār
man ḏahab, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Arnāʾūṭ and Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ
(Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1991), 7: 618–621; ʿAbd al-Raḥīm bin al-
Ḥasan al-Isnawī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiz Manṣūr
(Beirut: Dār al-Madār al-Islāmī, 2004), 1: 824–827; Abū ʿAbd Allāh
Muḥammad al-Ḏahabī, Taḏkirat al-ḥuffāẓ (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
ʿIlmiyya, 1955), 4: 1470–1474; cf. Fachrizal Halim, Legal Authority
in Premodern Islam: Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī in the Shāfiʿī
School of Law (New York: Routledge, 2015).

3 Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī, Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ wa al-lughāt

(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d.), 18–19; Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa,
Tübingen MS. Ma VI 18, fol. 3b.

4 For example, see Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 8: 396; Ibn al-

ʿImād, Shaḏarāt al-ḏahab, 7: 620–621.
5 Aḥmad Mayqarī Shumaylat al-Ahdal, Sullam al-Mutaʿallim al-
muḥtāj ilā maʿrifat rumūz al-Minhāj, ed. Ismāʿīl ʿUthmān Zayn
(Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 620.

6 His other works include a concise version of his own Majmūʿ,

namely Taḥqīq, which was also left unfinished; two commentaries
(entitled Taṣḥīḥ and Taḥrīr) on Shīrāzī’s Tanbīh; and a commentary
on Ghazālī’s Wasīṭ.

7 Out of around twenty Shāfiʿī texts mentioned in this thirteenth-

century catalogue, only three (the Nihāya of Juwaynī, Muhaḏḏab
of Shīrāzī and Wasīṭ of Ghazālī) are familiar texts. See Konrad
Hirschler, Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic
Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2016), 378 (catalogue no. 1343), 383 (1376) and
387 (1397, 1399).

8Subkī, Introduction to his attempt to complete Nawawī, Majmūʿ

sharḥ al-Muhaḏḏab, ed. Muḥammad Najīb Muṭīʿī (Jeddah:
Maktabat al-Irshād, n.d.), 10: 4–5.

9 Ḏahabī, Taḏkira, 4: 1472; cf. Halim, Legal Authority, 20.

10 Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 8: 397.

11 Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, Tübingen MS. Ma VI 18, fols. 14b–16b; Ibn

al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, ed. Āl Sulaymān, 101–104.

12For example, see the eulogies and panegyrics written by his

contemporary jurists and scholars, Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, Tübingen
MS. Ma VI 18, fols. 18b–41b; Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, ed. Āl Sulaymān,
101–104, 114–153.
13Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in
Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 137.

14 For example, in the fourteenth century, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm bin al-

Ḥasan al-Isnawī (d. 1370) wrote in his Ṭabaqāt about Nawawī: “He
is editor of the school, its reviver, rectifier, and organiser” (muḥarrir
al-maḏhab wa muhaḏḏibuhu, wa ḍābiṭuhu wa murattibuhu), see
Isnawī, Ṭabaqāt, 1: 825. A fifteenth-century biography of Nawawī
by the eminent scholar of Shāfiʿīsm Suyūṭī also uses the same
qualifications for Nawawī, which became synonymous with
Nawawī in the later literature of Shāfiʿīsm. He says further: “With
him, God strengthened pillars and structures of the school;
explained the principals and fundamentals of the divine law.”
Suyūṭī, Minhāj al-sawiyy, Tübingen MS. Ma VI 19, fol. 2b, and its
edition by Damaj, 26–27.

15 Norman Calder, Islamic Jurisprudence in the Classical Era, ed.

Colin Imber, intro. and afterword Robert Gleave (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 99. The following discussion
is greatly indebted to this study.

16 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 1b;

Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 1–2; Leiden Or. 1600, 2a–b; Mecca FS 21,
fols. 0b–1a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 2a; Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa ʿumdat al-muftīn, ed. Muḥammad Ṭāhir
Shaʿbān (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 64; Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-
Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥaddād
(Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2000), 1: 75.
17 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fols. 1b–2a;
Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 2 (some words in this part are missing due to
deterioration or have been added later, and it drops the letters “fī”
before the word al-aẓhar); Leiden Or. 1600, fols. 2b–3a; Mecca FS
21, fol. 1a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 2a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed.
Shaʿbān, 65; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 76. This
translation is taken from Calder, Islamic Jurisprudence, 100, with
slight revision.

18 The aẓhar and mashhūr together are known as rājiḥ; thus, wa fī

qawl kaḏā is opposite to rājiḥ. Likewise, wa-qīla kaḏā is opposite
to either aṣaḥḥ or ṣaḥīḥ.

19 They are Ḥasan al-Zaʿfarānī, Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal, Abū Thawr

Ibrāhīm bin Khālid al-Kalbī (d. 854), and Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn al-
Karābīsī (d. in or after 859).

20Among them, the noted jurists are Ibn Ḥarmala, Rabīʿ bin
Sulaymān al-Azdī (d. 870), Rabīʿ bin Sulaymān al-Murādī, and
Yūnus bin ʿAbd al-Aʿlā (d. 877).

21 Minhāj’s prioritisation of qadīm views over the jadīd ones have

been minutely studied by Muḥammad Sumayʿī Sayyid ʿAbd al-
Raḥmān Rastāqī, al-Qadīm wa al-jadīd min aqwāl al-Imām al-
Shāfiʿī min khilāl kitāb Minhāj al-ṭālibīn: dirāsa muqārana bi-ashhar
al-maḏāhib al-fiqhiyya (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2005).

22 For a detailed description of Minhāj’s use of these terms, see

Nawawī, Minhāj, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 31–42; Ayman al-Badārīn, “Iṣṭilāḥ
al-Shāfiʿīyya min khilal Iṣṭilāḥ al-Nawawī fī Minhāj al-ṭālibīn”,
Hebron University Research Journal 4, no. 2 (2009): 277–306.
23 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 2b;
Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 4–5; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 5a–b; Mecca FS
21, fol. 2a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 3a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed.
Shaʿbān, 68; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 81–82. In
this passage, I have made use of a few phrases of E. C Howard’s
translation, although I hardly agree with his style and there are
some mistranslations. Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī, Minhaj et
Talibin: A Manual of Mohammadan Law according to the School of
Shafii, trans. E. C. Howard (London: W. Thacker and Co., 1914),
2. The term qulla literally means “jar” or “olla”.

24 This discussion also exemplifies how the minute details of a

problem, in this case about the purity of water used for ablution,
was constantly the subject of serious discourse among legal
scholars. For a remarkable study on this, see Marion Holmes Katz,
Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunnī Law of Ritual Purity
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

25 ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qazwīnī al-Rāfiʿī, al-Muh̩arrar fī fiqh al-Imām

al-Shāfiʿī, ed. Muḥammad Ḥasan Ismāʿīl (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
ʿIlmiyya, 2005), 114. Mudd is a measure of grain that equals 543
grams.

26 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 28a;

Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 95–96; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 91a–b; Mecca
FS 21, fol. 38b; Mecca FS 98, fols. 39a–39b; Nawawī, Minhāj al-
ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 184; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād,
1: 432–433. The naḏr (vow) and kaffāra (atonement) are two
issues with broader juridical consequences in Islamic law.
27 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 1b;
Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 2; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 2b; Mecca FS 21,
fols. 0b–1a; Mecca FS 98, fols. 1b–2a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Shaʿbān, 64–65; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 75.

28Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 2a;

Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 3; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 3b; Mecca FS 21, fol.
1a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 2a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān,
66; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 77.

29 Manhaj al-ṭullāb has eight full commentaries including one by

Anṣārī himself entitled Fatḥ al-Wahhāb bi sharḥ Manhaj al-ṭullāb
(this became another success in scholarly circles, attracting more
than twenty supercommentators), two partial commentaries on the
Introduction, four marginalia, five abridgements and a poetic
version.

30This is not to ignore the fact that many scholars have utilised
such an extensive literary corpus to study the intellectual history.
But most of them have still ignored the historical socio-cultural,
political and economic contexts of substantive legal texts.

31al-Shāfiʿī, Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib (Mansura:

Dār al-Wafāʾ, 2001), 5: 361–478.

32This very interesting letter is cited in its complete form in Ibn al-
ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, Tübingen MS. Ma VI 18, fols. 14b–16b; Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār,
Tuḥfa, ed. Āl Sulaymān, 101–104.

33For similar counter-narratives on holy war, see Asma

Afsaruddin, Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in
Islamic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 179–
204.

34Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, 446; the verses are from Qurʾān 9: 36 and 2:

216 respectively.

35 For example, see the chapter on purity in Nawawī, Minhāj al-

ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 2a; Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 3;
Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 4a; Mecca FS 21, fol. 1b; Mecca FS 98, fol.
2b; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 67; Nawawī, Minhāj al-
ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 78.

36 Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, 457–458.

37Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 103a;

Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 354; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 340b; Mecca FS
21, fol. 166b; Mecca FS 98, fol. 155b; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Shaʿbān, 528; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 297–
298.

38 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 100b

adds the word “al-imam” in the sentence, hence also requiring
permission from the ruler; Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 349; Leiden Or.
1600, fol. 332a; Mecca FS 21, fol. 162b; Mecca FS 98, fol. 152a;
Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 519; Nawawī, Minhāj al-
ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 261.

39 It should be read along with the fact that on many other

occasions the Minhāj follows the same terms of the Muḥarrar such
as lā yajūz or laysa lahu. For example, both texts say that it is not
allowed/sanctioned (lā yajūz) to give protection to a non-Muslim
spy who would bother the Muslims. Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 102a; Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 351;
Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 336b; Mecca FS 21, fol. 164b; Mecca FS 98,
fol. 154a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 523; Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 282. Mecca FS 98, fol. 154a adds
“according to the aṣaḥḥ” at the end of the sentence.

40 The Muh̩arrar does not elaborate on most of the technical terms

it uses.

41 For example, in the late 1280s, the officers urged the Mamlūk
sultan Qalāwūn (r. 1279–1290) to consult the jurists about the
invalidity of a treaty that he had signed with the port town of Acre.
They thought that if the jurists declared the treaty invalid, they
could wage war against the crusaders and dislodge them from the
region. But the sultan did not consult the jurists as he did not want
betray his oath. The chronicler-cum-administrator Ismāʿīl Abū al-
Fidā (1273–1331) provides a detailed first-hand account of
Qalāwūn’s expeditions: Abū al-Fidā, Mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-
Bashar (Constantinople: Dār al-Ṭibāʿat al-ʿĀmirat al-Shāhāniyya,
1869), 2: 321.

42 Pouzet, “Rawāḥa”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

43 See Muḥammad bin Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd
al-Muṭṭalib (Mansura: Dār al-Wafāʾ, 2001), vols. 4 and 5.

44Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman, The Business of Identity: Jews,

Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2014); Abraham L. Udovitch,
Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1970); Abraham L. Udovitch, “The ‘Law
Merchant’ of the Medieval Islamic World”, in Logic in Classical
Islamic Culture, ed. G. E. von Grunebaum (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1970), 113–130.

45 al-Shāfiʿī, Umm, 5: 433–435, 606–714, 9: 248–275, passim.

46 For example, see Ismāʿīl bin Yaḥyā al-Muzanī, Mukhtaṣar fī

furuʿ al-Shāfiʿiyya, ed. Muhammad ʿAbd al-Qādir Shāhīn (Beirut:
Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 150.

47Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 102a–b;

Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 352; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 337b; Mecca FS
21, fol. 165a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 154b; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Shaʿbān, 525; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 286.

48 For example, see the treatment of apostates in Nawawī, Minhāj

al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fols. 25b, 28a; Leiden Or. 2227,
fols. 86, 95; Leiden Or. 1600, fols. 82b, 90b; Mecca FS 21, fols.
35a, 38a; Mecca FS 98, fols. 36a, 39a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Shaʿbān, 174, 183; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1:
403, 431.

49Virgil Ciocîltan, Mongols and the Black Sea Trade in the

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, trans. Samuel Willcocks
(Leiden: Brill, 2012).

50On the characterisation of the Muslim Mediterranean, see Nelly

Hanna, Money, Land and Trade: An Economic History of the
Muslim Mediterranean (London: Bloomsbury, 2002); on the Indian
Ocean as an Islamic Sea, see Michael N. Pearson, The Indian
Ocean (London: Routledge, 2006), chapter 4; Edward Alpers, The
Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 40–68.
51Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 15a–b;
Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 50–51; Leiden Or. 1600, fols. 45b–47a;
Mecca FS 21, fol. 20a–b; Mecca FS 98, fol. 21a–b; Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 129–130; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 253–257.

52 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 123; Leiden Or.
1600, fol. 103a; Mecca FS 21, fol. 49b; Mecca FS 98, fol. 50a;
Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 219; Nawawī, Minhāj al-
ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 2: 31. The folios of this discussion are missing
in Princeton Garret 1388Y.

53 Nawawī, Majmūʿ, 9: 220–221. This translation largely depends

on Halim, Legal Authority, 117, who used this passage to discuss
a completely different concern of Nawawī. Although I have
reservations about this translation when I compare it with the
original of the Majmūʿ, 9: 220–221, I use it here since its overall
content is sufficiently comparable with the original for our present
concern.

54 For a debate on the khiyār al-majlis among the early jurists and
al-Shāfiʿī’s viewpoint on this, see Joseph Schacht, The Origins of
Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950),
159–161. He speculates that al-Shāfiʿī got this idea of khiyār al-
majlis from local customs of Mecca, but the assumption lacks
convincing evidence.

55Abū Dāwūd Sulaymān bin al-Ashʿath al-Sijistānī, Sunan, ed.

Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ and Muḥammad Kāmil Qurah Balalī (Beirut:
Dār al-Risālat al-ʿĀlamiyya, 1994), 4: 145–146, no. 2489.
56 An obvious place to understand this influence is the Minhāj’s
discussions on commercial and maritime laws. Although the text
itself is limited to solid legal cases, the author’s fatwā collection
provides several questions from traders on commerce,
merchandise etc., some of which are on maritime trade and travel.
Once we read the same discussions in the Minhāj we can see how
the questions and answers have been incorporated into his
concise rulings and conclusions. Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī,
Fatāwā al-Imām al-Nawawī al-musammāt bi al- masāʾil al-
manthura, compiled by his student ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, ed.
Muhammad al-Ḥajjār (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 1996),
108–154.

57 For example, see Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret

1388Y, fols. 15b, 47a, 61b, 94a–b; Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 51, 182,
226, 327; Leiden Or. 1600, fols. 47a, 161b, 205a, 309a–b; Mecca
FS 21, fols. 20b, 77b–78a, 99a, 150b; Mecca FS 98, fols. 21b,
76a, 95b, 142a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 130, 295,
354, 490–491; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 257, 2:
217, 364, 3: 166–167. His further engagements with the
Mediterranean worlds can be seen in his other texts as well, as he
discusses war-ships for example, Tahdīb al-asmā’, 132–133, 160–
161.

58Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 94a–b;

Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 327; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 309b; Mecca FS
21, fol. 150b; Mecca FS 98, fol. 142a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn,
ed. Shaʿbān, 491; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 166–
167.
59 Rāfiʿī, Muh̩arrar, 455; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton
Garret 1388Y, fol. 102b; Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 352–353; Leiden
Or. 1600, fols. 338b–339a; Mecca FS 21, fol. 165b; Mecca FS 98,
fol. 155a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 526; Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 290–291.

60Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, 448; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton

Garret 1388Y, fol. 101a; Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 344 (this folio is
wrongly numbered as it follows fol. 349); Leiden Or. 1600, fol.
333a–b; Mecca FS 21, fol. 163a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 152b; Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 520; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed.
Ḥaddād, 3: 267–268.

61Angeliki Laiou, “Byzantine Trade with Christians and Muslims

and the Crusades”, in The Crusades from the Perspective of
Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki Laiou and Roy
Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection, 2001), 188–189.

62 Ciocîltan, Mongols and the Black Sea Trade, 15, 30–34; on the
increasing problem of “spy-merchants” at the other end of the
Mongol realm in China, see John Chaffee, The Muslim Merchants
of Premodern China: The History of Maritime Asian Trade
Diaspora, 750–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 131–132.

63Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 102a;

Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 351–352; Leiden Or. 1600, fols. 336b and
338a; Mecca FS 21, fol. 164b; Mecca FS 98, fol. 154a; Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 523 and 525; Nawawī, Minhāj al-
ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 3: 280–283. It also proscribes giving
protection to those who disturb Muslim life, such as a spy.

64For more details on this split and Nawawī’s related

contributions, see Halim, Legal Authority, 53–79.

65 Nawawī, Majmūʿ, 1: 112.

66 ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 757) proposed to the then

ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775) to codify the Islamic law.
The caliph was unsuccessful in bringing it about. At one point, he
approached Mālik bin Anas with an offer to cancel all other legal
thoughts than Mālik’s, to write his Muwaṭṭaʾ in gold, and to keep it
inside the Kaʿba. Mālik rejected this offer saying that the Prophet’s
companions are all over the world and he did not want to stand
against their legal opinions. J. E. Lowry, “The First Islamic Legal
Theory: Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ on Interpretation, Authority, and the
Structure of the Law”, Journal of the American Oriental Society
128, no. 1 (2008): 25–40.

67 Maribel Fierro, “Codifiying the Law: The Case of the Medieval

Islamic West”, in Diverging Paths? The Shapes of Power and
Institutions in Medieval Christiandom and Islamdom, ed. John
Hudson and Ana Rodriguez (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 98–118.

68Majd al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn Taymiyya, Muḥarrar, ed.

ʿAbdullāh bin ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-
Risāla, 2007).

69 Yaḥyā bin Sharaf Nawawī, Daqāʾiq al-Minhāj, ed. Iyād Aḥmad

al-Ghawj (Mecca: al-Maktabat al-Makkiyya, 1996), 26.
70In the title, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ṭālib literally means a seeker, but
generally connotes a student. The usual plural is ṭullāb, but here
he used ṭālibīn which includes all general aspirants of Islamic law.

71 Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol. 1b;

Leiden Or. 2227, fols. 1–2; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 2a–b (the
passage contains several scribal errors and adds a word “yaʿjuz”
unfound in other mss.); Mecca FS 21, fols. 0b–1a; Mecca FS 98,
fol. 2a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān, 64; Nawawī,
Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 75.

72Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination

and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).

73Shaykh Abdallah Salih Farsy, The Shaf’i Ulama of East Africa,

ca. 1830–1970: A Hagiographic Account, trans., ed. and annot.
Randall L. Pouwels (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1989), 88–90, 152. Abdullah Ba Kathīr studied with such teachers
there between 3 June and mid-August 1897.

74 Nawawī, Daqāʾiq.

75 Shaʿbān, Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, 13; Ibn al-

ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, 47. The grammarian was Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad
bin ʿAbd Allāh (d. 1273).

76 Sakhāwī, Manhal, 29.

77Ahdal, Sullam, 619: “qad ṣannaf al-ʿulamāʾ wa ikhtaṣarū falam /

yaʾtū bi mā ikhtaṣarūhu ka al-Minhāj.”
78 Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Suyūṭī, Minhāj al-sawiyy fī
tarjamat al-Imām al-Nawawī, Tübingen MS. Ma VI 19, fol. 10a, and
its edition by Aḥmad Shafīq Damaj (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1988),
59.

79 Ahdal, Sullam, 619

80 Cited in the preface to Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān,

5.

81Shaʿbān, Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Shaʿbān,

16–47.

82 I have taken this terminology from Foucault, but revised it

slightly. His focus is on the author who can be in the sphere of
discourse much more than a book. I bring the book into the
foreground, as it is what mattered the most in the Islamic legal
system, in which kitāb always had the validating and legitimising
capacity. For further details on the concept of discursive tradition,
see Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.
James D. Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York:
New Press, 1998), 217–220.

83 Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, 8: 398.

84 But that itself was becoming dated as the commentators wanted

to reformulate and revise it according to their priorities.

85Zayn al-Dīn Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn bi sharḥ Qurrat al-ʿayn,

Ponnāni 145, fol. 5; Ponnāni 113, fol. [2b]; Tānūr 142, fol. 6a;
Tānūr 144, fol. 4b; Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 3a; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-
muʿīn, ed. Bassām ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Jābī (Limassol: al-Jaffān
wa al-Jābī & Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2005), 35.

86 Calder, Islamic Jurisprudence, 99.

87Ovamir Anjum, “Islam as a Discursive Tradition: Talal Asad and

His Interlocutors”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East 27 (2007): 661.

88Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, Tuḥfa, 63, 84–85; Suyūṭī, Minhāj al-sawiyy, 52, 58–
59.

89Sirāj al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Bulqaynī (d. 1402) wrote Taṣḥīḥ al-Minhāj,

commenting on the last quarter of the book on criminal law so
extensively that it alone has five volumes, and another volume on
the part on marriage. His son Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d.
1421) wrote only as far as the “book” on expenditures (kharāj). His
grandson Qāsim (d. 1457) wrote an independent commentary.

90 Taqiyy al-Dīn Abū Bakr bin Aḥmad Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah (d. 1447),
the author of the renowned Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyya, wrote an
unfinished commentary as far as the part on khulʿ and named it
Kifāyat al-muḥtāj ilā tawjīḥ al-Minhāj. His son Badr al-Dīn
Muḥammad (d. 1469) wrote two extensive commentaries: Irshād
al-muḥtāj ilā tawjīḥ al-Minhāj and Bidāyat al-muḥtāj ilā sharḥ al-
Minhāj in two volumes. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Bakrī al-
Ṣīddīqī (d. 1486) wrote a commentary and an annotation. His son
Abū Al-Ḥasan Muḥammad (d. 1545) wrote four commentaries as
mentioned above. Both of them also wrote separate
supercommentaries on the commentary by Maḥallī.
91 For example, in Yemen the Minhāj replaced the Muhaḏḏab,
which had been a celebrated work in Shāfiʿī legal circles as the
biographers like Ibn Samura (d. 1190) confirm. On the receptivity
of Muhaḏḏab, see Ibn Samura, Ṭabaqāt fuqahāʾ al-Yaman, ed.
Fuʾād Sayyid, (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Sunnat al-Muḥammadiyya,
1957), 125–133. On the superseding of the Minhāj and other
works by Nawawī, see ʿAbd Allāh al-Hibshī, Ḥayāt al-adab al-
Yamanī fī ʿaṣr Banī Rasūl (Yemen: Manshūrāt Aḍwāʾ al-Yaman,
1980), 54.

92 Shaʿbān, Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj, 16–47.

93Faqīh Ḥusayn bin Aḥmad al-Mahfanī, Qayd al-jāmiʿ al-hādī:

mukhtaṣar fī aḥkām al-nikāḥ, Juma AI-Majid Center for Culture
and Heritage, Dubai MS. 679405. See Chapter 2 for further
details.

94 Muṣṭafā bin ʿAbd Allāh Ḥajī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī
al-kutub wa al-funūn (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth ʿArabī, 2008), 2:
1613.
◈
Before we sail further, keep in mind an oracular voice of
Umberto Eco from another side of the Mediterranean. “There
is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of
knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime
recapitulation.”
Eco, in the twentieth century, lived in the port town of
Urbino but also inland in Milan; his writings leaned on the
oceanic and textual sagas. More so when he writes about a
time in the immediate aftermath of Nawawī’s life:
“And who decides what is the level of interpretation and
what is the proper context? You know, my boy, for they have
taught you: it is authority, the most reliable commentator of all
and the most invested with prestige, and therefore with
sanctity.”1 The conversation in The Name of the Rose
between a Benedictine abbot and a novice resonate in the
ship of texts. Commentary and commentators formulate the
authority of a text, which is invested with prestige.
With Eco’s voice echoing in our ship, together with the
stories of Nawawī and the wisdom of al-Shāfiʿī, the ship now
has an arduous journey ahead, from Damascus to Cairo and
Mecca. From the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. How does
one cross the land mass between Asia, Africa and Europe?
Before the Suez Canal was opened for large ships in
1869, they had two options: take an onerous voyage from the
Mediterranean through the Gibraltar along the Atlantic, mostly
hugging coasts but circumnavigating Africa via the Cape of
Good Hope and eastern African shores to the bottleneck of
Bab al-Mandheb to the Red Sea. Otherwise, for smaller boats
(you are lucky that your ship is smaller), you can take the
navigable canal of the Suez (built in the eighth century), and
there is little danger of running aground. From Damascus
many people did take this route travelling from Dor on the Via
Maris or the Way of Philistines to Cairo via Alexandria, and
from Cairo to the Red Sea, combining seaborne, riverine and
overland journeys.
Three centuries forward from the thirteenth the Ottomans
planned to widen the canal. A grand vizier managed to do it,
connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Seas through the
Suez for his people. They were motivated by interests in
trade, war, diplomacy and pilgrimage in that age of
exploration.
Through these routes, on water between the
Mediterranean and Red Seas and on land, people travelled
between Damascus, Cairo, Jeddah, Mecca and Medina.
Cairo was an important transit point for caravan travellers and
voyagers. It connected people from all over. But its glory was
put on hold in the early decades of the century, after the
Ottoman conquest of the city, when the Mamlūk ruler was
assassinated and thousands of skilled scholars, notaries,
judges, scribes and clerks were taken to Istanbul.
A remote city like Mecca benefited from this. It was
mainly known as a destination of pilgrimage until the
sixteenth century, when it became not only a city of pilgrims,
but also of exiles, itinerants, fugitives, refugees, students and
intellectuals.
Observe a fellow traveller amongst you, Ibn Ḥajar al-
Haytamī. In him you can see this transition between two
cities. He is escaping from the ghost city of Cairo to a better
life in the Holy City. He had been in the sacred city twice
before but now he has joined you with an intention to settle
down. Let’s pay heed to his trajectory. Observe how his
narrative builds upon Nawawī’s.
Ibn Ḥajar epitomises the authority of commentators and
his journeys enshrine the commentarial circulations, in and
around Cairo and Mecca, two cities located inland from the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea, yet very much dependent
on the fluctuations and fluidities of the maritime world.
 5
The Commentary
◈

Similar to the expansive processes of global interactions and legal

codifications in the thirteenth century, the next most important stage
in world history as well as in the history of the Shāfiʿī school is the
sixteenth century. That century witnessed some remarkable ruptures
and continuities in global history, such as the rise of the three most
important Muslim empires (the Mughals, the Ottomans and the
Safavids), the decline of the Mamlūks, the Ottoman conquest of the
Middle East, and the arrival of Europeans in the Indian Ocean. In line
with such contemporary developments in global politics, economy,
society and culture, the century also saw intensified advancements
in the circulation of Islam in general and Shāfiʿīsm in particular. The
authoritative texts of the school, such as the Minhāj, began to be
circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim,
where the largest number of its followers had started to take up
residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other
texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj.
 This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between
the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century.
Why did so many scholars repeatedly endeavour in this century to
comment on a text which had already been much commented on in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? How do these commentaries
enlighten us on the history of the Shāfiʿī school after the thirteenth
century, and how do those intermediate the text and its school in its
broader circulations? I address these questions, focusing on one
commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (hereafter Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-
Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in
Mecca. The Tuḥfa is uniquely different from its contemporary
commentaries, such as the Nihāya and the Mughnī, and it appealed
to the wider Shāfiʿī clusters of the fuqahāʾ more than any other
commentaries on the Minhāj. The writing of the Tuḥfa, its discourse
and reception, owe much to the fact that its author migrated to
Mecca. In contrast to Cairo, Mecca was not an established place for
Shāfiʿī discourses until the sixteenth century. Ibn Ḥajar’s selection, or
rather his “rediscovery”, of this city would change and divide the
course of the school from then on.
The intellectual gap between the Islamic heartlands and distant
lands, especially in the Indian Ocean littoral, was now narrowed
through the intermediation of Mecca by people such as Ibn Ḥajar
and texts such as the Tuḥfa. The city’s intellectual revival in the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries provided the space in which
South|East Asian and African residents with aspirations to learn legal
and mystical traditions could sharpen their wits and contribute to the
tradition itself. Once the Tuḥfa appeared, it became an instant
appetiser for many students of Shāfiʿīsm from across a broad gamut.
It became an advanced scholarly text in some parts of the Islamic
heartlands as much as it did on the Indian Ocean rim. At this time
the oceanic arena was the highway for massive numbers of Yemeni,
Persian, Swahili, Indian and Jāwī migrants, who also played roles in
promoting the text among the learned classes. The commentaries on
the Tuḥfa produced on the oceanic rim are the best illustrations of
this process.1
 Ibn Ḥajar: The Commentator
Ibn Ḥajar, the author of the Tuḥfa, was a self-made man who had
suffered much deprivation in his life before he was recognised as a
leading jurist of the Shāfiʿī school. He was born at the end of 1503 in
the area of Abū al-Haytam in western Egypt.2 His family had moved
there from Ḥarām in eastern Egypt. In his early childhood his father
passed away and he grew up with his grandfather, who also died
soon afterwards. Ibn Ḥajar was still very young, so two of his father’s
teachers took care of him for a short while. Later, one teacher alone
looked after him, but could not afford the expense due to the
widespread economic depression in the country. He sent him to live
with one Sayyid al-Badawī at Ṭanṭā, where Ibn Ḥajar received his
primary education. This parentless and insecure stage of his
childhood along with poor living conditions had an impact on his later
intellectual life.
Fighting against the odds, he managed to get into al-Azhar
University in 1518 at the age of fifteen, one year after the Ottoman
conquest of Egypt. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries al-Azhar,
established by the Fāṭimids in the tenth century, had become a hub
of Sunnī learning, with a distinctive role in expounding the Shāfiʿī
dialogues of Egypt. Cairo was an outstanding centre to study law
and seek a career in the military or in administration. Al-Azhar was a
dream institute for many students as it enabled them to attain
economic, social and cultural capital, because its “professional
economy of knowledge” directly connected the scholarly elites to an
extensive pool of resources. These would have included access to
endowments, institutions, offices, positions, wages and other forms
of power capital.3 Thus, to arrive in Cairo and to enter al-Azhar was
the dream of most aspirants in law of the time. Even farmers and
their young children left the hinterlands of Palestine, Syria, Egypt
and Yemen for Cairo in order to pursue their academic ambitions.
That gave a headache to provincial and central rulers because their
income from farming taxes and agricultural products decreased.
Many bureaucrats and administrators tried to deter students from
pursuing an education or to force them away from Cairo. The
fuqahāʾ naturally resented this. They expressed their protest through
fatwās and pamphlets. At the time, one jurist ruled: “If consequently
any cultivator abandons his cultivation and comes to dwell in Cairo,
there is no claim against him, and the action of the oppressors in
subjecting him to compulsion is illegal, especially if he wishes to
engage in the study of the Qurʾān and learning like the students at
the mosque of al-Azhar.”4 To be affiliated with Cairo thus meant a
student received a token of fame and recognition in the Islamic
world. Within the Cairene estate a number of different aspects were
regarded similarly.
However, Ibn Ḥajar started his studies when Egypt was suffering
from poor socio-political and economic conditions in the early
sixteenth century, especially after the fall of the Mamlūks at the
hands of the Ottomans. Academia was not immune from those
threats. He himself had to endure deplorable social and economic
difficulties, about which he wrote later:
 At al-Azhar University, I have suffered terribly from hunger that
no one human being could tolerate if there were no grace and
mercy of God. For instance, for about four years I lived without
tasting a single bit of meat. But on one night we were invited to
a feast, and there meat was being grilled. We waited until
midnight. Finally it was brought in. It was dry [tasting] as if it was
uncooked. I could not enjoy even a single slice of it … I also
have suffered from some terrible teachers (ahl al-durūs) whose
classes we used to attend with horrific hunger. There is nothing
tougher than such starvation, as when I saw our teacher Ibn Ab
al-Ḥamāyil standing in front of my master Aḥmad al-Badawī,
and two [portions of food] were brought, and in front of us he
sliced them and ate each and every piece. It was so
exasperating!5

Furthermore, he was left broken-hearted after a theft at the

university. Some of his books, including his lengthy commentary on
the ʿUbāb titled Bushrā al-karīm, were stolen. He constantly prayed
to God to forgive the thief.6 His contemporary commentators from
Egypt, Ramlī and Sharbīnī, do not seem to have suffered such
troubles, probably because they were born into the prosperity of the
fuqahāʾ estate. Ramlī’s father was a renowned teacher and legal
scholar of the time, and therefore they were able to access better
resources endowed for al-Azhar’s riwāqs (learning communities).7
Ibn Ḥajar focused on his studies and learnt almost all the
famous texts in each discipline with some of the most renowned
scholars of the time, such as Zakariyyā Anṣārī and Shihāb al-Ramlī.
He studied various religious and extra-religious disciplines, such as
exegesis, ḥadīth, law, history, medicine, logic, grammar and
linguistics. Although he wrote widely on many of these disciplines, he
is primarily known as a historian and a jurist.8 The other teachers
and texts he studied are well described in his anecdotal notes in
various works. He says he was deeply influenced by the knowledge
and teaching methods of Anṣārī: “He is the brightest among the
dynamic scholars and descendant leaders I have seen. He is the
highest-ranking among the juristic, ‘chain-holding’ (musannidīn, i.e.
with the sanads of recognition) jurists from whom I have reported
and studied.”9 He says further: “I have not collected anything from
him without him saying: ‘I ask God to make you legally
knowledgeable in religion.’”
At the age of twenty Ibn Ḥajar finished his higher studies and
started to write books and give fatwās:

[T]o the extent that my distinguished teachers gave me ijāza to

teach and utilise those disciplines, to regulate editing difficult
parts of those by affirming (taqrīr) and compiling, to give fatwās
and to teach according to the school of Imām al-Muṭṭalib al-
Shāfiʿī bin Idrīs, and to author and compile. Thus, I wrote from
base-texts the commentaries where no elaboration was required
… all this is when I was less than twenty years old.10

His academic performance was to make him a reputed scholar,

despite the poor socio-political conditions in Egypt, which were major
hindrances.
Egypt’s political desolation was exploited and intensified by
pressure from the Ottomans, one of the expanding empires of the
time. After Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520) conquered Cairo in 1517
and publicly hanged the last Mamlūk sultan, Tuman Bay II (r. 1516–
1517), like a criminal at the south gate of the city, the Ottomans
deported numerous members of the fuqahāʾ estate, such as judges,
jurists, legal authorities, notaries, scribes, nobles and merchants,
and also manuscripts, to Istanbul. This deportation was aimed at
strengthening the Ottoman capital, which would eventually develop
into a centre of Islamic legalism.
In the same year, through a series of wars in the Hijaz, the
Ottomans managed to take control of Mecca. Its sharīf, Barakāt bin
Muḥammad (r. 1497–1525), agreed to the new caliphate’s
supremacy, which allowed him to retain his local autonomy. The wind
blew in favour of Selim I when the Portuguese incursions into the
Red Sea generated panic and uncontrolled price hikes. This led the
sharīf to send his young son to the Ottoman sultan at Cairo offering
him suzerainty of the Hijaz in order to save the region from poverty
and insecurity.11 Once the Holy City came under their control the
Ottomans tried to legitimise themselves through endowments for
social and religious activities in the city.12 This helped Mecca, once a
politically remote place, to revive its economy, culture and
knowledge. Although the existing knowledge centres such as Cairo
did not immediately lose currency in the broader Islamic world, they
began to suffer from new developments in producing legal expertise
and an increasing need for it. Turkish cities such as Istanbul began
to rise as new academic centres, and the Ottomans aimed for a
wider recognition and legitimacy among the Muslim scholarly elites.
Mecca benefited in that stage of the social transition.
 The city had not been recognised as a centre of academic
excellence, except for some intermittent madrasas and ribāṭs during
the Mamlūk period and earlier.13 Once the Ottomans took power,
other existing centres became less legitimate for restoring
intellectual prestige in the new empire, but Mecca showed a positive
desire to become involved in growth. It had long been a sanctified
place in the Islamic tradition and this was now furthered with a new
band of politically charged and revitalised academics. That is
precisely what the Ottomans also wanted, to attempt to regulate the
aspirations of the fuqahāʾ estate by attracting scholars who were
looking for new opportunities to escape from war-torn and poverty-
stricken lands such as Egypt. In their quest for legitimacy as a
caliphate (they took over the royal title of “the custodian of the two
Holy Cities”, khādim al-ḥaramayn al-sharīfayn), they could not find a
better site for influencing day-to-day activities than the holy cities of
Muslims from all over the world. All these developments opened up
new possibilities for Ibn Ḥajar and many other Egyptians as well as
for Muslims. Before he moved to Mecca permanently, he had visited
the city twice as a pilgrim, once in 1527 and then in 1531. On both
trips he must have realised the academic opportunities the city could
offer him as a burgeoning centre of knowledge.
The sharīfs of Mecca, the autonomous traditional rulers of the
city, had ambiguous juridical affiliation(s) in the ways in which they
contributed to the general legal practices in the city. This affected
educational endowments, academic developments, legal
clarifications and judicial proceedings. They changed their affiliations
between the Zaydī Shīʿī and Sunnī schools.14 After the
establishment of the sharīfate in 968 most of its rulers were
associated with Zaydī Shīʿīsm and some took to Ismāʿīlī Shīʿīsm.
But by the end of the fourteenth century there were signs of them
inclining towards Sunnīsm and particularly Shāfiʿīsm, as the
descriptions of Sharīf ʿAjlān bin Rumaytha Abī Numayy (d. 1375)
indicate.15 Following his death, the sharīfs almost stopped
supporting Zaydīsm, which led to its disappearance by the early
fifteenth century. The following sharīfs, including Ḥasan bin ʿAjlān (r.
1395–1426 with a slight interruption in 1415), Barakāt bin Ḥasan bin
ʿAjlān (r. 1426–1455), his son Muḥammad (r. 1455–1497) and his
grandson Barakāt (r. 1497–1525), all studied ḥadīths and Shāfiʿī
laws with many renowned scholars of Egypt and Syria. This resulted
in the gradual decline of Zaydīsm in the region and the nominal
prominence of Shāfiʿīsm by the fifteenth century.16 In the sixteenth
century Shāfiʿīsm achieved prominence over them as they
“exchanged their Zeidite (Shi’ite) confession for the Shāfiʿīte”.17 It is
difficult to know about the influences of the school affiliation of the
sharīfs on the Meccan estate as the only details we have are
fragmented and patchy. Nevertheless, we see that just before, during
and after Ibn Ḥajar’s arrival in the city, the sharīfs followed Shāfiʿīsm,
and we can only assume that their affiliation with that school must
have contributed positively to the internal dynamics of the Shāfiʿī
cluster there.
Unlike Nawawī, who entered into direct encounters with the
Mamlūk sultan Baybars, we have hardly any references for Ibn Ḥajar
disassociating himself from contemporary political entities. In his
lifetime, two eminent Ottoman sultans (Selim I, and Süleyman r.
1520–1566) and two Meccan sharīfs (Barakāt bin Muḥammad
Barakāt, r. 1497–1525 and Muḥammad bin Barakāt, r. 1525–1584)
were in office but we have only a few patchy references for any
engagement between him and the rulers of Mecca or of the Ottoman
empire.18 He himself wrote about his attitude: “My desire is not to be
mixing with people, mainly men of the world.”19 In fact he associated
with an Indian nobleman, who may have funded his scholarly
pursuits, as we shall see later in the chapter.
 Sojourners for Pilgrimage, Refuge or
Knowledge
The rise of Mecca as a leading educational hub in the sixteenth
century was a result of several long-term ruptures that the region
was going through. By the mid-thirteenth century Islamic centres of
knowledge and prosperity such as Baghdad and Khurasan had
almost lost their prominence, first to Damascus and later to Cairo,
especially with regard to the history of Shāfiʿīsm. The eminence of
Cairo in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was
enhanced by distinguished scholars such as Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī,
who contributed by rejuvenating the traditionalist approaches of
Buwayṭī and Ibn Quṭayba in interpreting Shāfiʿī law. It was furthered
in a different way in the fifteenth century by Maḥallī and Anṣārī, who
simultaneously advanced the Shāfiʿī school. Through these vital
discourses and a wider participation of the scholarly community,
Cairo reinvented itself in the Shāfiʿī realm, centuries after the
school’s inception there through al-Shāfiʿī, Muzanī, Ibn Quṭayba and
many others.
The fall of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans seeking
legitimacy at the Holy Cities, the Shīʿīzation of the Ṣafawids in
Persia, the Portuguese incursions into the Indian Ocean world and
the consequent decline of Arabo-Persian trade all carved out
channels for the movement of Muslim pilgrims, nobles, intellectuals,
students, teachers and traders to Mecca. The increasing
involvement of the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean world and their
attempts to establish a global abode for Islam stretching to
Southeast Asia was an added catalyst for the movement of believers
to the heartlands of Islam, which were now governed by one and the
same regime.20 These factors all contributed to the growing
significance of the Meccan fuqahāʾ in the broader spectrum.
Scholars acquired renown through interactions with sojourning
pilgrims, refugees and other aspirants for knowledge, adding
idiosyncratic features to Meccan academia from that century onward.
Before the sixteenth century, Mecca was not an interesting
place for educational aspirants and intellectuals to be. Certainly it
had its share of micro-networks of scholars, pilgrims and sojourners,
but it did not produce any renowned scholars or texts, at least from
the Shāfiʿī cluster. In the whole longue durée of the school, it had
until then held only a trifling position. Just like the eponymous
founder al-Shāfiʿī, who grew up in the city, one of his early students,
Abū al-Walīd Mūsā al-Makkī (d. 846), promoted his ideas there for
short time. Ghazālī’s teacher and a renowned jurist of his time,
Juwaynī, taught in Mecca for some years while living in exile there,
and also started writing his Nihāya. Apart from these men, it was not
a lively spot for Shāfiʿī scholarship. But that does not mean
Shāfiʿīsm was not present there at all. It was represented in the city
as one of the four Sunnī schools. In the mid-fourteenth century, Ibn
Baṭṭūṭa visited the city and its kaʿba, and he tells how the
representative leaders of the four schools divided their authority as
they coexisted there.21 In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
the situation was no different. Shāfiʿīs, such as Jalāl al-Dīn
Muḥammad al-Makhzūmī (d. 1457) and Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-
Qurashī (d. 1433), were in the city teaching law, leading prayers and
composing some lesser known works. Most of them had studied in
Cairo with reputed scholars of their time, such as Ibn Ḥajar al-
ʿAsqalānī and Anṣārī. This demonstrates Cairo’s important position,
even in the minds of Meccan students, up to the early sixteenth
century. Many scholars who had been born, brought up or spent
many years in Mecca were migrating to Cairo until the turn of the
century. Abū Bakr bin Qāsim al-Makkī, known in the Egyptian estate
as Abū Bakr al-Ḥijāzī (d. 1383), and Abū al-Maʿālī Kamāl a-Dīn
Muḥammad (d. 1500) are the best examples in this regard.22
Into a legalist context such as this Ibn Ḥajar moved to Mecca in
1534, and he was to spend his remaining academic life there without
leaving. As someone educated in Cairo by renowned scholars he
must have understood he had a value in the new atmosphere. The
rise of the Ottomans and their consequent domination over the city
had led to a general stimulation of the legal intelligentsia there. The
Ottomans were followers of the Ḥanafī school, so Ḥanafīs took up
several key positions in the newly established educational
institutions. Yet the Ottomans wanted to accommodate other
schools, especially Shāfiʿīsm, since a significant portion of Muslims
living in the empire adhered to this school. Their ambition to control
the new Shāfiʿī domains such as the Indian Ocean was an added
incentive. That naturally offered big opportunities for scholars such
as Ibn Ḥajar. These new developments, as Mecca was developing
as a prime centre of Islamic academia particularly for legal
knowledge, together with his own difficulties in his personal and
professional life, must have motivated his decision to migrate.
Once he arrived in Mecca, he easily attracted numerous
aspirants for Shāfiʿī law. He began to teach, compose texts and give
legal rulings. In an academic career lasting for more than three
decades there, he taught several students from backgrounds that
were unconventional in traditional Muslim academia –
geographically, culturally and socially. A large section of Shāfiʿī
pilgrims to Mecca came from different parts of the world and ended
up together in his lectures. In the sixteenth century, the pilgrimage
was not an easy affair that could be completed in a couple of weeks,
as happens now; it then took several months or even years of travel,
and most pilgrims stayed in Mecca for a sustained period. Many of
them investigated the circles for knowledge that existed in both
Mecca and Medina.23 Many Shāfiʿī pilgrims were or became fluent in
Arabic and keen to listen to the lectures relating to everyday legal
issues that a believer could encounter, so they attended Ibn Ḥajar’s
lectures. These pilgrims listened to his lectures and also approached
him seeking legal solutions for various issues with which they were
struggling personally or collectively in their homelands. His Fatāwā
al-kubrā al-fiqhiyya and Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya, two collections of
juridical opinions on a number of different topics, are a fine example
of an intermixture of proper legal academic reasoning and responses
to popular pleas for fatwās. Those works contain questions asked by
enquirers from lands which had scarcely appeared in the usual
Islamic legal texts before.24 In the institutional setting of Mecca these
popular interactions with academic discourses were closely
interconnected. They could not have taken place elsewhere on such
a massive scale.
As the prominence of Mecca rose in the legalist sphere, Ibn
Ḥajar asserted himself into the intellectual-cum-textual tradition of
Shāfiʿīsm. All his juridical engagements were an assertion of his
connectedness to the longer tradition of the school. His works were
also part of his attempt to contribute to the expanding arena of the
Meccan fuqahāʾ estate. His life and career in Mecca and the
production and reception of the Tuḥfa show how the sixteenth
century nourished the development of new estates, clusters and
legal intelligentsia in the city, and the ways in which Shāfiʿīsm
acquired its prime position in the fuqahāʾ estate there.
 Life and Career of the TuḤfa
As a person educated in Cairo by such authorities on the Minhāj as
Anṣārī and Shihāb al-Ramlī, the text had an immense influence on
Ibn Ḥajar’s academic career. He wrote many separate works on it,
including a commentary, a supercommentary, a partial commentary
on the Introduction and another on the Conclusion. That was apart
from his frequent dependence on the text in his many other legal
texts and law-giving.25 We see this in his fatwā corpus Fatāwā al-
kubrā al-fiqhiyya (collected by his student ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Wāʿiẓ al-
Zamzamī) and works dealing with specific aspects such as ḥajj,
marriage and judicial proceedings. Whereas many of these were
specialised, short or incomplete, the Tuḥfa was a complete and self-
contained corpus of his own Minhāj work. He must have given it his
full attention, as we can see in its typologies and articulations, giving
it an accuracy that would add to its importance.
The juridical uniqueness of the Tuḥfa can be understood only in
comparison to and in connection with Ibn Ḥajar’s other texts, as well
as other commentaries within the school related or unrelated to the
Minhāj. His other main law books are interconnected works: the
Naʿīm, Īʿāb, Imdād and Fatḥ al-jawād. These four works are his
commentaries on earlier texts of the school, which themselves are
part of a longer textual genealogy. For example, the third text,
Imdād, is a commentary on Ismāʿīl bin al-Maqarī al-Zabīdī’s Irshād,
which is an abridgement of ʿAbd al-Ghaffār
 Figure 5.1 Title page and a contents page of the Tuḥfa, Mecca
Library, Fiqh al-Shāfiʿī 83

al-Qazwīnī’s Ḥāwī al-ṣaghīr, which in turn is abridged from Rāfiʿī’s

ʿAzīz, a commentary of the Wajīz of Ghazālī. For Imdād, Ibn Ḥajar
himself wrote an abridgement entitled Fatḥ al-jawād, the fourth text.
The Naʿīm and Īʿāb also belong to the same textual family, with a
common ancestor: Rāfiʿī’s ʿAzīz.26 In other words, these works
belong to a textual genealogy different from that of the Minhāj, but
both lineages intersect in a node in the broader family tree, at
Ghazālī’s Wajīz. In contrast to these four texts, connected as they
are to ancestors through many intercessor texts, the Tuḥfa is directly
attached to the work of Nawawī with no intermediaries. This strong
ancestry would not be the only reason why the Tuḥfa attracted wider
attention from Shāfiʿī jurists than the other four texts. It also stands
out for having been written later than his other works. The internal
logic of Shāfiʿīsm considers later works and later opinions more
trustworthy and effective, if two opinions of the same author
contradict. This must have helped the Tuḥfa achieve a higher
position than Ibn Ḥajar’s other works, adding to its more favourable
reception among later generations.
When speaking of his personal motivation, Ibn Ḥajar himself
gives the reason why he decided to write a commentary on the
Minhāj although there were a plenty of others:

For a long time, I have been contemplating getting blessings by

serving any of the legal works of … the editor of the school
without opposition Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā al-Nawawī (May God
sanctify his soul and brighten his grave), until I decided on the
twelfth Muḥarram, 958 [twentieth January, 1551] to serve his
Minhāj, of which the exterior is manifest, and the treasures and
stockpiles are abundant.27

In this passage we immediately notice his emphasis on the word

serve, as he uses it twice. He wanted to serve any works of Nawawī
to get blessings and he decided to serve the Minhāj by writing a
commentary. Notions of service and servitude and getting blessings
are expressed in many Islamic commentaries, as authors believed
that engaging with a noted text is not merely an intellectual activity
but also bestows a religious accolade with divine blessings. The
notion of serving the school is an oxymoronic assertion by which Ibn
Ḥajar asserts authority for himself and for the Tuḥfa by relating to a
person and his text that are already authoritative in the Shāfiʿī
tradition. Certainly the school had grown to occupy a powerful socio-
political space of the fuqahāʾ estate, capable of uniting and dividing
its members through a discursive praxis. The school had developed
much from its own attributes, from “the opinion” of Nawawī in his
Minhāj and from its own contribution of codification through
standardisation, hierarchisation and prioritisation. Socio-legalistic
and political developments by the thirteenth century and later came
to restrict Sunnī legal thought into just four schools, in which
Shāfiʿīsm had an important and powerful role. In its locus of power,
Nawawī’s works and particularly the Minhāj had grown to be what
may be called sanctum sanctorum. Ibn Ḥajar said with much humility
that he is serving an already established scholar, his text and the
school. Then, as an oxymoron, he asserts his own ability and
consequently that of the Tuḥfa. Claims to serve the powerful come
from the powerful.28
More precisely, Ibn Ḥajar explains what exactly he intends to
contribute by writing such a commentary. He aims to summarise the
original text, referring to its widely circulated commentaries; to deal
with elaborate sentences; to avoid any beating around the bush by
giving exact rulings and evidence; to reconcile any disputes and
provide appropriate justifications; to trace back monographs and
studies to their authors where their intentions and determinations are
obscure; to refer to the debates by utilising the qiyās (deductive
analogy) or ʿilla (ratio legis). That the massive volume of legal
commentary texts appeared three centuries after the Minhāj was a
major concern for Ibn Ḥajar. Hence, the classification of authority,
hierarchisation of tradition and contextual pressure added to his
qualitative elaboration, which was inherent with complexities. This
precision in analytical design and intention leads the Tuḥfa towards
erudition, and resembles the predicaments Nawawī faced in his time.
If Nawawī had to encounter all the works of the school since its
inception, Ibn Ḥajar had to face all the works written after Nawawī,
primarily the commentaries on the Minhāj.
If we compare the content of the Tuḥfa with those of the rest of
his works we can understand how idiosyncratic it is in terms of
logical formulation, philological articulation and the amalgamation of
diverse commentaries and possible disagreements in the narrative.
For a non-specialist it can be hard to comprehend the judgements of
Ibn Ḥajar on each issue. Heated debates have erupted even among
specialist scholars over possible meanings of particular phrases or
sentences. Throughout the text the philological constructions are
those of a committed jurist. For the common reader, even one fluent
in Arabic and in the technical terms of Islamic law, it is highly
challenging to understand the wordings and sentence structures. It
might appear that Ibn Ḥajar is very bad at phrasing a sentence or
conveying his message, but Shāfiʿī experts of the text say that if we
read it with extreme care, we can see how Ibn Ḥajar has carefully
framed a sentence with exact wordings at exact places.29 This
applies also to the verbosity often identified in the text. To show the
complexity of the language and content in the Tuḥfa we take its
commentary on the “paraphernalia of disputes” in the Minhāj which
we examined earlier. The Tuḥfa reads:30

Wherever (Ar. ḥayth) [is written] with ḍamm [on the letter th],
fatḥ and kasr are also allowed by changing yāʾ into wāw or
alif.31 It indicates an actual or notional place … I use it in [the
text]. Akhfash has argued that it [the word ḥayth] connotes time;
the terms al-aẓhar or al-mashhūr related to the aẓhar or the
 mashhūr as a characteristic of it; that is, one of those derived at
once; it is a reference to two or more qawls. If the dispute is
strong, because of the power of its percipient non-rājiḥ by
expounding evidence, lacking its peculiarity and equalling both
their evidence in the original expression. If the rājiḥ could be
distinguished, either because the majority certainly supports it,
or for its evidence being the clearest, surely the differentiation
would not happen. I say al-aẓhar, otherwise it expounds the
contrary, empowered by its percipient al-mashhūr. That is how I
termed it as it indicates that its contrary [meaning] is subtle.
There might be contradictions among the works of the author in
determining preponderance (tarjīḥ) emerging out of changes in
his independent investigation (ijtihād). Then one should fix that
by editing it, especially if one wants to confirm things according
to their value. Wherever I use al-aṣaḥḥ or al-ṣaḥīḥ, it is a
reference to two or more wajhs, then if it is from one, the tarjīḥ
is according to the abovementioned qawls; or if it is from more
than one, it is according to the tarjīḥ of another independent
investigator. if the dispute is strong, I say al-aṣaḥḥ similar to
the abovementioned qawls, as it informs with the validity of its
opposite … if not strong then al-ṣaḥīḥ.32

From this passage we can get a glimpse of how the Tuḥfa comments
upon the Minhāj. It is concerned about the terminological usages
found there, while in other contexts it delves into many other
aspects. It enters into a detailed hagiographical account of al-Shāfiʿī
in the continuation of this passage. When the Minhāj says,
“[w]herever I say the naṣṣ it refers to a text of al-Shāfiʿī and signifies
the existence of a weak wajh, or a derived qawl”, it explains al-
Shāfiʿī’s birth, death, full name, genealogy and some miracle stories.
It provides a textual and intellectual reference to other works
commenting on the Minhāj, as seen from the statement: “Wherever I
refer to the new view, the old view is its opposite; and if I refer to the
old view, then the new view is its opposite.” The complexity of
philological enunciations in the Tuḥfa comes from an attempt to
achieve sophistication in legalist insinuations by elaborating on the
grammar and structure of the Minhāj. This was a famous element in
the Shāfiʿī tradition, and it certainly leads to an elaboration of
content, qualitatively and quantitatively. The quantitative aspect,
habitually inherent in a commentary, resulted in the production of a
four-volume text. The qualitative facets are entwined with authorial
intentionality, compulsions of new contexts, and the like.
The typologies of the Tuḥfa need to be more deeply analysed,
but for now one example might help us understand how differently it
approaches various topics. Commenting on Minhāj’s discussion on
purity and impurity which we discussed earlier, we read:

It should be excluded from the things that would pollute a little

water added to more water by a change [in colour, taste or
smell] and a little water by its contact with [the filth]. Then the
dispute discussed below is about water again, contrary to those
who argued that the base text would confuse by identifying it
with solid objects, given that among the legalists it is just a part
of it, and it is carelessness about excluding from it (mustathnā
minhu). A dead insect without blood that is of its kind flowing
(Ar. sāʾil) when a part of its live body splits, like a fly, mosquito,
moth, flea, beetle, bug, scorpion, toad, cockroach, wasp and
gecko, but not a snake, tortoise, or frog. If one doubts whether
or not its blood would flow, it would not offend, as it appears [to
me?] in opposition to Ghazālī, as I have explained in Sharḥ al-
Irshād and elsewhere. Rather, the rule of the animals whose
blood does not flow applies to it.
Remark: According to the Majmūʿ, it is allowed in sāʾil to
pronounce the rafʿ and the naṣb [at the last letter].33 Both their
modes are obvious, and with fatḥ. It has been contested about
[the purity of] the parted [fragment of the animal], for it has been
rejected extensively in Sharḥ al-ʿUbāb. You must refer there; it is
important. It would not contaminate a moist solid object if it is
[solid] or others such as cloth and stuck on the solid objects, for
it is identical to the liquid discussed in the ḥadīth below; not to
specify it, then there is no disagreement about it by its meeting
with it if it has not changed according to al-mashhūr for the
valid ḥadīth: “If a fly falls into any of your water, let him immerse
it completely, then take it out. Certainly there is disease in its
one wing and cure in the other.” A valid report narrates:
“Certainly he is taking care with its wing that has disease.” In
another report we read: “In one of the two wings of a fly is
poison and in the other is cure. Therefore, if it fell into food then
you dip it in, that is, immerse it. It emits the poison and
withdraws the cure.” Its immersing leads to its death, especially
in hot water. If it is contaminated, it is not required. All other
[insects] that do not have putrescent blood are similar to the fly,
even if those do not spread when they fall. Because a lack of
 putrescent blood entails less impurity than purity, as a group [of
jurists] like Qaffāl have opined.34

The Tuḥfa continues to discuss the relative purity and impurity of

water, food and other solids that become contaminated with small
creatures with or without shedding blood. This example
demonstrates how it proceeds with legal discussions of minute
details that a believer might come across in everyday life. The
typology of the Tuḥfa is well reflected in this passage, which
demonstrates how it deals with the original text, with the discursive
tradition of the school, with the larger narratives of Islam, and with
earlier texts of the author himself. The syntax of the Minhāj, and its
concision and hierarchical deployment of multiple disputes, are the
usual starting point for the Tuḥfa. Eventually, it moves on to the
layered possibilities of meanings implied in the original text. It also
comes up with a justifying analysis of the text’s rulings standing
within the framework of the school. To this purpose, it takes refuge in
the foundation scriptures of Islam, Qurʾānic verses and ḥadīths.
Though its stand is to extend the dominant views of the school, it
advances them with inevitable disagreements with previous
commentators on the Minhāj, and with legalist authorities before the
Minhāj.35 In its typology, the Tuḥfa stands closer to the Majmūʿ of
Nawawī, of which Calder wrote that it brings together several allied
sciences varying from the science of biography to the sciences of
language, ḥadīth, juristic argument, ikhtilāf and assessment of
maḏhab. “The whole is a dense reticulation of knowledge and
meaning that justifies and creates the religious history of the
community – the Shāfiʿī community within the Sunnī community.”36
 Mecca in the Frame
In line with the Minhāj’s attempt to converse with its regional
contexts, the Tuḥfa also addresses the local settings in which it was
written. It brings its immediate surroundings of Mecca and the Hijaz
at large into its substantive legal formulations. This reflects the
increasing nexus for sojourners in the city of pilgrimage, refuge and
knowledge, and it invokes Meccan and Hijazi ethnic, scholarly,
linguistic and cultural norms, identities and values as authentically
Islamic. With such parochial focuses, the text repeatedly forefronts a
specific Arab-Islamic identity in its rulings and visions of Islamic law.
This assertion has a long history within and beyond the Shāfiʿī
school, but it acquired an authoritative framework in the school
through the rise of a Meccan Shāfiʿīsm vis-à-vis a Cairene Shāfiʿīsm.
This Mecca-centred approach was nurtured in separate dimensions.
There were socio-cultural associations with an ethnic distinctiveness,
generally with Arab tribal communities living in the Hijaz region, there
were the geographical implications of an inward migration, and there
were progressive dynamics, such as textual progress, in this case
from the Minhāj to the Tuḥfa. By and large the process retained
Mecca as a centre of legal authority, of Islamic knowledge and of the
modes and practices of daily life for a Muslim. Ibn Ḥajar and the
Tuḥfa were ardent architects of this change in Sunnī legalism.
The text argues that the Arabs are the best ethnic group in the
world, and should be prioritised over non-Arabs (‘ajam) because “the
Arabs are closer to the Prophet and more honourable” and “because
Allah has chosen the Arabs over others and has made them
distinguished with several qualities”.37 This argument on the racial
quality of Arabs is not limited in the text to a few issues commonly
recognised by the Arab supremacist approach of Shāfiʿī jurists, such
as the hierarchised inscribing of people in the army registers and the
distribution of the proceeds of war. It also asserts this in several
other areas, such as the general leadership of Muslims, conjugal
suitability, marital and divorce norms, Arab patriarchal notions of
lineage, and rulership.38 The author contends that the Arabs,
particularly the Quraysh, are best suited to lead the Muslim
community and they stand at the top of its socio-racial hierarchy,
enjoying several privileges.39 In the case of marriage, the Arabs are
most compatible not only for marriage among Arabs but also as
grooms for non-Arab brides (never the other way around).40 In
recognising one’s lineage, the identity of one’s father should be
taken into account as “the Arabs take pride in it [the lineage of
fathers], and not of mothers”.41 This assertion of patrilineal descent
as an Islamic legal norm and its substantiation on the basis of Arab
patriarchal praxis evince the chauvinistic Arab vision which the Tuḥfa
disseminates for Islam. We should read this patriarchal argument
against the historical existence of several matrilineal Muslim
communities across the world and their recognition in Shāfiʿī texts as
early as the eleventh century.42 These juridical substantiations of the
Tuḥfa clearly illustrate a Meccan/Hijazi cultural preoccupation which
is covered in its legal discourse. Such rhetoric can be found in the
early histories of Islam, dispersed through various collections of
ḥadīths, exegeses, chronicles, hagiographies and poetry; the
Ḥanbalīs often clung to such reasonings. But only now do we find
such a claim being taken up with so much conviction by a Shāfiʿī
jurist in his legal text. We can understand that these rationalisations
were part of Ibn Ḥajar’s broader vision of racialism, as he has written
an exclusive treatise on the Arab racial superiority.43 He cites this
work in the Tuḥfa while discussing conjugal suitability, and he
encourages his readers to examine it for further details on the
“superiorities of the Arabs”.44
Ibn Ḥajar narrows this Arab identity and its religio-cultural and
racial superiority to a Hijazi identity, notably excluding Arabised
people from all over the Arab world. He bases his argument on
ethnic and tribal lineage, and dismisses the candidacy of native
language or other socio-cultural physiognomies to recognise
someone’s Arab identity, and therefore he makes an unmistakeably
racialist case. He does broaden his Arab-centric frame beyond
Mecca and its prominent Quraysh tribe, both of which he extols as
the best in human history and among humankind, but he restricts it
to the more limited Hijaz, excluding the larger Arab world of North
Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Gulf. It is not easy to understand
why he does that, though we may remark that Ibn Ḥajar claims a
genealogy going back to the Banū Saʿd clan of the Anṣārs. The
Anṣārs were one of the dominant groups in Medina in the early
history of Islam. They embraced the new faith from the very
beginning, and they helped the Prophet and his companions to settle
down there once they migrated from Mecca, according to traditional
Islamic sources.
 Ibn Ḥajar thus claims the superiority of a Hijazi-Arab identity and
asserts himself into this spectrum, despite the fact that he and his
immediate ancestors were born and brought up in Egypt. In his
pamphlet on the supremacy of the Arabs, he placed the Anṣārs just
behind the Quraysh as the best among the best of Arabs.45 Into this
hierarchy he introduces his own legal affiliation to Shāfiʿīsm by
narrating a ḥadīth in which the Prophet predicts that a scholar from
the Quraysh will fill the earth from horizon to horizon with knowledge.
In interpreting this Prophetic saying, scholars have different opinions.
The Shāfiʿīs claim that it was the eponymous founder al-Shāfiʿī, but
some Ḥanafīs deny the very authenticity of the ḥadīth. Ibn Ḥajar
refers to its alleged fabrication:

The allegation of some Ḥanafīs of its fabrication is out of

jealousy or inaccuracy. Thus, Aḥmad and similar scholars have
interpreted that it is al-Shāfiʿī (may God bless him!), because no
Qurayshī’s knowledge is spread across the lands and among
followers as that of al-Shāfiʿī has been, as has been witnessed
and is well-known from their time until today.46

After this discourse on Quraysh and al-Shāfiʿī, he mentions the

eminence of the Anṣār tribe, to which he feels he belongs. He enlists
elsewhere several other Hijazi Arab tribes and groups that would
help his readers identify the real Arabs from pretentious and false
claimants.47
The Tuḥfa also promulgates several cultural and linguistic
specifications of Mecca and the Hijaz as the correct, authentic, ideal
and pious model of a practice, place or judgement in Islam. It would
require much space to enlist or analyse all those here, but one telling
example is his repeated discussions of sartorial preferences of and
for the city. He asks the readers to choose certain dress codes as
followed in the city and its surroundings or as the Prophet wore when
he entered or lived in the city in order to mark a specific religious
identity and authority.48 This aspect becomes clear in its comparative
reading with the base text Minhāj. In a discussion about the sartorial
code for a believer at congregational prayer, the Minhāj says only
that it is meritorious to wear nice clothes. It is an obvious statement
and it does not make it obligatory. One chapter later, over about ten
lines, it deals with norms and laws related to clothing, where its main
concern is about proscribing men from wearing silk (for women silk is
permitted), and then briefly discusses exceptional occasions such as
war and extreme poverty.49 But the Tuḥfa takes this further with a
long discussion on what an ordinary Muslim should wear and how
and why it should be worn.50 Its discussion of the dress code for
scholars is interesting for our purposes. It starts by asserting that
scholars should wear model dresses (meaning formal Hijazi-style)
and forbids other believers from wearing similar dresses.51 To do so
would tempt someone to pretend to be a scholar with such a dress
and it is therefore forbidden. No such discussion is in the Minhāj or in
other works of Nawawī or his predecessors, as Ibn Ḥajar himself
writes in the Tuḥfa.52 Furthermore, the Majmūʿ clearly states that
wearing one’s best clothes is ideal and meritorious for all people, not
only for congregational prayers but for any other gathering too, and
there is no difference between a scholar and a layperson. During the
congregational prayer it is highly recommended for imāms more than
anyone else to wear good clothes and look elegant.53
Mecca also appears in the Tuḥfa as a historical place with direct
references to actual events, practices and norms in the city during
and before his stay there. As was explained earlier, such discussions
of regional instances are not uncommon in substantive legal texts,
and Ibn Ḥajar etches such norms when he discusses Mecca. For
example, there is a comparatively detailed account of a riot that
happened in the city during the ḥajj season of 1551 (the year he
wrote the text) that impeded the actual progress of the pilgrimage.
He writes that the riot emerged from a conflict between the ḥajj
commanders (umarāʾ al-ḥajj, sing. amīr al-ḥajj) and the local ruler on
the morning of Sacrifice Day, but the situation soon escalated
leading to fierce fighting.54 Fearing for their lives, most pilgrims and
residents left the city without continuing with the rituals. With the help
of militia, some prominent pilgrims tried to get back to the city so as
not to miss the time for the final rites, such as throwing pebbles at
Mina, but the Bedouin had dominated the entire area “like locusts”.
The Tuḥfa goes on to explain the juridical debate that ensued in the
city and in the region at large on the implications of such a situation
and the potential expiations that the pilgrims had to do for the missed
rituals. The account ends with contrasting opinions of Egyptian and
Meccan jurists on the obligation of sacrificing an animal as an
expiation. Another instance is his endorsement of a ban on women’s
access to the Sacred Mosque of Mecca at night, about which Marion
Katz has written in detail.55 Although Ibn Ḥajar wrote two long works
on this restriction and its legal implications in the context of Mecca,
his similar standpoint spills over to the Tuḥfa, where he generalises
the power of a ruler or his representative to prevent women from
entering any mosque if they are attractive, perfumed or adorned.
Similar to the descriptions of historical events with a discussion
on their legal implications, the Tuḥfa also talks about several other
social, cultural and political currents in Mecca. One example is its
discussion of the consumption of drugs among Meccans, especially
of one specific plant that grows in the mountains of the city. In highly
condemnatory terms, he expresses his anger at “several stupid
folks” of the city who have been consuming the plant called Qubaysī
from the Meccan mounds: “It [Qubaysī] is the worst among the
intoxicants, because a small quantity of it would knock out the body
and the brain and affect one’s whole balance, and a large amount is
an instant murderer. It is thus far stronger than opium in toxicity.”56 It
is notable that the text talks about this Meccan weed in the context of
several other drugs, along with a brief history of their consumption in
the Middle East. These direct historical references appear in the text
in addition to many other indirect references to historical practices in
the city. In one context, it forbids people from taking soil and stones
away from the holy land.57 In another context, it proscribes a specific
commercial transaction prevalent in the city, despite its approval by
many Ḥaḍramī jurists.58 In yet another instance, it recommends
better ways to distribute alms to the poor in the city.59 All these
discussions, among many others, must have arisen from his direct
encounter with aberrant practices there.
Some of his formulations emerged from the nexus of the
itinerant pilgrims, refugees and scholars who frequented Mecca
more than before. As discussed earlier, many sojourners attended
his lectures or approached him with questions that were troubling
them personally or collectively. A few of these questions and his
answers are included in the Tuḥfa, most of which are directly related
to pilgrimage to Mecca, such as carrying someone to the city and
during the obligatory circumambulations, and making donations to its
poor residents.60 The conversations between the author and his
interlocuters provide the best window to the exchanges that must
have happened there through an intermixture of pilgrimage, exile,
education, popular pleas for legal opinions and legal academic
reasoning. They are also a recreation of the author’s personal
conversation with his listeners prior to the writing as generalised
rulings applicable to a later and wider audience. They also enlighten
us on the ways in which these fatwās enter into substantive legal
texts, almost stripped of contexts, yet not entirely losing the
contextual inferences to the actual practices, contemporary
concerns, scholarly conversations, and interactions between the
estate and wider society.
The references in the text to the historical moments of Mecca
and its juridical engagements with networks of pilgrims, refugees and
students all come in addition to further engagement with the city
metaphorically, allegorically, factually and ritualistically. Mecca
appears in all these spectrums as a constant point of reference,
similar to many other texts written in the school before and after him.
One major difference, however, would be his extra emphasis on the
ritual laws related to Mecca. In the Tuḥfa, the ḥajj pilgrimage is
discussed so extensively in several dozen folios that it could stand
as a book on its own.61 In fact, he wrote a separate work on the ḥajj
pilgrimage, again commenting on Nawawī, with more nuanced
analyses on the basis of his familiarity and preoccupations with the
city.62
These discussions definitely provide venues for further
explorations into what the author believed in the central role of
Mecca not only for the pilgrimage but for the authentic praxis of
Islam, and how specific historical moments such as a riot and ban on
women’s access to the mosque influence the laws pertaining to the
ritual despite the general belief that neither the ritual nor the law
change over time. I refrain from elaboration, only emphasising how
the city becomes a constant point of engagement for Ibn Ḥajar in his
Tuḥfa, bringing the city to the centre of legal discourses and
prescribed practices in order to achieve the authentic form of Islamic
(Shāfiʿī) perfection. He justifies the superiority of Shāfiʿīsm over
other legal schools on the basis of its prevalence in the holy cities of
Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, as these “three places and their
residents are the best on earth and its people”.63 The historical
contexts of Mecca and the Hijaz and juridical substantiations for
them as reflected in the Tuḥfa, and any such substantive legal texts
for that matter, also encourage us dig further into the text to see
interconnections between regional contexts and substantive legal
texts and the ways in which jurists responded to what was
happening around them, and how their responses in everyday lives
emerged in their legal texts.
The assertion on Mecca and broadly Hijaz in the Tuḥfa also
enlightens us on the ways in which social hierarchies and cultural
differences weave into the Shāfiʿī substantive legal formulations
through ethnic, linguistic, cultural and social peculiarities of the city,
while also contributing to our knowledge of its historical,
metaphorical, factual and ritual values. This overall take on the Tuḥfa
and its regional contexts can be identified as a Mecca-centred
version of Shāfiʿī law, as a variant of regionalisation inherent in
substantive legal texts, but with an additional thrust on this region
becoming an ideal, correct, authentic and authoritative place and
form of Islam. Regionalisation is evident in the Minhāj in its
Levantine context, and it will become evident in the texts discussed
in the following chapters, but none of those texts centralises a region
as the ideal form of Islamic praxis as much as the Tuḥfa does for
Mecca. This focus on Mecca is reflected in the transformation of
Shāfiʿī legal discourses as they imagine new loci of power which
involve different sorts of provincialism and hierarchised ethnicities.
Such a regional emphasis incorporating Mecca into a substantive
legal text has long-lasting implications particularly in the Shāfiʿī
school and broadly in the Islamic legal, educational and intellectual
realms. In the Shāfiʿī sphere, it marked the emergence of a Meccan
stream against the Cairene one, a subject to which we will return in a
while. In broader spheres, Mecca began to be recognised as the
centre of Islamic knowledge, a case that would define further
developments of Islamic legalism in South|East Asia and Africa. That
development was certainly mediated through the transmission of the
Tuḥfa across the Indian Ocean rim along with the charisma attributed
to its author. The assumed role of the Ḥaḍramī Arabs in transmitting
Shāfiʿīsm in later periods, if not before the sixteenth century, to the
broader Muslim world could also have been catalysed by the
transmission of the Tuḥfa that justified a religious superiority for their
identities.
 Shāfiʿīsation of Mecca
Ibn Ḥajar’s emphasis on Mecca is closely associated with a parallel
process, that is Shāfiʿīsation of Mecca, in which many local and
translocal networks participated. Thanks to the intellectual
engagements of Ibn Ḥajar, his oeuvre, colleagues and students,
Shāfiʿīsm had nurtured a strong scholarly power centred in and
around Mecca by the middle of the sixteenth century. This significant
development of Mecca as a centre of Shāfiʿīsm influenced the
perception of Islam itself in the new communities. A scholarly debate
had already emerged among the fuqahāʾ estate claiming
prominence for Mecca or Medina. The Mālikī scholars usually stood
for Medina as a better city than Mecca, whereas several other Sunnī
minds stood for Mecca. Many Shāfiʿīs argued for Mecca as the best
place on earth, even though some felt otherwise.64 Yet the city
remained unhegemonised by any legal school for centuries. Thus
the ideological claims over it by the three schools and a subsequent
domination of it by the Shāfiʿīs significantly contributed to the
historical expansion of Shāfiʿīsm.
Mālikīsm had not completely lost its appeal in and around the
region during the period, a position that it had been enjoying for
centuries since its eponymous figure Mālik bin Anas was based in
the neighbouring holy city of Medina. As he was the one and only
Hijazi scholar to establish one of the four surviving Sunnī schools,
his Medinese tradition had an impact on Meccan legal practices. The
influence was mainly on the daily practices and norms of the Meccan
population. But in the scholarly legalist tradition it is hard to evaluate
any prominence for Mālikīsm in the city before the fifteenth century.
For that century we have a chronicler of the city, Taqiyy al-Dīn
Muḥammad al-Fāsī (d. 1429), who had been a Mālikī judge there
since 1405 and had written historical texts rather than legal ones.
The connections of such towering Mālikī scholars as Shihāb al-Dīn
al-Qarafī (d. 1285) and Khalīl bin Isḥāq al-Jundī (d. 1365) were
mainly with Medina and less with Mecca. In general the most
renowned Mālikī scholars came from North Africa and al-Andalusia.
By the sixteenth century the situation became comparatively better in
the city when a few Mālikīs visibly upheld their school’s doctrines
there.65
After the Ottomans took control of the Hijaz, Ḥanafīsm began to
enjoy its heyday in Mecca. They significantly promoted their school
through various legal-administrative policies. While all the Sunnī
schools had their representative judges in Mecca the chief judgeship
from now on was given to a Ḥanafī.66 In 1565 the Ottomans ordered
that judges of other schools should consult the judgement registers
(sijillāt) of a Ḥanafī judge before giving their adjudication. Such
measures in favour of the Ḥanafī cluster of the Meccan fuqahāʾ
estate must have motivated many Ḥanafīs to move to Mecca. We
see many scholars from the Indian subcontinent and Ottoman
Turkish lands settling in Mecca and attracting wide attention by the
early decades of the century. Interestingly, many of them were from
South Asia, mainly from Sindh and Gujarat, but also from Bijapur
and Allahabad, more than from the Ottoman Empire.67 The Ḥanafī
cluster had expanded even more by the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Then no direct conflicts developed with Shāfiʿīsm, as
would happen later in the nineteenth century between the traditional
Sharīfs and the Ottoman emirs with the direct involvement of Shāfiʿī
jurists.
Ḥanbalīsm was only marginally represented in the city during
this period. Muḥammad al-Fākihī (d. 1574), who also studied
Shāfiʿīsm with Ibn Ḥajar, and with many other scholars from other
schools, was a leading scholar of Ḥanbalīsm, but he was almost
alone in his cluster there, which had only lesser known members. He
therefore travelled between different knowledge centres over the
years.68 His probable colleague in Mecca was Abū Bakar Abū al-
Khayr (d. 1621), who worked as a caller to prayer like his father, but
Abū al-Khayr had to leave the city due to some issues with a Shāfiʿī
judge.69 The school found a considerable following in the Hijaz,
including Mecca and Medina, only in the twentieth century.70
Although the Ottoman administrative policies supported
Ḥanafīsm, as we saw in the foregoing discussion, Shāfiʿīsm
managed to gain the upper hand over the educational circles of
Mecca and thus over its fuqahāʾ estate. Various factors contributed
significantly to this. One of the main reasons was the rise of some
Shāfiʿī families who prompted the circulation of the school’s ideas
and the empowerment of its cluster there through their diverse
activities. The Ṭabarī family, the most important among them, lived in
and around the city for centuries, and they gained momentum in the
sixteenth century. Then its members, men and women alike, became
very influential in the Meccan fuqahāʾ estate and took overall control
in its educational realm. Most of them did not associate at all with
any political system or take up any administrative positions; they
focused mainly on educational activities, controlling the Meccan
curriculum and its legalist setting.
Two other important scholarly families that promoted the school
were the Zamzamīs and Ẓahīras. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ʿIzz al-Dīn Zamzamī
(d. 1568) was as famous as Ibn Ḥajar in the sixteenth century. His
biographers say that one of his great-grandfathers migrated to the
city in 1330 from Shiraz and assisted a man who was in charge of
the Zamzam Well.71 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was a colleague of Ibn Ḥajar in
Mecca, composing books, teaching and giving fatwās according to
Shāfiʿī law.72 He was known as Raʾīs ʿulamāʾ Makka, the leader of
the Meccan ʿulamāʾ. His son and grandson also contributed
significantly to the external structure of Shāfiʿīsm in the city.73 The
Ẓahīras, on the other hand, were prominent in the Meccan estate by
the fifteenth century. One of them, Jamāl al-Dīn Ẓahīra (d. 1502),
was chief judge in Mecca and his life gives us the best example of
the conflicts that arose between the Meccan estate and the state in
which the autonomy of the one challenged that of the other. He
fought against the Sharīf of the city, but failed, and he met a tragic
death on the festive day of ʿĪd. His son, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (d. 1521),
became the judge of Shāfiʿīs in the city during the period just before
Ibn Ḥajar’s arrival.
Another new important Shāfiʿī family in the city was that of Ibn
Ḥajar. His two sons (Muḥammad and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān) were
scholars of Shāfiʿīsm. Although they did not attain as wide a
reception as their father, they did manage to hold some sort of
honorary position in the Meccan estate. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s son,
Raziy, was well accepted in his circles as well as more widely in
Shāfiʿī clusters elsewhere. This was due to his juristic contributions,
one of which is a commentary on the Tuḥfa. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 1661),
the son of Ibn Ḥajar’s daughter, also became eminent in the Meccan
Shāfiʿī realms during the seventeenth century.
Many of these families had inter-married: for example, Ibn
Ḥajar’s daughter married the son of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Zamzamī.
Marriage functioned as a path to social status and professional
alliance within the estate, as it did in the royal families. Altogether
these families dominated the local Meccan fuqahāʾ estate to the
favour of Shāfiʿīsm from the sixteenth century on. They continued to
do so in periods up to the eighteenth century or even later. They
could do this for several reasons. First, they controlled the
educational circles known as ḥalqas and bayts that were coordinated
individually by scholars, scholarly families or collectively. The Bayt
al-Zamzamī is an example of such an exclusive Shāfiʿī space
controlled by the Zamzamī family. Second, they were leaders within
the Meccan estate. Ibn Ḥajar and Zamzamī had the final word on
many general and particular issues within and outside the estate’s
concern. Similarly, many more Shāfiʿīs became so powerful in the
city that many other individuals and schools had to accept their
supremacy. For example, there was the case of the Ḥanbalī jurist
Abū Bakar Abū al-Khayr mentioned above, who had inherited the
position of caller to prayer from his father, but had to leave the city
due to a dispute with the Shāfiʿī judge. Nevertheless, the Ottoman
state, which was mostly unaware of the local internal dynamics of
such an estate, appointed the Ḥanafī jurists as chief judges, showing
their favouritism for that school. The judge was a tool of the state,
from the top downwards, so this did not create much change in the
interests of the estate, since their power was constituted from the
bottom upwards. Yet we should also keep in mind that the Meccan
estate was not in direct conflict with the Ottoman state even though it
had some conflicts with the local administrators of the city, the
sharīfs. Ibn Ḥajar praised the Ottoman sultan Süleyman for reforms
he introduced in Mecca and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Zamzamī took charge of
the newly established Ottoman madrasa in the city towards the end
of his life.74
In addition to the family dynamics, the student chains of
particular teachers also had a role in the undercurrents of the estate
and contributed to the growth of the Shāfiʿī cluster in the city. Some
of Ibn Ḥajar’s and Zamzamī’s prominent students have all
internalised this Meccan constellation of Shāfiʿīsm in their legal
approaches. Beyond the students we also see many other renowned
scholars of Shāfiʿīsm centring their juridical careers in and around
Mecca towards the end of the sixteenth century. Some of them made
remarkable contributions to the expansion of the school in the city
and beyond through their works, fatwās, teachings, etc.75 One name
worthy of mention is ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Fākihī (d. 1574), who was a
colleague and friend of Ibn Ḥajar and is said to have written works
“equalling Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī [d. 1505] in abundance”.76 Although
many of their works or fatwās are not available today, we can clearly
imagine the intensity of Shāfiʿī legalist teachings and careers in
Mecca in the sixteenth century. Their students and students’
students furthered this tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In addition to the Bayt al-Zamzamī, more institutions such
as the Bayt al-Manūfī arose, certainly improving the position of
Shāfiʿī excellence in the city.
These scholars and intellectuals permanently residing in Mecca
helped to make the city a renowned centre for learning and legal
clarification, catering for the needs of Muslims from all over the world
in the sixteenth century. All other schools had a space in the
spectrum but most of their teachers or students did not rise to
prominence in the global fuqahāʾ estate or their own school,
whereas Ibn Ḥajar had done so. Changes for Shāfiʿīsm clearly
occurred in the city, where many jurists managed to hold sway within
the school and even further afield.
 Mecca versus Cairo: Division of
Commentators
Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqs, commentators on his
Minhāj in the sixteenth century were divided into two sub-schools.
One I identify with Cairo and the other with Mecca. The mechanism
of divisions inherent in the Shāfiʿī tradition now expressed itself in a
split between commentators on the same text. Ibn Ḥajar led the
newly formed version of Meccan Shāfiʿīsm, whereas the Cairene
one was led by Ramlī. The commentaries on the Tuḥfa and the
Nihāya stood at the forefront of this division. The Mughnī of Sharbīnī,
the third commentary from the same period, was a supporting text
for the Cairene stream in the long run of discourses. A comparative
reading of the texts demonstrates the differences. The opposition of
traditionalism against rationalism, the major components in earlier
splits in the school, is hard to substantiate in this new development.
Ibn Ḥajar’s articulations can be seen to stand closer to a puritan,
traditionalist version, although that is not an exclusive
characterisation of his viewpoints.
The origin of this division and consequent differences in
authority lay, according to Shāfiʿī scholars, in the nominal
disagreements within the Cairo readership of the Minhāj in the early
sixteenth century, between Anṣārī and his student-cum-colleague
Shihāb al-Ramlī. In interpreting the text and giving rulings on a few
issues the two had their differences. After Anṣārī’s death, the leading
position in the Shāfiʿī cluster was taken over by Shihāb al-Ramlī, and
his opinions gained the upper hand in Egyptian circles through his
two students, Shams al-Ramlī and Sharbīnī. The Shāfiʿī accounts
tell us that since Ibn Ḥajar left Cairo for Mecca while Anṣārī was the
leading figure in Shāfiʿī circles there, he was mostly familiar with the
dated opinions of Anṣārī and was unaware of the revisions brought
by Shihāb al-Ramlī. This narrative would, in a way, help us trace the
origin of the division to the teachers of the dominant commentators.
One of them was Anṣārī, whose work was continued by Ibn Ḥajar,
and the other Shihāb al-Ramlī, whose work was furthered by Shams
Ramlī and Sharbīnī.77 Yet such compartmentalisation does not
always work, as at times Ramlī agrees with Anṣārī, opposing Ibn
Ḥajar. Furthermore, a clear distinction between the two streams is
not as explicit as it is between Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī. There is a
regional factor highly visible in Ibn Ḥajar’s legal articulations
following his move from Cairo to Mecca.
The framework of a Shāfiʿīsm rooted in the Meccan/Hijazi
specificities is a corner stone of Ibn Ḥajar’s interpretation of Islamic
law. Once we look more closely at his differences with Ramlī and his
occasional articulations against Egyptian culture and customs, this
aspect becomes even more obvious. As we discussed earlier in this
chapter, he asserts in the Tuḥfa the purity of the Arab people and the
Arabic language in contrast to other ethnicities and languages. He
says that if a non-Arab mispronounces the wordings of the Qurʾān
while reciting the obligatory opening chapter “Fātiḥa” in prayer then
the prayer will not be valid.78 By contrast, Ramlī says that accurate
pronunciation is not so important, and inaccuracies do not affect the
legitimacy of the prayer.79 The roots of the debate go back to
Nawawī, who discussed the issue in detail by differentiating the
validity of prayer from the validity of recitation. He said that if
someone mispronounces or drops a letter of the Fātiḥa then his
recitation would not be correct. There are two opinions about the
legitimacy of that prayer. The aṣaḥḥ (more valid) opinion says it is
unacceptable, whereas ṣaḥīḥ (the valid) makes it acceptable. If the
reciter had not managed to study the pronunciations before the
prayer that would not affect its legitimacy.80 Ibn Ḥajar, in a detailed
discussion on the issue, maintains that an incorrectly pronounced
prayer is invalid, saying:

If he changed ḥāʾ of al-ḥamdulillāh as hāʾ, or the qāf of Arabs

with an uncertain letter between it and kāf, the meaning for
Arabs is one which imputes to them features which are not
considered theirs. That is why some scholars have considered
the people of Western (ahl al-gharb) and Upper Egypt [as
Arabs] … [that their prayer] will not be valid, unless there was an
excuse about learning before the prayer-time passes.

In the following lines, he refutes other scholars who took a liberal

view on the issue.81 Indeed, Ramlī has a liberal view on this, as he
clearly states that the prayer will be valid, even if the pronunciation is
abominable.82 Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī also has the same view.83
This dispute illustrates a pattern of Ibn Ḥajar’s standpoints
differing from those of his Cairene colleagues. He asserts confidence
in the purity of the Arabic language, and of the way in which it should
be pronounced. Even in an unlikely discussion on prayer he does not
fail to deprecate some Egyptians by pointing to their non-Arab
origins, especially when we think of the Egyptian pronunciation of
qāf, for example, which he specifically denigrates. The examples of
his disparagement of Egyptian customs are too many to list. One
other example occurs in his discussion about observing non-Islamic
festivities and celebrations, where Ibn Ḥajar notes that the Egyptians
are the worst as regards breaking this rule.84 He also shows his
reluctance to accept an excuse of ignorance as he restricts the
incompetence to the time of prayer. The debate also demonstrates
that Sharbīnī sides with the Ramlī group in the division. Interestingly,
Anṣārī also has a liberal view and Ramlī followed him, but Ibn Ḥajar
did not.85 This supports my argument against the traditional view of
tracing the Ibn Ḥajar–Ramlī conflict to their teachers Anṣārī and
Shihāb al-Ramlī.
Ibn Ḥajar’s assertion in his arguments of a privileged position for
Mecca and more generally for the Hijaz can be seen further for
example in his disagreements with Ramlī on issues such as the
obligations on Meccans for ḥajj pilgrimage, and prioritising Meccan
staple foodstuffs over others for obligatory charitable gifts during the
annual festival of Fiṭr.86 Again, in all these issues Anṣārī has the
same views as Ramlī.87 As for foodstuffs, Ibn Ḥajar specifically gives
priority to dates, whereas Egyptian scholars favour rice. This adds to
the “regional” element within the transregional divisional debate.
In the later history of Shāfiʿīsm this division in the debate spread
across its clusters. The Shāfiʿīs of Syria, Yemen, Daghestan,
Kurdistan, South|East Asia followed Ibn Ḥajar’s views, whereas
Egyptians followed Ramlī’s arguments.88 The wide currency of Ibn
Ḥajar’s oeuvre throughout the Shāfiʿī world, except obviously in
Egypt, has to do with his migration from Cairo to Mecca and
consequent spreading of Meccan/Hijazi peculiarities. While Ramlī
stayed in his homeland throughout his life, Ibn Ḥajar moved to
Mecca in the middle of his career, which helped to disseminate his
work more readily than could have happened from Cairo, where
particular individuals and scholarly families were dominant. Ibn Ḥajar
lost the possibility of his space in Egypt, but he won a much wider
spectrum of acceptance in Northern and Southern Arabia, and in
Central, South|East Asia and East Africa. In the Hijaz the Shāfiʿīs
initially followed Ibn Ḥajar’s viewpoint, but the Egyptians who
migrated to the Hijaz brought Ramlī’s arguments with them. In later
centuries the Hijazi Shāfiʿīs mingled the views of Ramlī and Ibn
Ḥajar without prioritising one over the other.89
In the seventeenth century, scholars such as Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī bin
ʿAlī al-Shabrāmalsī (d. 1676) attempted to reconcile the
disagreements between the Nihāya and the Tuḥfa by writing
separate commentaries on each text. The attempt helped to tone
down the bitterness in the disagreements. But it was not a general
success because by this time the Shāfiʿī following was clearly
divided into a Cairene and a Meccan stream. In the later tradition
many Shāfiʿī scholars tried to reconcile the division by fixing a
hierarchy for the opinions of Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī. Yet these
endeavours were not devoid of partiality. The Cairene division would
prioritise Ramlī’s views, and the Meccan division Ibn Ḥajar’s.
Cairene favouritism is reflected in the hierarchy attributed to ʿAlī bin
ʿAbd al-Barr al-Wanāʾī, who says: “The approved view (muʿtamad) is
what unified both the Shaykhs, Ramlī and Ibn Ḥajar, as long as the
followers of their opinions have not unanimously stated that it is
poorly articulated. Then, [follow] Ramlī in his Nihāya, and Ibn Ḥajar
in his Tuḥfa, even if the majority disagree.”90 Similar expressions can
be found when some Meccan sub-school’s adherents prioritise Ibn
Ḥajar over Ramlī. However, both sub-schools prioritise an opinion
when both the Nihāya and the Tuḥfa have the same ruling, and they
forbid any ruling contradicting their unanimous opinion. An
eighteenth-century scholar from Medina, Muḥammad bin Sulaymān
al-Kurdī (d. 1780), wrote in his Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya: “It is not
allowed to give a fatwā contradicting both of them, specifically
contradicting the Tuḥfa and the Nihāya, even if it resonates with their
other works.”91 This Cairene–Meccan division persisted among the
Shāfiʿīs until it became synthesised in the nineteenth century (see
Chapter 7).
 Maritime Communities and Mecca
In Mecca, the dual process of focusing on Mecca and Shāfiʿīsation
was made possible through the transitory merchants and the nobility
of the Indian Ocean rim. In the case of Ibn Ḥajar, we can see that he
accepted no position or benefit from the local political establishment,
the Sharīfs, or from the imperial power of the Ottomans. His
intellectual enterprise clearly depended on an Indian nobleman and
his family, Masnad al-ʿĀlī Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āsaf Khān, a
Gujarati migrant who lived in the city for long time and a former
minister of the Gujarati sultan, Bahādur Shāh (d. 1537 at the hands
of the Portuguese). When Āsaf Khān passed away, Ibn Ḥajar wrote a
long panegyric in which he explained their relationship. Regarding
their first meeting he wrote:

When he arrived there I did not salute him as was my wont due
to my not mixing with people, mainly men of the world. This
famous Khān is not with us. He was an eminent man of the
world and a wazīr. He sent a man of his acquaintance to me
with excessive kindness and much love till a meeting took place
between us. I then became acquainted with his excellent nature
and weighty words and deeds. He was a man of religion and
world. He was a man of wide learning and abundant
righteousness. He was not of the nature of men of the world
though he was of their shape and form.92
Ibn Ḥajar goes on praising Āsaf Khān at length, and we can see how
he presents himself as someone who keeps his distance from
worldly men, including a vizier whom he regarded as a politician, and
from Ottoman nobles. Nevertheless, he chose to maintain a good
relationship with Āsaf Khān, about whom we get biographical details
from others apart from Ibn Ḥajar.93 Following the fuqahāʾ tradition to
keep one’s distance from political nobilities, Ibn Ḥajar must have
observed that attitude towards the Ottomans, who ruled Mecca at
that time. But he chose to keep a close relationship with an Indian
noble, who did not possess any political power in the Holy City, and
not even in his homeland, for it had been taken over in 1535 by the
Mughal Emperor Humāyūn (r. 1530–1540 and 1555–1556). He
definitely arrived in the city with a great deal of money, as he was
sent by the dethroned Bahādur Shāh with his treasure and harem.
Āsaf Khān was, as Ibn Ḥajar says, very generous and enjoyed the
company of scholars, which must have helped Ibn Ḥajar to meet his
financial needs. In other words, the legalistic enterprise of Ibn Ḥajar
was not funded by regional political entities but by transregional
itinerants in Mecca, such as Āsaf Khān.
Outside Mecca, a hagiographical story was circulating of a
miracle in Yemen. Once Ibn Ḥajar had finished writing the Tuḥfa, a
group of pious Yemeni scholars dreamt of the author sending a copy
of it to Tarīm in Ḥaḍramawt. In their collective dream, after the Tuḥfa
arrived there Ibn Ḥajar himself came to Tarīm. People hurried to him
and he began to teach them at the congregational mosque.
Everyone was happy. When the group woke up in the morning they
found an actual manuscript of the Tuḥfa before them. They wrote
about this to Ibn Ḥajar. He was delighted to hear it, and he asked
them to keep the manuscript as an endowment.94
The historicity of the story, mingling the worlds of dream and
reality, is not for us to authenticate. Whether or not it is true, what
matters is the historical consciousness behind it and the strategic
legitimisation embodied in the narrative. The records of dreams and
claims of dreams have always been a means to assert authority and
legitimacy in Islamic traditions. Various scholars have discussed this
on the basis of the visions of the Prophet Muḥammad and other
prominent figures of Islam.95 However, dreams about a legal text are
rare in the known literature, except for the many visions related to
the Qurʾān and ḥadīths.96 Therefore a narrative, such as this on
Tuḥfa’s arrival with blessings from its author reflects the Yemeni
scholars’ aspiration to assert themselves within a larger
contemporary network of Shāfiʿī textual and knowledge production.
The story also includes references to the lectures Ibn Ḥajar delivered
for local students and people. That statement is a further indication
of how deeply they wanted to legitimise their academic activities,
affirming an adherence to the chain of transmission of knowledge,
something that is crucial in traditional Islamic communities for
confirming legitimacy and authenticity. In terms of the historical
content of the story, the transmission of texts from Mecca, especially
ones written by the author himself or copied by others and
authenticated by him, is an important element. The transmission of
knowledge from a charismatic textual scholar from Mecca to the
people of another locality is another aspect that sheds light on
contemporary educational norms. Rather than a text or scholar from
a different terrain such as Cairo or Damascus, the notion of Mecca
being circulated among the fuqahāʾ estate and knowledge aspirants
marked the centrality of the Meccan educational system, which had
gained prominence in the Muslim world by this time. It also shows an
interconnection of Ibn Ḥajar and his Tuḥfa with Yemen, which would
play a substantial part in the spread of Shāfiʿīsm.97
The new Mecca-centric version of Shāfiʿīsm appealed to its
followers in the Hijaz, especially the Yemeni Arabs. They appreciated
the new relevance of Shāfiʿī clusters in Mecca and beyond. Ibn
Ḥajar’s views about Arab identity and hierarchised Arab ethnic
groups, which appeared in the Tuḥfa and in an exclusive pamphlet,
legitimised the position of Yemenis in the estate. In a way this led to
their functioning as a bridge between the paradoxical gaps of the text
and its wider Indian Ocean audience. By the thirteenth century, if not
earlier, Yemenis were influential in Meccan everyday life in
administration, the economy and religion. Once the fuqahāʾ estate
intensified they delved into the possibilities of this new horizon. Many
Yemenis began to run their own circles and madrasas, studied and
taught law, and composed texts. These activities added to their
acceptability both in the Arab world and on the Indian Ocean rim.98
By this time the Indian Ocean littoral was witnessing significant
migrations of Yemenis. They played a role in promoting this text in
learned circles. The commentaries and glossaries on the Tuḥfa
produced in the littoral are the best evidence of this, and it led to an
intensified “maritime wave” of Shāfiʿīsm along the South Arabian
coast, and by extension on the South|East Asian and African coasts.
The Yemenis helped to keep the Tuḥfa prominent in the Shāfiʿī
school by writing supercommentaries. As with the story from Yemen
of the miracle dream of the Tuḥfa and Ibn Ḥajar, more such
miraculous and travel narratives arose from the Indian Ocean world.
A scholar from Malabar called Zayn al-Dīn Makhdūm Jr, who will
feature in the next chapter, seems to have studied with Ibn Ḥajar.
Once he finished his studies he returned home and took charge of a
religious institute in Ponnāni which had been established by his
grandfather. His own teacher, Ibn Ḥajar, is said to have visited his
institute, taught his students and laid a stone on which an oil lamp
was placed to help give the students proper light by which to learn,
read and write.99 Again, establishing the historicity of the story is
hard, especially as none of Ibn Ḥajar’s biographers talk about him
travelling to the Indian subcontinent. What is important to us is the
historical consciousness it shows with regard to the networks of
itinerant scholars in which a jurist like Ibn Ḥajar could have
participated. By supposing that such a renowned scholar of
Shāfiʿīsm visited a remote place like Ponnāni primarily legitimises its
aspiration to educational significance in the realm of Shāfiʿī legalism.
It also represents an urge in the maritime Shāfiʿī clusters to publicise
the wider expansion of their school.
In the following centuries, the Tuḥfa was the source on which
the school most depended for final verdicts in legal debates and
lawgiving, learning and teaching at higher educational and legal
centres. It stood at the forefront of textual circulation as an
authoritative and highly ranked source of law in the new waves of
population movements. It attracted commentaries,
supercommentaries, abridgments and poetic versions, and it also
became a prime source of Shāfiʿī discursive tradition in and around
the Indian Ocean, where the school began to dominate other legal
schools. The growth of higher educational institutions dedicated to
Shāfiʿī law in particular and Islamic law in general significantly
facilitated the increased popularity of the Tuḥfa. The proliferation of
legal texts and scholars strongly influenced by the Yemeni diaspora
led to the growth of the Shāfiʿī school in the oceanic Muslim
communities.
 Between the Storms: Reception and
Legacy
Despite all the internal idiosyncrasies of content, articulation, form
and structure, an important factor contributing to the popularity of the
Tuḥfa over any of Ibn Ḥajar’s other works is the fact that it was a
comprehensive commentary of the Minhāj. In the sixteenth century,
the Minhāj was enjoying popularity in Shāfiʿī circles, attracting
multiple commentaries, discussions, fatwās and inclusion in the
curricula of higher educational institutions. Ramlī and Sharbīnī had
yet to write their commentaries, but naturally their colleague’s
commentary, which had appeared recently, was an immediate
reference point for them, even though it was one with which they
would mostly disagree.
The fact that Ibn Ḥajar began to teach the Tuḥfa at Mecca once
he had finished writing it must also have accelerated its wider
reception. The practice, generally called samāʿ (hearing) and iqrāʾ
(reading), was how premodern Islamic authors published their texts.
The audience read back a copied text to the author to be
authenticated. In those sessions the author sometimes revised
phrasings or even arguments. Such educational gatherings were
sometimes more intensive than usual samāʿ-iqrāʾ sessions as they
offered a chance for rigorous discussion. The author could then
revise the text with additions and deletions in response to questions
raised by students. These gatherings led to the production of a
“dynamic text”, in which additions and deletions frequently
invigorated a text. This process continued until the author stopped
working on the text or died. The “original” manuscript of such a
dynamic text is practically impossible to trace. The Tuḥfa is no
different from this general paradigm, although it was written in less
than a year in 1551. Historical sources tell us that the author
conducted regular teaching sessions. Numerous doubts expressed
by students at those sessions about different usages and arguments
in the Tuḥfa motivated him to produce a supportive
supercommentary. Such supercommenting on one’s own work is an
independent aspect of a dynamic text. Possibly this
autocommentary, though he could not finish it, would be the first in a
series of more ḥāshiyas, and certainly an accelerator to its wider
reception in the Shāfiʿī world.
Initially the wind of opinion was against the Tuḥfa. The Cairene
Shāfiʿī cluster disagreed with many of its formulations. Ramlī’s
commentary indirectly appreciates the works of Ibn Ḥajar, yet directly
puts forward his views contradicting those in the Tuḥfa. Sharbīnī did
not go that far, but he mildly opposed many of its rulings. The
situation became worse when another renowned scholar from Cairo,
Ibn Qāsim al-ʿAbbādī (d. in or after 1584), produced a direct
supercommentary on the Tuḥfa in which he expressed many
criticisms and opposite viewpoints to its arguments. ʿAbbādī (also
pronounced as ʿUbbādī) was born and brought up in Egypt and had
visited Mecca many times. We do not know whether he met Ibn
Ḥajar there, but we do know that many of his visits happened while
Ibn Ḥajar was still active in the city. ʿAbbādī was truly a Cairene
scholar, for he had been educated at al-Azhar with renowned
scholars of the time, such as Naṣr al-Dīn al-Laqānī and Shihāb al-
Dīn Aḥmad al-Burullulsī, known as Shaykh al-ʿAmīra, who also wrote
a supercommentary on Maḥallī’s commentary on the Minhāj.
The supercommentary of ʿAbbādī was put together by his
student Manṣūr al-Ṭablāwī (d. 1606), who himself wrote a
supercommentary on the Fatḥ al-Wahhāb of Anṣārī and an epilogue-
commentary for the Minhāj. In the preface he explains his motivation
for organising such a work from his teacher’s lecture notes : “This is
a gentle supercommentary, with fine minutiae, valued editing,
significant alerts, self-evident passages unprecedented in previous
works.”100 He further places ʿAbbādī as the last scholar with a
thorough understanding of Islamic law. While Ramlī and Sharbīnī
levelled only occasional criticisms in their commentary on the Minhāj,
ʿAbbādī expressed his disagreements directly and frequently.
ʿAbbādī utilised Ramlī’s commentary to substantiate and strengthen
his own arguments. Certainly all these works together must have
enhanced the reception and acknowledgement of the position and
aim of the Tuḥfa. This would have been similar to the fate of the
Muḥarrar once the Minhāj had been released.
A more favourable wind blew when Ibn Ḥajar’s grandson, Raziy
al-Dīn bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 1631), produced another
supercommentary, in which he confronted the criticisms raised by
ʿAbbādī and also those of other Egyptian commentators. We
mentioned him earlier when referring to the descendants of Ibn Ḥajar
who advanced Shāfiʿīsm in Mecca. While countering the juridical
disapproval, Raziy al-Dīn justified the arguments of the Tuḥfa and
stated that ʿAbbādī criticised the Tuḥfa only because he could not
properly understand the “heteroglossia” of the text. That relieved the
pressure on the Tuḥfa’s further journey over an otherwise hazardous
ocean of criticisms. The onward course into the scholarly worlds was
moderately smooth. Only the Egyptian jurists were not fully
convinced by the arguments of the Tuḥfa or by Raziy’s
supercommentary. This kept the division in Shāfiʿīsm alive and
dynamic. Thus, in the later textual-cum-academic history of the
school we can see that Ramlī’s commentary attracted the Egyptian
circles, whereas the Tuḥfa enjoyed a primary position in the rest of
the Shāfiʿī world, especially along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
Of the twenty-five known supercommentaries on the Tuḥfa,101
two are widely circulated and used among the Shāfiʿīs, those by
ʿAbbādī and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Sharwānī (d. 1884). Both their works
were copied down together, and even printed together multiple times
while keeping the Tuḥfa at the margins. This transformed the four-
volume Tuḥfa into a ten-volume text which embodied three (or four, if
the base text is also counted) books in one. Beyond the full
supercommentaries there are also many more specialised textual
descendants of the Tuḥfa. Three scholars interpreted its section on
inheritance law alone, and many others have attempted to write
about the technical terms used. As mentioned earlier, the Tuḥfa has
a very complicated use of language which even experts have
problems analysing. That motivated textual experts to produce
clarifications and elaborations on its jargons alone.102 There are also
some lesser known elucidating texts, relevant regionally in a few
places.
 Compared to its textual ancestors, the Tuḥfa was much less
abridged, mainly because the complexity of language it maintains
throughout prevents even expert interference. Removing certain
parts would probably destroy its complex content. Nevertheless, a
summary was written in the eighteenth century, though it was not
circulated widely among the Shāfiʿīs.103 Conversely, there are many
indirect abridgements of the Tuḥfa which seem at first glance to be
independent works, but when examined more closely are in fact
found to be summaries of the text.104
As well as these different sorts of ḥāshiyas on the Tuḥfa there is
another side to its reception which should be noted. The production
of such detailed and copious marginalia explains its wider reception
in Islamic legal higher education, in institutions and in the practice of
issuing fatwās, giving judgements and entering debates. Each
ḥāshiya represents a minor part of these diverse activities
surrounding the text in different localities in the Shāfiʿī world. An
expert involvement with the text encouraged its social reception in a
way that made possible deep inferences from and analyses of the
Tuḥfa in particular. The ḥāshiyas in general acted as a hierarchised
marker of its scholarly social functions and related status in the
fuqahāʾ estates and the Shāfiʿī clusters.
In a nutshell, the Tuḥfa owes its reception to serving the Minhāj,
whose “exterior is manifest, its treasures and stockpiles are
abundant”. Moving away from the inhibiting social and academic
atmosphere of Cairo, Ibn Ḥajar built up a successful career in
Mecca, where he wrote many legal texts while interacting with
numerous students from all over the world. The Tuḥfa caught the
attention of students and scholars as being a commentary on the
Minhāj, and one written by a towering scholar based in Mecca. The
immediate criticisms and endorsements from his contemporaries in
Cairo and elsewhere contributed further to its long-term legacy. The
responses or commentaries of Ramlī, Sharbīnī, Ibn Qāsim al-
ʿAbbādī and rebuttals by Raziy al-Dīn, all within a few decades of its
composition, demonstrate that the text attracted the wider attention
of the Shāfiʿī jurists within a short period. If the legacy of the Minhāj
was based on its precision, systematisation and overall codification
of Shāfiʿī law, the Tuḥfa endured due to its elaborate engagements
with all the previous commentaries and many thematic and linguistic
aspects of the code. The reception of the Minhāj is the “success of
the code”, while that of the Tuḥfa can be seen as the “success of the
commentary”.
 Circulation of Supercommentaries
The Indian Ocean rim was subjected to a process of Shāfiʿīsation
through different individuals, micro-communities and institutions,
which makes us ask what implication this had for the course of
Shāfiʿīsm, and what role the Tuḥfa played as a text in the historical
rupture that revolutionised Shāfiʿī thought, dividing it into two sub-
schools.
After the sixteenth century, the Tuḥfa appealed to more
commentators, as did many of Ibn Ḥajar’s texts that “spread in a few
years in innumerable copies to the remotest countries”.105 In the
seventeenth century, four known supercommentaries were written by
scholars from different regions, from Nablus in Palestine, Ḥaḍramawt
and Kurdistan.106 Another three followed in the eighteenth
century.107 In the nineteenth century, one of its most celebrated
supercommentaries was released by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Sharwānī,
whose contemporary and possibly a colleague in Mecca, Abū Bakar
Shaṭā aka Sayyid Bakrī al-Dimyāṭī, also wrote a
supercommentary.108 This tradition continued into the twentieth
century and the Tuḥfa remains even today one of the most authentic
texts in Shāfiʿī debates, law-giving and higher educational
institutes.109
We will meet Sayyid Bakrī al-Dimyāṭī in detail in the next
chapter, and earlier in this chapter we briefly mentioned ʿAbd al-
Ḥamīd al-Sharwānī, whose supercommentary was printed several
times along with the one by ʿAbbādī. Sharwānī was from Daghestan
in the Caucasus, but migrated to Mecca and taught there for a long
time.110 Before settling in Mecca he had travelled to and studied in
Istanbul and Cairo with many eminent scholars of his time, including
Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) at al-Azhar. He was fluent in Arabic,
Turkish and Persian and used to teach at the Sulaymaniyya College
in Mecca. After the morning prayers he usually taught the Tuḥfa
before he withdrew to his room for his prayers and chants. The
Dāghistānīs in Mecca were “some of the more highly esteemed
depositaries of learning” and Sharwānī was the towering figure
whom many considered to be “more learned than” the Shāfiʿī judge
in the city, Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān (1816–1886).111 Many Indian Ocean
Muslims attended his lectures on the Tuḥfa, such as the Swahili jurist
Shaykhan bin Muḥammad al-Hibshy, the Malabari Aḥmad Kuṭṭi
Musliyār Kōṭancēri (d. 1907) and the Javanese Nawawī al-Bantanī.
His supercommentary has no details about its composition or
motivation. The one-line ritualistic prayer is directly followed by
comments on phrases in the Tuḥfa. This work extensively interprets
phrases, arguments, opinions and scriptural references, which are
otherwise incomprehensible for students.
Apart from this supercommentary and another by Ibn Qāsim al-
ʿAbbādī mentioned earlier, two other supercommentaries are also
widely used by specialist readers of the Tuḥfa. One is by ʿUmar bin
ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Baṣarī (d. 1628), and the other is by Rasūl bin
Yaʿqūb al-Kurdī al-Zakī (lived in the seventeenth century). ʿUmar al-
Baṣarī was also a knowledge-seeking migrant in Mecca, originating
from the port town of Basra. In his supercommentary he attempted to
analyse the wordings of the Tuḥfa and to draw attention to the
occasions where the Nihāya of Ramlī offered the same opinion.112
Rasūl bin Yaʿqūb was part of a larger Kurdish scholarly commune
who actively participated in the spread of the Shāfiʿī school since the
seventeenth century, and many of them advanced the Tuḥfa’s own
commentarial conversation.113 Besides these four
supercommentaries, which had a wide readership in the Indian
Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean regions, there are other
commentaries which are regionally important. For example, those by
Ḥusayn bin ʿAlī and ʿAbd Allāh Qādrī Bā Shuʿayb are well known in
Yemen as these authors were locally reputed jurists. Their works
must have been transmitted through the internal networks of their
students and chains of pupils before they were published very
recently.114
Muḥammad al-Bālī (d. unknown) wrote a commentary on the
Introduction of the Tuḥfa. The author’s adjectival patronymic (nisba)
“al-Bālī” could indicate an origin in Bali, an Indonesian island east of
Java, or a village in Shiraz.115 The latter is a distant possibility since
Shiraz had become predominantly a Shīʿī hub with few Shāfiʿī
scholars, while historical research on Islam in the Hindu-dominated
religio-cultural sphere of the Indonesian island is an untrodden path.
However, we know one Muḥammad al-Bālī who studied, taught and
lived in Medina in the nineteenth century. He wrote commentaries on
Islamic texts and issued fatwās on a number of controversial issues,
including one on the accusation of Shīʿīsm against a Māppiḷa Muslim
group of Malabar.116 This Bālī could be the same person, but we
lack any further details. If he indeed came from Bali it would open up
many interesting aspects of another distant region’s contribution to
the textual histories of Shāfiʿīsm. It could tell us not only of the
introduction of the Tuḥfa to scholars from there, but also of its wider
reception in Southeast Asia, or among Southeast Asian scholars
living in Middle Eastern educational centres, and of the role of a
possible Balinese scholar in the wider Islamic intellectual networks.
The Cairene–Meccan division of the school initiated by the
Tuḥfa and Nihāya also spilled over to the prioritisation of their
respective supercommentaries. Many supercommentators took sides
in the divided spectrum, furthering the divide to the following
centuries. A few jurists attempted to reconciliate this
supercommentarial division by introducing a hierarchy of authority
and dependability when they express contrasting views. An
eighteenth-century Shāfiʿī scholar Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-
Kurdī wrote in his Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya that the fatwā should be
given by prioritising the hāshiyas of “Ziyādī, then Ibn Qāsim, then
ʿAmīra, then the rest.”117 Another scholar adds to the list: “then the
opinion of hāshiya of Shabrāmalsī, then the opinion of Ḥāshiyat al-
Ḥalabī, then the opinion of Ḥāshiyat al-Shawbarī, then the opinion of
Ḥāshiyat al-ʿAnānī, as long as they do not contradict the foundation
of the school”.118 All these ḥāshiyas or the author-jurists mentioned
refer to supercommentaries well known among the learned Shāfiʿīs.
If we look closely into the contexts of these textual progenies of
the Tuḥfa, especially the backgrounds of their authors, we see that
many of them belong to South|East and Central Asia and South
Arabia. There is less participation in Egypt or Syria. This is a very
interesting historical development in the history of Shāfiʿīsm, which
had mostly evolved around Egypt and Syria in the preceding
centuries. The rise of Mecca as a centre for Shāfiʿī legalism in the
sixteenth century offered new possibilities for Muslims in these
regions. The revitalisation of the school in Mecca under the
leadership of Ibn Ḥajar and his Tuḥfa quickly attracted communities
from these other places to create their own centres for Islamic
learning and legal thought.
 Conclusions
The sixteenth century was a time of many remarkable shifts in the
textual longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm. It witnessed the production and
dissemination of at least four famous texts of the school, all which
were commentaries on the Minhāj. The most important and widely
circulated of these was the Tuḥfa by Ibn Ḥajar, whose trajectories
reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and
cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the
Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased
movement towards Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The author
moved to Mecca as the Ottomans began to take advantage of the
possibilities offered by the city for their political and religious
interests in the wider Muslim world. This gave new life to the Holy
City. In the wider Indian Ocean, it provided Muslims living in the
regions to the east and south, and to some extent in the immediate
west, an unprecedented chance to partake actively in Islamic
discussions combined with pilgrimages and rituals. Biographical
literature refers to Muslim educational aspirants crowding into the
Hijaz and to the subsequent increasing presence and prominence of
South, Southeast and Central Asian and East African scholars, in
contrast to the earlier outward migrations from the city in search of
knowledge and wealth.
The more cosmopolitan a place becomes, the more
conservative its residents become. Ibn Hajar and his Tuḥfa operated
in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city, but he took a rather rigid
approach. Like the Minhāj, the Tuḥfa too addressed its immediate
regional contexts, while also reasserting the geo-cultural superiority
of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs.
Although such notions existed previously in the Islamic world and
among the Arab supremacists of Shāfiʿī jurists, this is first time we
see an author arguing for such superiorities with so much conviction
within the legal frameworks of Shāfiʿīsm. It could have been that
there was too much cosmopolitanism and the increasing role of non-
Arab communities in the heartland of Islam persuaded the author of
the Tuḥfa to take a highly Arab-centric attitude towards Shāfiʿī law
and Islam in general.
The approach of the Tuḥfa was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s
colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries, Ramlī in his
Nihāya and Sharbīnī in his Mughnī. Just as Nawawī once
amalgamated two ṭarīqs, now commentators on his Minhāj were
divided into two sub-schools. The division might have originated in
the disagreements within the Cairo readership of the Minhāj,
between Anṣārī and Shihāb al-Ramlī, but it gained a wider scope
when Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī led two separate groups. Those groups
were divided not only on interpreting the Minhāj but also on several
hundred substantive legal questions. Ibn Ḥajar’s articulations can be
seen to stand closer to a puritan, traditionalist version. Even so, it is
hard to substantiate the idea that opposing traditionalism against
rationalism played a divisive role, as it did in earlier splits in the
school. The Cairene–Meccan division of the school initiated by the
Tuḥfa and Nihāya was advanced by their respective
supercommentaries and the viewpoints in the Tuḥfa found a wider
currency across Indian Ocean littoral, while the positions taken by
the Nihāya were accepted almost only in Egypt.
The Tuḥfa is idiosyncratic in its logical formulation, philological
articulation and the amalgamation of diverse commentaries and
possible disagreements in the narrative. For a non-specialist it can
be hard to comprehend the judgements of Ibn Ḥajar on each issue. It
would determine future engagements of numerous Shāfiʿī scholars
from the fuqahāʾ estates of South Arabia, the Hijaz, South|East and
Central Asia and Africa. The Arab-centric, Hijaz-focused and Mecca-
centric version of Shāfiʿīsm projected in Tuḥfa would not have been
welcomed in the Indian Ocean littoral, from East Africa to Southeast
Asia. Its complicated methodology and incomprehensible language
were hard for primary and intermediate students of Islamic law to
follow, and could have had a negative impact on how it was received
outside the Arab lands. But the participation of the Yemenis and
other Arabs in the picture changed that scenario. Their genealogy,
ethnicity, language and culture were valued in the Arab-centric
articulations of the Tuḥfa as well as in Ibn Ḥajar’s other works. In
reasserting a Mecca-centric view of Islam and dealing with much of
the incomprehensibility of the Tuḥfa and of Islam more broadly, they
began to play important roles. But they were not the only actors in
the future history.
Most of these regions had not been represented in the earlier
educational-intellectual histories of Shāfiʿīsm, and the scholars from
there did not have access to mainstream intellectual engagements
until Mecca became an easily “accessible” place and a centre of
Shāfiʿīsm for most of them. Mecca’s intellectual development in the
sixteenth century, along with the stimulation of legal education in
their homelands, provided a space for such aspirants to sharpen and
enlighten themselves. They were helped not only through stories of
miracles but also through direct participation in significant numbers.
The intellectual gap between the central Islamic lands and the rest of
the Muslim world, which had earlier been filled through mercantile
networks and the intellectual motivation they provided, was now
narrowed by the fortunes of those in Mecca and adjacent regions.
This process would determine future engagements of numerous
Shāfiʿī scholars from the fuqahāʾ estates of South Arabia, the Hijaz
and the oceanic littoral. The strengthening grip of the Ottomans over
such sacred spaces as Mecca and their growing interest in the
Indian Ocean trade helped them push their activities into the
mainstream and attract the attention of Muslims who were
geographically remote and marginalised far away from the Islamic
heartlands. This remarkable development led to a flock of Muslim
educational aspirants crowding into the Hijaz. Biographical literature
about Meccan scholars shows an increasing presence and
prominence of South|East and Central Asian and African scholars
since the sixteenth century, in contrast to an almost complete
absence earlier.
Along with the Ḥaḍramī and non-Ḥaḍramī Yemenis, there were
Persians, Swahilis, Jāwīs and Indians, and all these shared in the
dissemination of Shāfiʿī ideas. This new maritime wave of Shāfiʿīsm
along the Indian Ocean rim gave an intellectual confidence to the
Muslim communities there. An awareness grew among some of its
Muslim intelligentsia who had arrived in Mecca, stimulating them to
return to their homelands to establish similar educational centres and
revive the “indigenous Islams” into a standardised Islam. This
phenomenon resulted in the emergence of many religious higher
educational institutions all along the rim. It also led to a more
intensive Shāfiʿīsation of the existing Muslim communities. For those
scholars who returned home, the Tuḥfa was an immediate reference
point for many of their legalistic problems. A significant outcome of
revival under the flag of the Tuḥfa is that from now on the Minhāj
began to be overshadowed by the oeuvre of Ibn Ḥajar. The new
oceanic scholars referred to the Tuḥfa and other works by Ibn Ḥajar
along with the texts of his contemporaries like Ramlī and Sharbīnī
and furthered the legacy of the Minhāj through its commentaries.
That process can be better understood once we look at a sixteenth-
century Malabari text, an indirect progeny of the Tuḥfa, to which we
shall turn in the next chapter.

1 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver

(San Diego, CA: Warner, 1984), 263.

1 In this study, I cross-cite three important manuscripts and two

printed editions of the Tuḥfa. The manuscripts are Mecca Fiqh
Shāfiʿī (henceforth FS) 83 (vol. 1, dated 1158AH/1745CE), 84 (vol.
2, 1157/1744), 85 (vol. 3, 1160/1747), 86 (vol. 4, 1157/1744);
Riyadh King Saud University (hereafter KSU) 7850.1 (vol. 1,
1135/1723), 4886.1, 4886.2, 4886.3 (vols. 1–3, 1271/1855), 1365
(vol. 3, 1034/1625) and 7850.4 (vol. 4, 1136/1724). I also refer to a
few incomplete manuscripts whenever necessary: the first volume-
manuscripts at British Library (henceforth BL, London) IO B367
[Loth 280] (1012AH/1604), KSU 2148 (twelfth/eighteenth century),
and KSU 566 (vol. 1 1240/1825) and a third volume-manuscript
KSU 1365 (1034/1625). It was first printed in 1282/1865 in four
volumes (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Wahabiyya Press), but the most
widely used and reprinted version was printed first between
1304/1886 and 1307/1890 on the margins of its two
supercommentaries in ten volumes (Cairo: Bulaq Press). I use this
popular edition (indicated by “Cairo” in parenthesis) along with
another recent edition by Anas al-Shāmī (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth,
2016). The latter, as already mentioned regarding the critical
editions of the Minhāj, also contains several mistakes. Although I
do not use it here, we should keep in mind that the text (along with
some of its supercommentaries) has been printed multiple times in
Egypt, India and Lebanon, including one edition revised by
Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Khālidī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-
ʿIlmiyya, 1996).

2 For his biography, see Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, al-
Fatāwā al-kubrā al-fiqhiyya (Cairo: ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Aḥmad Ḥanafī,
1938), 1: in the Introduction, one of his students wrote a biography
of Ibn al-Ḥajar while the subject was still alive; cf. Abū Bakr bin
Muḥammad Bā ʿAmr al-Sayfī al-Yaznī, Nafāʾis al-durar fī tarjamat
Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (Ẓāhiriyya, ms. no. 2319 Tārīkh), 138–144;
ʿAbd al-Muʿizz al-Jazar, Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (Cairo: al-Majlis al-
Aʿlā li al-Shuʾūn al-Islamiyya, 1981); ʿAbd al-Qādir bin Muḥammad
al-Jazirī, al-Durar al-farāʾid al-munaẓẓamat fī akhbār al-ḥājj wa
ṭarīq Makkat al-muʿaẓẓama (Riyadh: Dār al-Yamāma, 1983), 94–
96, 963, 1402, 1829; ʿAbd al-Qādir bin Shaykh ʿAydarūs, Tārīkh
al-nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir, ed. Aḥmad Ḥalū,
Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ and Akram al-Būshī (Beirut: Dar Sader
Publishers, 2001), 390, 287–292; Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, al-
Ḳawākib al-sāʾira bi aʿyān al-miʾat al-ʿāshira: A Biographical
Dictionary of Notable Men and Women in the Moslem World in the
16th Christian Century, ed. Jibrāʾīl S. Jabbūr (Beirut: American
Press, 1949), 3: 111–112; ʿAbd al-Ḥayy bin Aḥmad Ibn al-ʿImād,
Shaḏarāt al-ḏahab fī akhbār man ḏahab, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-
Arnāʾūṭ and Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ (Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1991), 10:
541–543.

3Irfana Hashmi, “Patronage, Legal Practice, and Space in al-

Azhar, 1500–1650” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014).

4Cited in Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim

Learning (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1961), 81.

5Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Manhaj al-qawīm bi sharḥ

masāʾil al-taʿlīm ʿalā al-Muqaddimat al-Ḥaḍramīyyat al-musammā
Bushrā al-karīm (Jiddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2006), 25.

6 Muḥammad Abū Bakr Bāḏīb, Introduction to Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn

Ḥajar al-Haytamī, in Muḥammad Mahfūẓ bin ʿAbd Allāh al-
Tarmasī, Ḥāshiyat al-Tarmasī al-musammā al-Manhal al-ʿAmīm bi
ḥāshiyat al-Manhaj al-qawīm wa Mawhibat ḏi al-Faḍl ʿalā sharḥ al-
ʿAllāma Ibn Ḥajar Muqaddimat Bā Faḍl (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj,
2006), 24.

7On al-Azhar’s riwāqs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

see Hashmi, “Patronage, Legal Practice”, 52–61, passim.

8 For his contributions to the historical writing, see Miyāʾ Shāfiʿī,

“Ibn Ḥajar al-Makkī wa juhūduhu fī al-kitābat al-tārīkhiyya” (PhD
diss., Umm al-Qura University, 1996); on his role and position in
the Shāfiʿī school, see Amjad Rāshid Muḥammad ʿAlī, “al-Imām
Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī wa atharuh fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī” (MA diss.,
Jordan University, 1999).

9 Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Manhaj al-qawīm, 22–23.

10 Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Fatāwā al-kubrā al-fiqhiyya, 1: 4.

11Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the

Ottomans, 1517–1683 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994), 31.

12 For the details, see Jār Allāh Muhammad bin Fahd, Nukhbat
bahjat al-zamān bi ʿamārat Makka li mulūk Banī ʿUthmān, ed.
Qays Kāẓim al-Janābī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2010);
Quṭub al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī, al-Barq al-Yamānī fī al-fatḥ al-
ʿUthmānī: Tārīkh al-Yaman fī al-qarn al-ʿāshir al-Hijrī, ed. Ḥamd
bin Muḥammad al-Jāsir (Riyadh: Dār al-Yamāma li al-Baḥth,
1968), passim; Muḥammad bin Abī al-Surūr, al-Minaḥ al-
Raḥmāniyya fī al-dawlat al-ʿUthmāniyya: wa ḏayluh, al-Laṭāʾif al-
Rabbāniyya ʿalā al-minaḥ al-Raḥmāniyya (Damascus: Dār al-
Bashāʾir, 1995), 185–202; ʿAbd al-Malik bin Ḥusayn ʿIṣāmī, Samṭ
al-nujūm al-ʿawālī fī anbāʾ al-awāʾil wa al-tawālī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat
al-Salafiyya wa Maktabatuhā, 1960/1961), 4: 94.

13 Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Fāsī, al-ʿIqd al-thamīn fī tārīkh al-Balad al-Amīn,

ed. Fuʾād Sayyid (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risala, 1985). For an
exceptional case in the early fifteenth century, see Mahmood
Kooria, “Un agent abyssinien et deux rois indiens à La Mecque:
Interactions autour du droit islamique au XVe siècle”, Annales.
Histoire, Sciences Sociales 74, no. 1 (2019): 73–103.

14Richard Mortel, “Zaydi Shiism and the Hasanid Sharīfs of

Mecca”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 4
(1987): 455–472.

15Fāsī, al-ʻIqd al-thamīn, 6: 70, no. 1979; biographical note on the

Sharīf ʿAjlān, 58–73.

16We have no direct reference to the existence of Zaydīsm in

Mecca after the death of ʿAjlān bin Rumaytha in the works of three
contemporary historians from the city: Fāsī, Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar bin
Fahd (d. 1480), and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz bin ʿUmar bin Fahd (d. 1516).
Mortel, “Zaydi Shiism”.

17C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th

Century: Daily Life, Customs and Learning: The Moslims of the
East-Indian Archipelago, trans. J. H. Monahan (Leiden: Brill,
2007), 1: 199.

18He wrote an appreciative passage on the Ottoman sultan

Süleyman about his renovation projects in Mecca. Shihāb al-Dīn
Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Arbaʿūn ḥadīth fī al-ʿadl, ed. Samīr Kattānī
(Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2012).

19 Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, “Riyāḍ al-riḍwān” or “Life of

al-Masnad al-ʿĀlī Abil Kasim ʿAbdul ʿAzīz Āsaf Khān”, in ʿAbdullāh
Muḥammad al-Makkī al-Āsafī al-Ulughkhāni, Zafar ul Wālih bi
Muzafar wa Ālihi: An Arabic History of Gujarat, trans. M. F.
Lokhandwala (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1970), 1: 279.

20On Ottoman aspirations in the Indian Ocean world, see

Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
21Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾib al-amṣār wa-ʿajāʾib al-
asfār, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-ʿUryān and Musṭafā al-
Qaṣṣāṣ (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-ʿUlūm, 1987), 172–173.

22 Muḥammad al-Ḥabīb al-Hīla, al-Tārīkh wa al-muʾarrikhūn bi

Makka min al-qarn al-thālith al-Hijrī ilā al-qarn al-thālith ʿashar:
jamʿ wa ʿarḍ wa taʿrīf (Mecca: Muʾassasat al-Furqān li al-Turāth
al-Islāmiyya, 1994), 126 on Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qurashī; 136 on Jalāl
al-Dīn al-Makhzūmī; 87 on Abū Bakr bin Qāsim al-Makkī; 167 on
Abū al-Maʿālī Kamāl al-Dīn; and 193 on Abū al-Makārim Shams
al-Dīn. The only exception could be two families (Banū Ẓahīra and
Banū Fahad) that controlled the Meccan fuqahāʾ estate in general
and the Shāfiʿī cluster in particular for decades. Still, their
reputation in the wider estate or long history of the school until
then is marginal. For details on Banū Ẓahīra, see 88–89; and 99–
110 on Banū Fahad.

23 For the details of educationally motivated pilgrims in the

sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, see Michael Pearson, Pious
Passengers: Hajj in Earlier Times (London: Hurst, 1994).

24 For example, in the Fatāwā al-kubrā, there is a question from

the “people of Malabar” (ahl Malaybar) about the legitimacy of
pronouncing the Arabic formula of divorce incorrectly or
pronouncing in the vernacular a formula that does not literally
mean divorce. In the Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya, there is a question on
an Indian king’s (Ratan al-Hindī) conversion to Islam during the
lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad and his becoming a companion
to the Prophet. Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, al-Fatāwā al-kubrā al-
fiqhiyya, 4: 129; Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Fatāwā al-
ḥadīthiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 175.

25For a partial description of Ibn Ḥajar’s works along with the

details of the manuscripts, see Hīla, al-Tārīkh wa al-muʾarrikhūn,
216–228. We note that among forty-two works listed, Hīla does not
mention many legal texts by Ibn Ḥajar since his major focus was
on Ibn Ḥajar’s role as a historian who lived in Mecca.

26The ʿAzīz was abridged by Nawawī into the Rawḍa, for which
Zabīdī wrote an abridgement entitled Rawḍ, and Ṣafiyy al-Dīn
Aḥmad bin ʿUmar al-Muzjid wrote another entitled ʿUbāb. Ibn
Ḥajar’s Naʿīm is a commentary on the Rawḍ; his Īʿāb is a
commentary on the ʿUbāb.

27Mecca FS 83, fol. 1b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 4b; BL London
Arabic 280, fol. 2a; Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 1: 2–3; Ibn
Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 1: 16–17.

28 A convincing parallel would be the title Khādim al-Ḥaramayn al-

Sharīfayn (Custodian of the Two Holy Cities) “given” to the
Ayyūbid, Mamlūk, and Ottoman sultans and its usage well into
present times by the Saudi kings. This term khādim (servant or
custodian) denotes the autocratic king and his obligation of service
to the religiously powerful cities.

29Although this is an overstatement, a specialist on the text, M. T.

Abdulla Musliyār from Malabar, told me that if one reads it more
carefully it is possible to find, between its lines and phrases,
answers to any modern or postmodern issues. This belief is
underpinned by an idiomatic poem:
It is a text that has what it has,
 Niceties of its meanings.
Inability to discern what it contains,
Is akin to a dog in his mouth peeing
(kitāb fīh mā fīh, latā’if maʿānīh, faman lam yadrī mā fīhi ka bawl
al-kalb fī fīh). M. T. Abdulla Musliyar, Personal communication, 28
April 2014.

30The bold font is my translation of the Minhāj as quoted in the

Tuḥfa, the Arabic expressions Ibn Ḥajar used for a translated term
are in round brackets, and my interpretative phrases are in square
brackets.

31The fatḥ and kasr are Arabic vowels: fatḥ is a diagonal stroke
written above the consonant and represents a short vowel “a”;
kasr is diagonal stroke written below the consonant and
represents a short vowel “i”. The yāʾ, wāw and alif are consonants.

32Mecca FS 83, fols. 12b–13a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fols. 12b–

13a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 12b–13a; Riyadh KSU 566, fols.
4b–5a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 1: 49–51; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed.
Shāmī, 1: 98–101.

33The rafʿ and the naṣb are two out of four grammatical states in
Arabic.

34Mecca FS 83, fol. 23b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 20a; Riyadh
KSU 4886.1, fol. 22b; Riyadh KSU 566, fols. 9b–10a; Ibn Ḥajar,
Tuḥfa (Cairo), 90–92; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 1: 172–175; cf.
Oded Zinger, “Tradition and Medicine on the Wings of a Fly”,
Arabica 63, no. 1–2 (2016): 89–117.
35 Halim has written that the juridical debates happened before
Nawawī became irrelevant for later scholars, but as we see in this
passage and elsewhere in the Tuḥfa, Ibn Ḥajar occasionally
returns to the earlier scholars of the school to validate his
arguments. Fachrizal Halim, Legal Authority in Premodern Islam:
Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī in the Shāfiʿī School of Law (New York:
Routledge, 2015), 44–45.

36Norman Calder, Islamic Jurisprudence in the Classical Era, ed.

Colin Imber, intro. and afterword Robert Gleave (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113.

37Mecca FS 85, fols. 78b–79a, 136a; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fols.

70a–b, 119b; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 137, 279; Ibn Ḥajar,
Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 8: 375–376, 653.

38Mecca FS 85, fols. 78b–79a, 136a–b, 244b; Mecca FS 86, fol.

63b; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fols. 70a–b, 119b–120a, 214a; Riyadh
KSU 7850, fol. 52a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 137, 279–280, 8:
54, 9: 75; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 8: 375–376, 653–655, 9:
419, 10: 646.

39 On leadership, see Mecca FS 86, fol. 63b; Riyadh KSU 7850,

fol. 52a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 9: 75; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed.
Shāmī, 10: 646. On other aspects see the second to last footnote.

40Mecca FS 85, fol. 136a–b; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fols. 119b–

120a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 279–280; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed.
Shāmī, 653–655.
41 FS 85, fol. 136a, a similar statement is also made in fol. 44b;
Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fols. 119b and 41a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo),
7: 279 and 58; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 653 and 219.

42For example, see Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Wasīṭ fī al-maḏhab,

ed. Aḥmad Maḥmud Ibrāhīm and Muḥammad Muḥammad Tāmir
(Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 1997), 4: 454, 6: 185.

43Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Mablagh al-arab fī fakhr al-

ʿArab, ed. Yusrī ʿAbd al-Ghanī ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (Beirut: Dār al-
Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1990).

44Mecca FS 85, fol. 136a; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fol. 119b; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 279; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 653.

45Mecca FS 85, fols. 78b–79a; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fol. 70a–b;

Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 137; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 8:
375–376.

46Ibn Ḥajar, Mablagh al-arab, 34. In the Tuḥfa he does not name
Ḥanafīs but reiterates the argument, see Mecca FS 83, fols. 13b–
14a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 13a–b; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fol.
13a–b; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 5a–b; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 1: 52;
Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 1: 104.

47Mecca FS 85, fols. 78b–79a; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fol. 70a–b;

Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 137; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 8:
375–376.

48For example, see Mecca FS 83, fols. 250b, 264a–b; Riyadh

KSU 7850.1, fols. 188a, 197a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fol. 242b;
Riyadh KSU 2148, fols. 253a, 268a–b; Riyadh KSU 566, fols.
120b, 125a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 2: 475, 3: 34; Ibn Ḥajar,
Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 3: 279, 372–373.

49 Princeton Garret 1388Y, fols. 17a, 18a; Leiden Or. 2227, fols.
57, 60–61; Leiden Or. 1600, fols. 52a, 55b–56a; Mecca FS 21,
fols. 23b, 24a–b; Mecca FS 98, fols. 23b, 25a–b; Yaḥyā bin Sharaf
Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa ʿumdat al-muftīn, ed. Muḥammad
Ṭāhir Shaʿbān (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 136, 139–140;
Yaḥyā bin Sharaf Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Aḥmad bin ʿAbd
al-ʿAzīz al-Ḥaddād (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2000), 1:
279, 291–294.

50Mecca FS 83, fols. 250a–251a, 260b–268a; Riyadh KSU

7850.1, fols. 188a–b, 194b–199a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 242b–
243a, 251a–258a; Riyadh KSU 2148, fols. 252b–253a, 264a–
268b; Riyadh KSU 566, fols. 120b, 125a–128a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa
(Cairo), 2: 474–476, 3: 18–39; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 3:
277–281, 341–378.

51 Mecca FS 83, fols. 264a–268a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fols. 197a–

199a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 251a–258a; Riyadh KSU 2148,
fols. 264a–268b; Riyadh KSU 566, fols. 126b–128a; Ibn Ḥajar,
Tuḥfa (Cairo), 3: 33–39; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 3: 341–378;
cf. Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Darr al-ghamāma fī ḏurr al-
ṭaylasān wa al-ʿaḏabat wa al-ʿimāma (Miṣr: Maṭbaʿat al-Saʿāda,
n.d) – this booklet is dedicated to the dress code, specifically the
turbans.

52Mecca FS 83, fol. 264a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 197a; Riyadh
KSU 4886.1, fol. 254b; Riyadh KSU 2148, fol. 265a; Riyadh KSU
566, fol. 126b; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 3: 33; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed.
Shāmī, 3: 368.

53Yaḥyā bin Sharaf Nawawī, Majmūʿ sharḥ al-Muhaḏḏab, ed.

Muḥammad Najīb Muṭīʿī (Jeddah: Maktabat al-Irshād, n.d.), 4:
411.

54Mecca FS 83, fol. 432a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 295a; Riyadh
KSU 4886.1, fols. 401b–402a; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 198b; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 4: 127; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 5: 9.

55Marion Katz, Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought

and Social Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014),
chapter 3.

56 Mecca FS 86, fol. 96a, for a similar discussion of other

intoxicants such as opium, hashish and bhang see 172a; Riyadh
KSU 7850, fols. 79b and 141b; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 9: 168
and 388; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 11: 93 and 527–528.

57Mecca FS 83, fol. 432a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 305b; Riyadh
KSU 4886.1, fol. 416b; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 206a; Ibn Ḥajar,
Tuḥfa (Cairo), 4: 194; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 5: 132.

58Mecca FS 84, fol. 20a; Riyadh KSU 4886.2, fols. 19b–20a; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 4: 296; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 5: 317–
318.

59Mecca FS 85, fol. 27a–b; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fol. 25a–b; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 13; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 8: 132.
60 Mecca FS 84, fol. 268a; Mecca FS 85, fols. 6a–b, 27a–b;
Mecca FS, fol. 197a–b; Riyadh KSU 4886.2, fol. 252a–b; Riyadh
KSU 4886.3, fols. 5b–6a, 25a–b; Riyadh KSU 1365, fol. 3a;
Riyadh KSU 7850, fol. 163a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 6: 194, 397,
7: 13, 10: 57; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 7: 365–366, 8: 33–34,
132, 11: 676.

61 Mecca FS 83, fols. 394b–455b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fols. 273a–

319a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 368a–422a; Riyadh KSU 2148,
fols. 387a–408b (incomplete); Riyadh KSU 566, fols. 182a–208b;
Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 4: 4–199; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 4:
508–734, 5: 5–170.

62 Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Ḥāshiyat ʿalā sharḥ al-īdāḥ

fī manāsik al-ḥajj li al-Nawawī (Beirut: Dār al-Ḥadīth, n.d.).

63Mecca FS 83, fol. 13b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 13a; Riyadh
KSU 4886.1, fol. 13a–b; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 5a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa
(Cairo), 1: 52; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 1: 104.

64For different opinions and Shāfiʿī preference of Mecca, including

by al-Shāfiʿī and Nawawī, see Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-
Suyūṭī, Ḥujaj al-mubayyana fī al-tafdīl bayna Makka wa al-Madīna,
ed. ʿAbdullāh bin Muḥammad al-Darwīsh (Beirut: Yamama, 1985),
37–48.

65 On some other Mālikīs in sixteenth-century Mecca, see ʿAbd

Allāh Murdād Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar min Kitāb Nashr al-nawr
wa al-zahr fī tarājim afāḍil Makkah min al-qarn al-ʿāshir ilā al-qarn
al-rābiʿ ʿashar, ed. Muḥammad Saʿīd Āmūdī and Aḥmad ʿAlī
(Jiddah: ʿĀlam al-Maʿrifa, 1986), 79, 84, 140, 149 and 277.
66 Uzuçarsılı Ismail Hakki, Umarāʾ Makkat al-Mukarrama fī al-ʿahd
al-ʿUthmānī, trans. into Arabic Khalīl ʿAlī Murād (Baṣra: Markaz
Dirāsāt al-Khalīj al-ʿArabī bi Jāmiʿat al-Baṣra, 1985), 115.

67For details on some prominent Ḥanafīs in Mecca at that time,

see Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar, 149, 151, 250, and 365; on some of
the South Asian Ḥanafīs: 183, 195, 210, 235, 280 (from Bijapur),
395 and 400.

68About his journeys and biography, see Abū al-Khayr,

Mukhtaṣar, 471–473.

69 Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar, 60–61.

70 For other lesser-known Ḥanbalīs in the sixteenth century, see

Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar, 93; the seventeenth, 238; the
eighteenth, 67; the nineteenth, 287 (woman scholar).

71Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar, 258–259. The overseer was one

Salīm bin Yāqūt.

72 He is also recorded as a law-giver in one fatwā collection from

sixteenth-century Malabar. Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-
ʿajība ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība, Ponnāni MS. 1203 (also numbered
2598).

73 On his son Muḥammad, see Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar, 345; on

his grandson ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Jr, 259–260.

74On ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and the Ottoman madrasa, see Abū al-Khayr,
Mukhtaṣar, 259; Ibn Ḥajar, Arbaʿūn ḥadīth.
75Some exemplary figures are Abū Bakr Anṣārī (d. 1598; a
specialist in inheritance law within Shāfiʿīsm, along with his
expertise in mathematics and linguistics), Raziy al-Dīn al-Qazanī,
and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin ʿAbd al-Qādir Fahad al-Hāshimī.

76 On him, see Abū al-Khayr, Mukhtaṣar, 272–273. Apart from the

legal texts, he also showed a clear interest in the mystical works of
Ghazālī.

77 Many Islamic scholars have tried to tabulate the differences

between the Five Scholars in general, and between Ramlī and Ibn
Ḥajar in particular. See for example Saʿīd Ba ʿIshn, Bushrā al-
karīm (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2004); Shaykh ʿUmar Ibn al-
Qarahdāghī, al-Manhal al-naḍḍākh fī ikhtilāf al-ashyākh (Beirut:
Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islamiyya, 2007); ʿUmar Bā Faraj Bā ʿAlawī,
Fatḥ al-ʿalī bi jamʿ al-khilāf bayn Ibn Ḥajar wa Ibn al-Ramlī, ed.
Shifāʾ Muḥammad Ḥasan Hītū (Beirut: Dār al-Minhāj, 2010). The
first two texts take up the differences of all five scholars together,
whereas the latter work restricts itself to the disagreements
between Ibn Ḥajar and al-Ramlī in the matter of rituals.

78Mecca FS 83, fol. 130a–b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 107a;

Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 126b–127a; Riyadh KSU 2148, fol.
135a–b; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 64a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 2: 37;
Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 2: 226–227.

79Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ramlī, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj (Beirut:

Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 1: 481.

80Nawawī, al-Majmūʿ, 3: 347–348; Princeton Garret 1388Y, fol.

8a; Leiden Or. 2227, fol. 24; Leiden Or. 1600, fol. 23a; Mecca FS
21, fol. 10a; Mecca FS 98, fol. 11a; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed.
Shaʿbān, 97–98; Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, ed. Ḥaddād, 1: 164.

81Mecca FS 83, fol. 130a–b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 107a–b;

Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 126b–127a; Riyadh KSU 2148, fol.
135b; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 64a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 2: 37;
Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 2: 227–228.

82 Ramlī, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, 1: 481.

83Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī, Mughnī al-

muḥtāj ilā maʿrifat alfāẓ al-Minhāj, ed. Muḥammad Khalīl ʿAytānī
(Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1997), 1: 243.

84 Ibn Ḥajar, Fatāwā al-kubrā, 4: 239.

85 Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, Asnā al-maṭālib fī sharḥ Rawḍ

al-ṭālib (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Maymaniyya, 1894), 1: 151.

86On the disagreements related to foodstuffs as well as Meccans

performing ḥajj (page/folio numbers in this order), see Mecca FS
83, fols. 350a, 404b–405a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fols. 248a–b,
279a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 330b, 376b–377a; Riyadh KSU
2148, fol. 346a–b, 396a–b; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 163b, 186b; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 3: 321–322, 4: 37–38; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed.
Shāmī, 4: 210–213, 571–574; Ramlī, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, 3: 122,
258.

87For his view on the above-mentioned issue of ḥajj, see Anṣārī,

Asnā al-maṭālib, 1: 459; on foodstuffs, Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā al-
Anṣārī, Fatḥ al-wahhāb bi sharḥ Manhaj al-ṭullāb (Beirut: Dār al-
Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 1: 198–199.
88Bā ʿAlawī, Fatḥ al-ʿalī, 16, 927–928; C. van Arendonk and
Joseph Schacht, “Ibn Ḥaḏj̲ar al-Haytamī”, Encyclopaedia of Islam,
2nd ed.

89 Bā ʿAlawī, Fatḥ al-ʿalī, 16–17.

90 Bā ʿAlawī, Fatḥ al-ʿalī, 927.

91 Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī, Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya

fīman yuftā bi-qawlih min aʾimmat al-Shāfiʿiyya, ed. Bassām ʿAbd
al-Wahhāb al-Jābī (Limassol: Dār al-Jaffān wa al-Jābī &
Damascus: Dār Nūr al-Ṣabāḥ, 2011), 64–65.

92 Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, “Riyāḍ al-riḍwān”, 279–280.

93On him, see Quṭub al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī, Kitāb al-Iʿlām bi-aʿlām

balad bayt Allāh al-ḥarām Geschichte der Stadt Mekka und ihres
Tempels, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus,
1857), passim.

94Muḥammad Bukhārī al-Fayḍī, Tārīkh al-abrār mimman tudras

kutubuhum fī diyār Malaybār (Palakkad: Lajnat Anwār al-ʿUlūm al-
Jāmiʿat al-Ḥasaniyyat al-Islamiyya, 2010), 213–214.

95 For recent studies, see Ozgen Felek and Alexander Knysh, eds.
Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2012); Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Dreams and Visions
in the World of Islam: A History of Muslim Dreaming and
Foreknowing (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).

96 Another rare comparable dream of a legal text, specifically

related to our focus, comes from Suyūṭī, a polymath and prolific
writer from Mamlūk Egypt. In his biography of Nawawī, he claims
that he dreamt when he started to write a commentary on the
Minhāj. In the dream, Suyūṭī raised several objections on the text
to Nawawī; the latter started to make changes only to realise that
the text was becoming completely different. Suyūṭī intervened and
discouraged Nawawī from the mission. Suyūṭī places himself
foremost in intellectual stature, although eventually expressing his
humility. After all, it is his dream. Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-
Suyūṭī, Minhāj al-sawiyy fī tarjamat al-Imām al-Nawawī, Tübingen
University, MS. Ma VI 19, fol. 10b. Cf. the edition by Aḥmad Shafīq
Damaj (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 1988), 60. He also claims that he
has seen the original manuscript of the Minhāj in which Nawawī
says that he finished writing it on 19 Ramadan [6]69 HE. Ms. 9v
(edition, 57). Another scholar, who wrote a short treatise on the
jargon and technical phrases of the Tuḥfa, also relates the
motivation of writing the text with his dream. Muḥammad bin
Ibrāhīm, Tadkirat al-ikhwān fī iṣtilāḥāt Tuḥfa li Ibn Ḥajar, Mappila
Heritage Library Ms. 284, fols. 2–3.

97 However, some Yemeni scholars such as Bā Qushayr were in

constant touch with Ibn Ḥajar, whom they described as the “faqīh
of the age”. In 1546, Bā Qushayr sent his epistle on menstruation
to Ibn Ḥajar. The latter wrote taʿlīqat on it, which became almost
like a sharḥ. It is published along with the Fatāwā of Bā Qushayr.
Ibn Ḥajar wrote a commentary on the Muqaddimat al-Ḥaḍramīyya
titled Manhaj al-qawīm at the request of a Yemeni scholar ʿAbd al-
Raḥmān bin ʿUmar al-Āmudī. Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Manhaj al-
qawīm.

98For many other important Yemeni fuqahāʾ of the sixteenth

century, see ʿAydarūs, Tārīkh al-nūr al-sāfir, passim.
99P. A. Sadiq Fayḍī Tānūr, Dars Kitābukaḷ: Caritṟaṃ Swādhīnam
(Calicut: Islamic Sāhitya Academy, 2013), 116; cf. Muḥy al-Dīn
Ālwāy, al-Daʿwat al-Islāmiyya wa taṭawwuruhā fī shibh Qārat al-
Hindiyya (Damascus: Dār al-Qalam, 1986).

100 Ibn Qāsim al-ʿAbbādī (on the ms. ʿUbbādī), Ḥawāshī ʿalā
Sharḥ al-Minhāj, Princeton Garret no. 2Yq, fol. 1b; Ibn Qāsim al-
ʿAbbādī and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Sharwānī, Ḥawāshī Sharwānī wa
al-ʿAbbādī ʿalā Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj bi-sharḥ al-Minhāj, ed. Anas al-
Shāmī (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2016), 1: 15.

101 According to a list provided by Muḥammad Shaʿban,

Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn, 28–31.

102 Two such works are ʿUqūd al-durar fī bayān muṣṭalaḥāt Tuḥfat
Ibn Ḥajar by Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī and Taḏkirat al-
Ikhwān fī sharḥ Muṣṭalaḥāt al-Tuḥfa by Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm al-
ʿAlijī al-Qalhatī (d. in the twentieth century).

103 In this regard, Itḥāf fī ikhtiṣār al-Tuḥfa by ʿAlī bin Muḥammad

bin Abū Bakr bin Abū al-Qāsim bin Mātir al-Ḥikamī al-Yamanī (d.
1631) and Mukhtaṣar al-Tuḥfa of ʿAlī bin ʿUmar bin Qāḍī Bā Kathīr
(d. 1795), are worth mentioning as both texts engage with
abridging the Tuḥfa.

104Qurrat al-ʿayn and Fatḥ al-muʿīn, to be discussed in the next

chapter, are the best examples.

105 Arendonk and Schacht, “Ibn Ḥaḏj̲ar al-Haytamī”.

106The seventeenth-century supercommentators other than

Shabrāmalsī mentioned above are Ismāʿīl bin ʿAbd al-Ghanī bin
Ismāʿīl al-Nāblusī (d. 1652), Muḥammad bin Aḥmad al-Shawbarī
(d. 1659), who also wrote a supercommentary to Sharḥ al-Manhaj
of Anṣārī, Rasūl bin Yaʿqūb al-Kurdī al-Zakī (d. in the seventeenth
century), and ʿAbd Allāh bin Abī Bakr Qādirī Bā Shuʿayb al-
Ḥaḍramī (d. 1706). These details, as well as the following notes,
are from Shaʿban, Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj, 29–31.

107Three supercommentaries are known from the eighteenth

century: by ʿAlī bin ʿAbd al-Raḥīm bin Muḥammad Ba Kathīr (d.
1732); ʿĪsā bin Ṣibgat Allāh al-Ṣafawī al-Ḥaydarī al-Kurdī (d.
1776); ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Suwaydī al-Baghdādī (d. 1786).

108 Other notable ḥāshiyas in the nineteenth century are those by

Ḥasan bin Ibrāhīm bin al-Qāʾid (d. 1819), Yaḥyā bin Khālid al-
Marwazī al-ʿImādī (d. 1839), Bulūgh al-Irāda wa nayl al-ḥusna wa
ziyādat min Ḥawāshī Ṭāhā bin ʿAbd Allāh al-Sāda ʿalā Tuḥfat al-
muḥtāj by Ḥusayn bin ʿAlī al-Ḥabshī al-Ubbiy al-Yamanī (d. 1840)
and Aqṣā al-rawāj li Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj by Rasūl bin Muḥammad al-
Barzanjī (d. 1855).

109 The ḥāshiyas widely known in the twentieth century were

written by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin ʿUbayd Allāh al-Saqqāf (d. 1955),
Abū Darr Ḥāmid bin Burhān al-Ghifārī, ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-Raḥīm
al-Baṣarī al-Makkī, Muḥammad bin Abī Ṭāhir al-Madanī, Mullā
Muḥammad al-Kurdī and ʿAbd Allāh bin Abī Bakr Bā Qushayr.

110For his biographical details, see Naḏīr al-Durkilī al-Tunī,

Nuzhat al-aḏhan fī tarājim ʿulamāʾ Dāghistān, ed. and trans.
Michael Kemper and Amri R. Sixsaidov (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz,
2004), 149–150. In this text, his first name is given as ʿAbd al-
Majīd, although in all other texts he is known as ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd.
111 Hurgronje, Mekka, 202.

112 Shaʿban, Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj, 29.

113 Some other Kurdish commentators on the Tuḥfa are ʿĪsā bin
Ṣibgat Allāh al-Kurdī, Mullā Muḥammad al-Kurdī (d. late in the
eighteenth century), and Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī. The
latter wrote a work on the legal jargon and technical phrases of the
text.

114 Shaʿban, Introduction to Nawawī, Minhāj, 28–31.

115 The nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographical dictionaries

of Muslim scholars do not mention such a scholar with this nisba.
For example, see Yūsuf ʿAbd al-Ḥasan al-Marʿashlī, Nathr al-
jawāhir wa al-durar fī ʿulamāʾ al-qarn al-rābiʿ ʿashar (Beirut: Dār
al-Maʿrifa, 2006); Aḥmad Taymūr Bāshā, Tarājim aʿyān al-qarn al-
thālith ʿashar wa awāʾil al-rābiʿ ʿashar (Cairo: Dār al-Āfāq al-
ʿArabiyya, 2001); ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Muʿallimī,
Aʿlām al-makkiyyīn min al-qarn al-tāsiʿ ilā al-qarn al-rābiʿ ʿashar al-
hijrī (Mecca: Muʾassasat al-Furqān li al-Turāth al-Islāmī, 2000).
The fourteenth-century Ṭabaqāt of Subkī talks about two Shāfiʿī
jurists with the nisba “al-Bālī” who lived and died in a village called
Bāl in Shiraz. Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb bin ʿAlī al-Subkī,
Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyyat al-kubrā, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-
Ṭanāḥī and ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat
ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī), 9: 400–401. Although not helpful for any
details on Muḥammad al-Bālī, this entry can also be considered
for a potential origin of his nisba.
116On the Sunnī–Shīʿī conflicts among the Muslims of Malabar
and the involvement of Middle Eastern scholars including
Muḥammad al-Bālī in the debates, see Hussain Randathani,
Mappila Muslims: A Study on Society and Anti-colonial Struggles
(Calicut: Other Books, 2007), 49–65, esp. 58.

117 Kurdī, Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya, 68.

118 Bā ʿAlawī, Fatḥ al-ʿalī, 17.

◈
Let’s now sail from the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea, to the
Malabar Coast in the sixteenth century. Reaching the ports of
India, especially Malabar, the land of fabled spices, was the
dream of Iberian explorers, including Vasco da Gama,
Cristopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. They all
wanted to undercut the monopoly of Arabs and Italians
between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Gama’s fleet
filled with sailors and prisoners from the Habsburg domains
succeeded in traveling around Africa to Asia and arrive in the
land of black pepper just before the turn of the fifteenth
century.
After a day or two journeying by caravan from Mecca to
the port city of Jeddah, you can board any ship heading
eastwards from the Red Sea. Ships bound for Malabar used
to anchor at Aden or some other port in Yemen or Oman, but
in the fifteenth century they ventured directly to and from the
Red Sea, thanks to the welcoming approaches of the Meccan
sharīfs and against the exorbitant taxes the Rasūlid sultans of
Yemen imposed. With or without a stoppage in the
Arabian/Persian Gulf, you can sail to the Indian coast.
On the coast of Malabar, we encounter different
scenarios than those familiar to us in Damascus, Cairo or
even Mecca. Its major port city, Calicut, was once compared
to Alexandria in the fourteenth century, but it is facing troubles
after the European influx. The Portuguese wanted to promote
two other competing port towns (Goa and Cochin) because
the ruler of Calicut was hostile to their attempts at
monopolisation.
Set almost at an equal distance between Cochin and
Calicut is an important port town, Ponnāni. Let’s anchor in
this harbour. It will be easy to go north to Calicut or south to
Cochin from here. Just a short trip. Black pepper is a precious
commodity in all these ports, but also dried ginger, turmeric,
tamarind and cardamom, to name but a few.
Ponnāni teems with a population of local and translocal
merchants, brokers, sailors, militia, etc., and among all these
steers a family of scholars, the Makhdūms. Become
acquainted with them, specifically with one member who was
an observant author. Let him inform you on what he thought
was happening to his place of origin and the people of his
race. When trying to get in touch with him, do keep in mind
that the Portuguese ships might raid the port at any time, as
they did in the 1520s and 1530s, and after. None of these
attacks diminished the vibrancy of Ponnāni over the
centuries. Its economy, culture and polity flourished at least
until the eighteenth century.
Possibly due to the extravaganza of maritime trade and
wealth, local scholars and mystics of Islam and Hinduism who
lived in the vicinity of the port increasingly turned to law and
spirituality, as did the Makhdūms. With the law they tried to
regulate the vicissitudes of everyday problems in a diverse
and vibrant port and hinterland, while with spirituality some of
them tried to move away from the materialistic clamour of a
growing city. In Malayalam, one of the local languages, a
contemporary poet expressed his protest at this unending
pursuit of material wealth and momentary pleasure:

To earn wealth and get honours,

Some people do rituals of fire,
Some sell gold and nine gems,
Some trade in elephants,
In thoroughbred horses,
Some even charter ships.
How much they want to earn! Lord! Lord!
Without purity but with extravagance.
How much we destroy by avarice for wealth!
In this age, no one’s thirst is quenched.
No matter how much one earns of wealth.1

His contemporary, the mathematician and poet Melpattūr

Bhaṭṭatiri, wondered in Sanskrit about the cosmopolis the city
of Cochin had become, with diverse communities from the
world over and the commotion of activities in his abode. His
descriptions of the Portuguese soldiers in the city are some of
the best, if not the earliest, Sanskrit descriptions of
Europeans in Asia. In the same way members in the
Makhdūm family would write in Arabic.
Malayalam and Sanskrit poets were both influenced by
spiritual aspirations as much as were their contemporary
Makhdūms, who expressed similar concerns in Arabic. You
can meet a member of the family who will tell you more, and
he might even introduce you to his Sanskrit and Malayali
colleagues.
 6
The Autocommentary
◈

In the legal textual continuum of the Minhāj and the Tuḥfa, a

subsequent text and its author from Malabar in southwest Indian
coast mark a point from which to analyse Shāfiʿī experiments in the
Indian Ocean rim. Here we consider Fatḥ al-muʿīn (hereafter Fatḥ),
written by Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn bin Muḥammad Ghazālī al-Malaybārī,
an autocommentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn (henceforth Qurra). Both
the base text and the autocommentary form an independent family in
the Shāfiʿī textual history with their own textual descendants, while
they can also be considered as indirect progenies of the Tuḥfa, for
they stimulated the Shāfiʿī legacy of Ibn Ḥajar and his oeuvre on the
Malabar coast and the wider territories around the Indian Ocean.
They demonstrate how Indian Ocean Muslims made their way into
the textual landscape of Shāfiʿīsm, and even into the heartlands of
Islam.
By the sixteenth century, the Muslim communities on the Indian
Ocean littoral began to participate intensively in Islamic intellectual
activities, producing many jurists and composing many texts. They
made lengthy journeys to religious educational centres such as
Mecca, and this had a significant impact on the production of a huge
corpus of literature by particular scholars who themselves
constructed an estate in that time and space. As a consequence,
they began to imagine the centres of Islam in their homelands in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through an educational prism.
Taking the Fatḥ as an example, we can see how such a law book
added to the long pattern of Islamic thought in a traditional way and
also advanced it. We shall investigate how it criticised many
methods and arguments of its intellectual predecessors and
generated a different discourse within the school from its peculiar
perspective from Malabar and the Indian Ocean at large.
The author achieved this by employing the commentarial praxis
of writing interpretations of one’s own work, generally identified as
autocommentary. This specific mode of writing under the broadly
conceived commentarial culture gave authors an opportunity not only
to explain themselves after the base text was published, but also to
address new dimensions and discourses that were left unaddressed
in the earlier work through different prisms of disciplines, language,
grammar, literary criticism and discourse analyses. The practice was
not alien to the Islamic textual tradition, although it has not been
studied as much when compared to its South Asian or Indic
counterparts in Buddhist, Jain and (to a lesser extent) Hindu
traditions. In the Shāfiʿī history itself, the best example of
autocommentary, or more precisely autosummary, can be seen in
the case of the Wasīṭ family, where Ghazālī abridged his own Basīṭ
into Wasīṭ, and then further into Wajīz and so on. The authors
discussed in the last two chapters have depended on this technique.
We mentioned that Nawawī wrote a minutiae (Daqāʾiq) on the
Minhaj and Ibn Ḥajar wrote a ḥāshiya (which can be translated here
variously as auto-, super- or subcommentary) on the Tuḥfa. Both
these works were too technical or were incomplete, whereas the
Fatḥ provides a comprehensive and perfect picture of an
autocommentary in the ways it addressed both local and broader
concerns, especially from the curious position in which it finds itself
in a maritime historical region.
I shall argue that when such texts as the Fatḥ located
themselves in the longer tradition of religion and law, they also
questioned the existing legalistic texts and their notions of their
“regionality”. This helped such texts and authors to gain popularity
among Indian Ocean Shāfiʿīs, while also being attached to the
earlier centres of the school. Their books were accepted there as
well, generating “return journeys” for Indian Ocean Shāfiʿī scholars,
taking their ideas and texts back to the heartlands of Islam. I shall
explore these developments by looking at the Fatḥ and analysing it
as a product of its specific historical place and time in relation to its
broader contexts of Islam, Shāfiʿīsm and the Indian Ocean.1
 Scholars in a Port and the Author
The author of the Fatḥ, Zayn al-Dīn Jr, belonged to the Makhdūm
family of Ponnāni. Ponnāni was a port town at the southern end of
the local Hindu kingdom of the Zamorins. It functioned as their
second capital and became a target of repeated Portuguese attacks
in the sixteenth century. It remained a crucial place over the course
of time for different political entities – the Zamorins, Tānūr Rajas,
Cochin Rajas, as well as the later Mysore sultans – and for
Portuguese, Dutch, French and English economic adventurers. The
town’s affluence began when it became a major site of settlement for
Muslims and a centre of Islamic activity. It has been called the
“Mecca of South India” or “Little Mecca” (Mala. Dakṣinēntiayuṭe
Makka or Ceṟumakka). Several other knowledge centres of the
Indian Ocean Muslim world were given the nickname Mecca from
the sixteenth century on: Bijapur on the Konkan coast was known as
a Mecca of Sufism; Aceh in the Indonesian archipelago as “Veranda
of Mecca” (Mal. Serambi Makkah); and Surat in Gujarat was called
“Gateway to Mecca” (Ar. Bāb al-Makka) because of its importance
for the pilgrimage. Apart from Surat, the other places were so tagged
because of their additional importance in local religious higher
education, and not for any ideas of sacredness, such as Mecca itself
had for believers. Ponnāni received the name after the activities of
one scholarly family, the Makhdūms, and their efforts to make it a
centre for Islamic education.
 By the second half of the fifteenth century there was a
significant Muslim population in Ponnāni, as some affluent Muslim
families had migrated there from the Coromandel Coast and other
parts of Malabar. There they obtained a religious leader with
arguable genealogical roots back to Yemen and who was well
educated in Islamic sciences. In the early sixteenth century Ponnāni
witnessed an influx of Muslim mercantile families from ports such as
Cochin, which had encountered hostility from the Portuguese. The
geographical and topographical features of the town gave the site an
importance on land and on sea. On land it bordered Portuguese-
dominated Cochin to the south and a significant mountain-pass in
the Western Ghats to the east, which gave access to the broader
hinterlands of southern India. Ponnāni was the site of the chief
arsenal of the Zamorins, and it hosted their admirals, the Kuññāli
Marakkārs. It also produced many war treatises, addressing the
Muslim population not only in Ponnāni but throughout Malabar and
beyond. These treatises were mainly initiated by the scholarly circle
of Ponnāni, who expressed strong religious sentiments with open
calls for jihād against the Portuguese intrusions. The Zamorins were
supportive of such moves as they knew that all such incitements
would benefit their anti-Portuguese aspirations.
The Makhdūm family played a central role in these
developments. They had recently migrated to Ponnāni from Cochin,
and they made its congregational mosque a centre of their socio-
religious, economic and political activism. That their real origin was
Yemen and that the family genealogy was traced back to the
Prophet’s best companion, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (d. 634), are debated
among scholars because of the lack of substantive evidence.
Nevertheless, we do have evidence for their recent past before the
sixteenth century. As a group of transient scholars, they had settled
in various places on the coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. The first
family member we can identify is one Zayn al-Dīn, who moved from
Yemen to Nagōre (Tanjavur) on the Coromandel Coast in the early
fifteenth century and became a disciple of a renowned Sufi scholar
there, Abū Bakr Ṣādiq Maʿbarī. After a while he moved to Cochin,
where he is said to have converted many people to Islam, and
founded the mosque known today as Cempiṭṭapaḷḷi. He died and is
buried there. He had two sons called ʿAlī and Ibrāhīm. ʿAlī became a
qāḍī of Cochin and established a madrasa, whereas his son moved
to Ponnāni with his uncle.2 The son, named Zayn al-Dīn after his
grandfather, would become a celebrated author and scholar in the
region. The family is credited with having founded a mosque in
Ponnāni, which became a principal centre of congregational prayer
in and around the locality, and also a distinguished educational
centre for religious studies. From this point on the family became
more settled. This is not to forget that some descendants moved
further north to Cōmbāl, or travelled to the Middle East, but Ponnāni
remained their centre, and members of that family acted as religious
leaders there until the early twentieth century. The educational
centres in Cochin and Ponnāni functioned in and around newly
established mosques, which opened new opportunities for a good
number of students who could not otherwise pursue higher studies
after their primary and secondary education.
 The mosque as education centre was important for the
Makhdūm family. The graduates from their college as newly
educated persons could bring change in a different setting instead of
trying to alter traditional indigenous practices all at once. These
institutions soon became centres of higher education, but they also
stood at the forefront of transforming the community gradually by
attracting many believers for congregational prayers and for other
occasional rituals. As the anti-Portuguese sentiments strengthened
on the coast and Calicut collaborated with broader Ottoman maritime
ambitions, the aspirants for knowledge from the locality saw new
vistas of travel opening up through contacts with the wider scholarly
world. This development can be compared to how Mecca was
resurrected to new fame in the Islamic world as a centre of
knowledge. Now many new Malabari students could have access to
ideas and books from Middle Eastern regions through the power of
new political and diplomatic ties which had been made to confront a
common enemy.
A number of scholars emerged from Ponnāni’s mosque-college
in the late fifteenth century and after. The most important was the
aforementioned ʿAlī’s son Abū Yaḥyā Zayn al-Dīn, widely known as
Zayn al-Dīn al-Kabīr (the Senior). After he had finished his education
in Malabar in the late fifteenth century, he travelled to the Middle
East on pilgrimage and for education. First he arrived in Mecca,
stayed there for at least six years, and then he moved to Cairo to be
educated at al-Azhar University. He studied with renowned scholars,
including Anṣārī and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī.3 When he returned to
Ponnāni, he took charge of the religious leadership of the region,
succeeding his uncle. During the wars, the Portuguese burned the
congregational mosque at Ponnāni. It was reconstructed around the
1520s and an inscription from inside the mosque contains a related
chronogram.4 No name is mentioned in the inscription but it is
reputed among the indigenous Māppiḷa Muslims that Zayn al-Dīn Sr
must have been responsible for its reconstruction. He began to teach
there, to give fatwās, to write books, to engage in social and political
affairs and to introduce religious reforms.
This Zayn al-Dīn left two sons, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and Muḥammad
Ghazālī. The former became a renowned scholar, writing books,
teaching and functioning as a qāḍī like his father. The books he
wrote were mainly related to Islamic law, mysticism and to an extent
concerned Arabic grammar and logic. The other son, Muḥammad
Ghazālī, is said to have moved into Cōmbāl, where he died and was
buried. He left one son, named Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn after his
grandfather and great-great-grandfather. He would later be
renowned as Zayn al-Dīn al-Ṣaghīr (the Junior), author of the
autocommentary Fatḥ.
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz wrote a detailed biographical note about his father,
Zayn al-Dīn Sr.5 But for the grandson we have no contemporary
references. A vast oeuvre of scholarship has been produced by
historians and traditional scholars, and many doctoral dissertations
have been written at various South Asian and Middle Eastern
universities on the Makhdūms in general and on Zayn al-Dīn in
particular.6 Even so, the facts of his life remain dubious. His text that
is best known to historians, Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, has been translated
into many European and Indian languages,7 whereas the Qurra and
the Fatḥ are his legal texts best known among Shāfiʿī clusters.
Neither professional historians nor Shāfiʿī scholars have offered any
solid historical account of his life or expressed any doubt on the
authenticity of popular traditions about him. They simply repeat the
stories of his life uncritically.
To summarise the narratives will be helpful. He was born and
brought up in Cōmbāl, in northern Malabar.8 His primary education
was at home with his father, Muḥammad Ghazālī. He moved to
Ponnāni, where his uncle, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, was the main teacher and
patron. There he studied different disciplines and memorised the
Qurʾān completely. He went to Mecca on a cargo ship for higher
studies. There he studied with many scholars but Ibn Ḥajar was his
main teacher.9 He also found many important colleagues and friends
with whom he kept in touch later in his academic career.10 He
mastered various Islamic disciplines but mainly law and ḥadīth. The
Meccan scholars are said to have called him a muḥaddith for his
expertise in ḥadīth. In between times he performed ḥajj and visited
the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad in Medina. After spending
around ten years in Mecca he returned home and took up the
position of chief teacher and leader at Ponnāni, which his uncle had
held until he passed away. Eventually he moved near to his father’s
house in northern Malabar and spent the rest of life in a small village
called Kuññippaḷḷi. It is there that he died and was buried.11
Scholars intersperse these details by adding further information
for each stage of his life. But they rarely supply references to primary
sources, the dates they give are contradictory, and they include
confusing or exaggerated details. We do not know when he was
born or when he died, the dates or destinations of his travels, with
whom he associated in the scholarly, social and political world, and
what works he actually composed. Fortunately, for some texts we
are given the dates of composition or completion, although the
earliest extant manuscripts come from one or two centuries after his
assumed lifetime.12 We lack solid historical evidence for claiming
that the Qurra, its autocommentary Fatḥ or the Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn
were written by Zayn al-Dīn Jr in 1575 or 1583, even though many
scholars make that claim. The primary biographical or hagiographical
literature on Ibn Ḥajar does not refer to a student named Aḥmad
Zayn al-Dīn who came from Malabar or al-Hind to study with him.
The biographers provide a list of the important students of Ibn Ḥajar.
How they could overlook one who studied with him for ten years and
came to be known for his own works in Shāfiʿī circles needs to be
explained. Perhaps Zayn al-Dīn was not a notable student at the
time, even though later indigenous narratives claim that Ibn Ḥajar
came to visit him and his college in Ponnāni. The questions are
important, but the answers are elusive. A comparatively recent thesis
on Ibn Ḥajar’s contributions to the Shāfiʿī legal tradition says that
Zayn al-Dīn was his student and it appears to be the first reference
to him in a monograph devoted to Ibn Ḥajar.13 But that thesis
contradicts other narratives in several ways, by saying, for example,
that his father’s name was ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and he died in 1579.14
The story goes that, after his return to Malabar, Zayn al-Dīn
maintained his relationship with renowned scholars such as Ramlī,
Sharbīnī, the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the then
Zamorin king and the ʿĀdil Shāh sultans of Bijapur.15 While
companionship with the latter two rulers is quite possible on the
basis of contextual evidence of his later academic life in Malabar in
the kingdom of the Zamorins, and a book “undoubtedly attributed” to
him is dedicated to ʿĀdil Shāh, the other associations again lack
historical evidence. What we can say is that all these individuals
lived during the supposed lifetime of Zayn al-Dīn, even if details of
the contacts are controversial.16 The historicity of these popular
narratives is hard to substantiate, but in them we see at least the
historical consciousness of a community relating its past and a
predecessor with the wider world of Shāfiʿīsm and with Islam in
general. It opens our eyes to possible and existing networks of
Malabari scholars, connecting them with an educational centre such
as Mecca, with the personalities of broader fuqahāʾ estates, and with
the eminent political structures which transcend geographical,
cultural, linguistic, legalistic and religious borders.17 The narratives
on these networks and peregrinations also contain some grains of
truth when we read them against the historical account on his
grandfather written by his uncle, with similar details of itineraries and
contacts between Malabar, Mecca and Cairo.
We have to analyse the Fatḥ and its author while keeping in
mind these uncertainties of sources and limits of historical writing.
For the moment, I accept the general consensus on Zayn al-Dīn Jr.
and his text Fatḥ, and see them as products of a Malabari
educational centre that managed to converse with the long culture of
legal discourse that prevailed in the Middle East, something that has
been neglected by scholars of Islamic legal history in particular and
of Islamic history in general. The text is a fine example of how a
Malabari scholar could compose such a text along with many others
in the juridical language of the time after an education received
locally at Ponnāni and more broadly at Mecca.
The author is said to have composed many works in different
disciplines.18 His most renowned work among historians is the
Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, written in the 1580s, protesting against the
Portuguese incursions on the Malabar Coast and inciting the Muslim
community to fight against the intruders. It was translated into
Portuguese and English in the early nineteenth century, and this was
followed in India by multiple translations.19 Two works of dogma,
Jawāhir fī ʿuqūbat ahl al-kabāʾir (on grave sins and punishments in
Islam) and Sharḥ al-Ṣudūr fī aḥwāl al-mawtā wa al-qubūr (on the life
hereafter), have been ascribed to him; and also a few other legal
texts, including Fatāwā al-Hindiyya (a compilation of his fatwās),
Ajwibat al-ʿajība (a collection of fatwās given by his teachers), Irshād
al-ʿibād ilā sabīl al-rashād (concerning a number of different legal
and ethical issues varying from rituals and good behaviour to
apostasy, homosexuality and alcohol consumption) and Iḥkām
aḥkām al-nikāḥ (on marital laws). The Qurra and its autocommentary
Fatḥ are the best known of his comprehensive legal works. The Fatḥ
gave him the widest recognition in the Shāfiʿī world and identified
him as “Ṣāḥib Fatḥ al-muʿīn”, “the author of Fatḥ al-muʿīn”.
The mosque-college of Ponnāni began to change the course of
history for the Makhdūm family in the sixteenth century as it
produced many renowned scholars who were more confident about
going to the Middle Eastern centres for higher education. It also
changed the local scenario of educational ambitions and even the
wider scenario, now that subcontinental scholars were represented
in the legal discourses of Shāfiʿī intelligentsia. After Zayn al-Dīn
Senior and Junior, we see many more Malabari students who
graduated from the local educational centres or from the college of
Ponnāni pursuing their further studies in Mecca. It should be noted
that Zayn al-Dīn Sr went to Cairo for his higher education, but Zayn
al-Dīn Jr chose Mecca for his. This illustrates a shift in academic
prestige, with Cairo replaced by Mecca by the sixteenth century, as
demonstrated in the previous chapter. Such movements increased in
the following centuries. Although this was a natural development
according to the changing times and opportunities for travel,
especially by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we
also see students from the Middle East and Southeast Asia looking
to the college of Ponnāni for their higher education.20 The popular
historical writings tell us that the college used to attract students from
Sri Lanka, Java and Sumatra.
We do not know much about the curriculum of the college, but
we have various reasons for saying that it certainly did not follow the
curriculum predominant in the Islamic world of the Ottomans, the
Ṣafawids or even of the Mughals. Francis Robinson compared the
syllabi under these three empires in the sixteenth to seventeenth
centuries, and this could have been helpful in illuminating my
investigation, but he has made some sweeping generalisations.21 If
we follow his method, without generalising about the curricula but to
get a sense of contemporary trends in texts and debates, we can
assume that religious sciences played a significant role in Mecca, in
the Hijaz and thus also in the college of Ponnāni.22 The texts written
in the Hijaz were distinguished by their juridical, theological and
mystical content. However, we should not deduce from this that they
viewed the rational sciences negatively.23 In fact, Meccan and
Egyptian scholars strongly supported the “rational sciences” and
occasionally even advanced them by critically engaging with existing
arguments. But they prioritised “religious” texts, as Ibn Ḥajar, himself
a supporter of the rational sciences, also did.
The texts produced in Ponnāni at this time indicate that priority
was given to religious disciplines, and the rational sciences, such as
logic and philosophy, were hardly touched upon. In the sixteenth
century, a shift in the programme of education that is worth noting is
from spiritual subjects (taṣawwuf, akhlāq, dīniyyāt) to legalistic
disciplines (substantive law, legal theory, exegeses and ḥadīths with
a legal thrust). Most works produced in the early sixteenth century by
Zayn al-Dīn Sr have a mystical orientation, whereas those in the
second half of the century are mostly law-related. Linked to this is
the way Fakhr al-Dīn Abū Bakr (d. 1489) developed a syllabus called
“Silsilat al-Fakhriyya” in Malabar, although we do not have many
details to elaborate on the endeavour.24 He is said to have studied
with Jalāl al-Dīn Maḥallī, the famous commentator of the Minhāj
based in Cairo. Zayn al-Dīn Sr studied with Fakhr al-Dīn at Calicut.25
The family became the main leaders of the Malabari fuqahāʾ
estate from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but then their
leadership was questioned. In that period the family produced many
outstanding scholars who contributed to the spread of Shāfiʿī thought
in and around the Indian Ocean rim.26 As with the contributions of
many other well-educated scholarly families of the Islamic world, the
Makhdūms played a phenomenal role in stimulating religious
education and spreading a legalistic version of Islam.27 They
established themselves among the regional and oceanic Muslims
through their writings and teachings from the sixteenth century
onwards by upholding Shāfiʿī and Sufi ideas. The career of this
family epitomises the wider Shāfiʿīsation process occuring after this
century as much as it demonstrates the ongoing extension of
Islamisation around the maritime littoral ever since.
The Shāfiʿīsation process made use of the revered space
assigned to religious scholars, especially those who were educated
at Mecca and similar educational hubs in the Islamic heartlands.
Those scholars always tried to rectify any deviant tendencies in their
community. In Malabar, rectification was mediated through particular
texts written by the members of the Makhdūm family. Many of their
works addressed the jurists and legal enthusiasts, and also the
larger audience of laypersons. Some of the titles explained very
basic rituals and religious duties, while others analysed complicated
and nuanced legal issues.28 The graduates of the Ponnāni mosque-
college joined this process by composing similar texts themselves.
One of them was Qāḍī Muḥammad al-Kālikutī (d. 1616), who is
particularly noted for his works on marriage law and inheritance
law.29 Several other texts they wrote were vital in this process, but to
catalogue them would require more space and energy. In the
sixteenth century, they produced many legal, mystical, theological,
hagiographical, jihādī and ethical texts with historical content. All
these texts contributed to the wider schema of Islamisation, as this
oeuvre was carefully framed to give a Sharīʿa perspective rooted in
Shāfiʿī ideals. Their textual corpus also provides a clue to the
curriculum they would have followed in the sixteenth century, which
inspired advanced students to produce texts in the disciplines they
studied and taught in and around Ponnāni. Rational science is
clearly absent from their oeuvre, which again shows that the
generalisations about the “rationalistic” emphasis of South Asian
ʿulamāʾ were inadequate. It should be mentioned that many of these
legal treatises depended on the Tuḥfa for their articulations. In the
course of time the Fatḥ became an emblematic text of the college
and the family among several Shāfiʿī clusters.
 Life and Career of the FatḤ
The Qurra, the base text of the Fatḥ, was written with a framework
that can be described as revivalist. The author believed that Islam on
the Malabar Coast had been corrupted and that it needed to be
rejuvenated through legalist teachings. This idea was not new. As we
discussed, many early Shāfiʿī authors also had often complained
that religion was becoming more corrupted day by day, and that an
enthusiasm for pursuing pure knowledge was decreasing
immeasurably.30 We have seen that idea in the Minhāj as well as in
the writings of Ghazālī as early as the eleventh century. It was a
common trope among the fuqahāʾ and they made a space for
themselves in that rhetorical sphere by asserting their responsibility
for religious revival.31 The author had the same preconceptions
about his community. He felt the need especially in the context of
being geographically remote from the central Islamic lands and being
a demographic minority under a Hindu majority, politically ineffective
and economically threatened by the arrival of the Portuguese in the
Indian Ocean.
 Figure 6.1 Opening pages of the Fatḥ, Ponnāni Jumuʿattu Paḷḷi
Library MS. 141

His belief that his audiences in Malabar and the wider Islamic
world were becoming morally corrupt and religiously impious is
reflected in his treatise against the Portuguese, Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn.
He articulates this by interlinking the Portuguese onslaughts
emerging from the weakening piety of Muslims. He writes: “[Muslims]
began to exchange the blessings of God with ingratitude, they
sinned and got divided by schisms. Therefore God brought down
upon them the Portuguese of the Franks (may Almighty God
confound them!), who began to attack the Muslims, to ruin and
oppress them with all sorts of assaults and onslaughts.”32 Resisting
the attacks and defending the interests of the community were the
main goals of this jihādī text, whereas he composed legal texts such
as the Qurra and Fatḥ to correct the behaviour of the community by
teaching them “proper Islam”.
The Qurra communicated to its immediate audience in Malabar
with its mission of introducing a more purified, legalised Islam on the
basis of the principles of education its author would have received in
Mecca. At the same time, by choosing Arabic rather than the
regional language Malayalam,33 he demonstrated his motive of
communicating with the wider world of the Indian Ocean where
Arabic was still a lingua franca. Arabic also enabled the Qurra to be
incorporated into the broader Islamic networks of scholars, texts and
ideas. Even if we disbelieve the popular narratives for the sake of the
argument and suppose that the author never went to the Middle East
for academic purposes, the language used and copius references
provided still lead us to interesting conclusions. He refers to many
books which must have been available to him at the time of writing.
They would have been part of the curriculum in the local educational
centres such as Ponnāni or of the collections in local libraries. That
leads us to speculate on the possibility of Islamic legal texts being
physically transported across the Indian Ocean and so to Malabar.
To write a book like the Qurra and its autocommentary, with
sensitivity for the longer tradition of Islamic juridical writings and its
adoption of a position in the genealogy of better known Shāfiʿī texts,
obviously implies that the author had access to previous literature. If
the author did not himself sail to some central Islamic place such as
Mecca, the Islamic texts of the sixteenth century and earlier must
have become available to him in the course of the general increase
in circulation of texts along the Indian Ocean rim. Both possibilities
relate to the intensified movement of scholars and texts in the
sixteenth century as the number of Islamic texts produced in the
maritime littoral subsequently increased.
The author identifies the Qurra as a mukhtaṣar (abridgement) of
Shāfiʿīsm. We are given no elaboration on the intention or motivation
of the author in writing it. We simply have the title followed by a
typical prayer for comfort “tomorrow”, i.e. in his afterlife: “I entitled
this [book] Qurrat al-ʿayn bi muhimmāt al-dīn ‘Solace for the Eye with
Essentials of the Religion’, expecting from God that the intelligent
people (aḏkiyāʾ) will use it and that it will cool my eyes tomorrow,
when glancing at His venerated face all the time.”34 The term aḏkiyāʾ
connotes the broader intellectual and mystical communities within
the fuqahāʾ estate in the region and beyond. It was also used in the
title of a mystical text, Hidāyat al-aḏkiyāʾ ilā ṭarīq al-awliyāʾ, “A Guide
for the Intellent to the Path of the Mystics”, written by his grandfather,
Zayn al-Dīn Sr, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The style and language of the Qurra have been a matter of
concern in Shāfiʿī clusters ever since the time of its composition and
even now. Its extremely precise formulations lack any discursive
engagement with the previous scholarship of the school and
specialist readers find it too obvious to engage with. Trying to
remedy this, the author wrote the Fatḥ as an autocommentary
dealing with the broad tradition of the school. The new text gained
significance and prestige from later discussions of its content. It
seeks to provide an uncomplicated and clear ruling while being
attentive to the contrasting viewpoints within the school. In the
context of the Malabari fuqahāʾ estate and the benign Islamic
traditions and legal discourses in the region, such precise and
unambiguous pronouncement of rulings would have been much in
demand.
Because the precision, the avoidance of nuances within the
school, and statement of the obvious made the Qurra an impractical
text, the author sought in his autocommentary to overcome those
obstacles and at the same time display the depth of his knowledge in
recent legal discourses. In the autocommentary the author is then
provided with an opportunity to combine advanced discussions in the
field with his own personal opinions on the basis of supportive
evidence from earlier generations of scholars as well as foundational
scriptures, all accompanied by philological explanations on specific
phrases, idioms and grammar. In the preface of the Fatḥ, he briefly
explains his autocommentarial methods: “This is a beneficial
commentary on my work entitled Qurrat al-ʿayn bi muhimmāt al-dīn.
It elaborates on the subtext, completes inferences, amplifies
connotations and explicates benefits.” He further says that he has
entitled the text Fatḥ al-muʿīn bi sharḥ Qurrat al-ʿayn bi muhimmāt
al-dīn, “Victory of Supporter: A Commentary on the ‘Solace for the
Eye with Essentials of the Religion’”. He adds: “I ask the generous
and benevolent God to broaden its usefulness for colleagues,
specialists and laypersons.”35 These words partly explain the
author’s intention, but also mark a growth of the fuqahāʾ estate on
the Malabar Coast by addressing an audience assumed to have
some advanced knowledge of Islamic law, who encouraged him to
write a more detailed work than a concise one, while still acting as a
self-commentary.
The passage above as well as the overall architectonic design
of the Fatḥ demonstrate its most important aim: to achieve precision,
simplicity and comprehensiveness. These factors are connected as
much as they are relative. The Minhāj was also a short text, but it
continued to be difficult for a non-specialist reader to comprehend its
nuances without the help of commentaries or a trained specialist.
Some Shāfiʿīs were inclined to identify it as a legal “theoretical” text
rather than a “practical” one.36 The Tuḥfa was linguistically complex,
and what is more its length required much time and patience for the
student to get to grips with its content and language. Hence only
deeply motivated specialists or aspirants of Shāfiʿī law could engage
with it. By contrast, the Fatḥ presented its arguments more concisely
and simply while addressing almost all the issues that a general text
of Shāfiʿīsm would address in a way that specialised texts do not.
Those may be precise and simple in addressing particular issues,
such as marriage, inheritance, rituals or trade, but the Fatḥ was
comprehensive too. Even so, as simplicity, precision and
comprehensiveness are seen differently according to the teachers,
students and readers who are engaging with the text, some jurists
who thought otherwise came up with commentaries on or
abridgements of it.
In the long legalist discursive tradition of the school, the Fatḥ
accommodates the latest views emerging among Shāfiʿī jurists when
it was written. We can give an exact date for the composition of the
Fatḥ, for at the end of the text it is stated that the revision (tabyīḍ) of
the manuscript was finished on Friday, 24 Ramaḍān 982 AH, which
corresponds to 7 January 1575. This date can be used to identify the
historical context in which the text was written. Popular narratives
say Zayn al-Dīn was in Mecca until the early 1560s, from which we
can assume that he wrote the Qurra immediately after his return, and
the commentary after he had established himself in the fuqahāʾ
estate as a recognised scholar. As such, he brings in up-to-date
opinions expressed by Shāfiʿī jurists in Mecca and the Hijaz at large.
He gives priority to the oeuvre of Ibn Ḥajar over other contemporary
scholars, and to teachers going back to Nawawī and Rāfiʿī. He
writes:

I have selected those [legal views] for this book from reliable
works of our teacher, the Last Verifier (khātimat al-muḥaqqiqīn),
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bin Ḥajar al-Haytamī and of other eminent
mujtahids: Wajīh al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin Ziyād (may God
bless them both!) and two teachers of my teacher, Shaykh al-
Islām al-Mujaddid Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī and Imām al-Amjad
Aḥmad bin al-Muzjad (may God bless them both!) and other
later verifiers, relying on the views of two shaykhs of the school,
Nawawī and Rāfiʿī.37

In this passage, he mentions two scholars whom we have not

discussed so far: Ibn Ziyād (d. 1568)38 and his teacher Muzjad (d.
1524).39 Both were from Zabīd in Yemen and studied and taught in
Yemen and/or Mecca for a long time. The works of Muzjad,
especially his ʿUbāb, influenced the Shāfiʿī clusters, and Ibn Ḥajar
wrote a commentary on it.40 That these two Shāfiʿīs are mentioned
in the Fatḥ shows the legalistic connections between the Yemeni and
Malabari estates. This interrelationship is significant if we consider
tracing a possible lineage for the Makhdūms back to Yemen. It is
also important to note that he does not mention Ramlī or his
contemporary Sharbīnī, who both wrote remarkable commentaries to
the Minhāj and made other contributions to the legal corpus of the
school. This supports my earlier statement on the division of
Shāfiʿīsm between Meccan and Cairene streams, with the Shāfiʿīs of
the Indian subcontinent adhering to the Meccan block.
The Fatḥ selects the most dependable view among the debated
issues (masāʾil khilāfiyya) of Shāfiʿīsm. It normally avoids detailed
discussion on minutiae but states a generally agreed view while
signposting the opposite viewpoints. It does include larger subjects
of debate among his teachers and earlier luminaries of the school,
such as Nawawī and Rāfiʿī. It also occasionally refers to the opinions
of other schools, mainly Ḥanafīsm and Mālikīsm. In such debates it
is important to note the position it takes. Without directly referring to
any of his teachers or immediate preceding scholars, Zayn al-Dīn
expresses his disagreements with earlier jurists. An analysis of the
context of these dissenting positions shows that many of his
arguments emerge from actual demands in the place where he was
living (see later in this chapter). The references to opinions of other
schools were necessary at times, and Islamic legal hermeneutics
allow practitioners to follow the opinions of other schools as
secondary opinions within their own school, provided that there is no
contradiction concerning the ritual or circumstance. He uses the
general legalistic consensus to do some “forum-shopping” if
necessary, and thus navigates a course through a contextual reading
of earlier texts. Citations and references in legal texts are always
political, economic and diplomatic, and the Fatḥ is no different.
This text became a foundation for the major developments of
Shāfiʿīsm in Malabar as well as along the Indian Ocean rim. It
achieved this status essentially for two reasons: not only did it add to
the long tradition of the pattern of Islamic legal thought in its own
terms, but it also advanced it by addressing many legalistic concerns
of oceanic Muslims. Its advancement of Shāfiʿī legalism proceeded
in two ways: first, it criticised many rulings and arguments made by
its intellectual predecessors, and on a number of issues it expressed
its own views which dissent from previous unanimity; second, it
generated an alternative discourse of Shāfiʿīsm with attentiveness to
its particular contexts in the Indian Ocean. This is how Ibn Ḥajar and
his work, the Tuḥfa, became targets for criticism, but it also had other
earlier scholars in view in that criticism, some as far back as the
early stages of the school. Legal clarifications in the Fatḥ on a
number of different issues oppose the viewpoints of previous
scholars as it is evident in its recurrent use of the term “khilāfan” (“in
opposition” or “contrary to”) aimed at many jurists of the school and
beyond. The text thus reveals the attempts of a scholar from a
distant territory to address issues of central importance in his place
and time. It attempted to break the Arabian sway over the mind and
character of Islamic law by integrating the social, cultural and
political experiences of a non-Arab oceanic region into the legal
narratives. On the one hand, incorporating the traditional genealogy
helped its reception in Shāfiʿī circles in Islamic heartlands. On the
other, its regional qualities helped its wider welcome among large
circles across the ocean.
 A Complicated Abode of Islam
The intensification and gradual domination of the Shāfiʿī school on
the oceanic rim can be attributed to the three components of the
fuqahāʾ estate: individuals, clusters and institutions. In Middle
Eastern Muslim contexts we have seen how the three collaborate
with each other vis-à-vis the state and society, and how the
educational and religious institutions functioned as an exclusive
space of the estate once they were established or funded by the
state. But things were different on the non-Arabo-Persian rim of the
Indian Ocean for two main reasons: (a) in most regions there
Shāfiʿīsm had to operate with non-Islamic (broadly conceived) socio-
cultural and sometimes political structures, when the Muslim
communities were a demographic and political minority and bizarrely
diverse without an overarching conception of social cohesion; (b) the
main actors in the fuqahāʾ estate, the individuals and micro-
communities, were new entrants or part of a foreign diaspora on the
rim. This “newness” or “foreignness” in their new lands forced both
itinerant and settled jurists around the Indian Ocean to compromise
their earlier notions of autonomy, separated from local authorities.
Their predicament resonated with the quandaries of early Muslim
jurists who went to or came from the newly conquered lands in the
first centuries of Islam, but the major difference was that the
idealistic conceptions of autonomy and siyāsat al-sharīʿa had not
developed back then. In the oceanic littoral, the jurists were familiar
with such freedoms but were unable to enjoy them in the given
socio-political, demographic and cultural situations. Their legal
institutions therefore did not come under the full control of the estate.
Negotiations with many other societal actors were called for, be it on
economic, cultural, political or even religious matters, which were its
concern in Middle Eastern contexts.
The author of the Fatḥ lived under the rule of a non-Muslim
kingdom, the Zamorins of Calicut. This was unlike any other previous
centre of Shāfiʿīsm, where the rulers were almost always Muslims. In
Malabar, most of the rulers were Hindu. Yet the Muslims never faced
any trouble in practising their faith and observing their laws. Indeed,
the Zamorins showed them great respect in social and economic
milieus and relating to their religious and juridical requirements.
From contemporary sources we understand that the kingdom was
tolerant to Islam and Muslims in each and every respect.41 But the
situation quickly changed with the arrival of the Portuguese at the
end of the fifteenth century. Malabar was one of the first regions on
the Indian Ocean rim that encountered the Portuguese. The
Zamorins were at a “golden stage” of political conquests and
economic growth when the Portuguese arrived. They had a well-
equipped army of 60,000 Nayars under their commanding officers,
another 76,000 under their feudatories, and another large force in
Cochin, which they had recently subjugated. They also had a
battalion of musketeers and a corps of artillery primarily staffed by
Muslims. Besides their military might,t they had a well-filled treasury.
Their ships, traditionally provided by local merchants and Arabs, also
fleshed out the organisation of the kingdom economically and
politically. But the situation became complex with the arrival of the
Portuguese. The Zamorins soon became part of a larger network
that politically and diplomatically stood against the Portuguese, such
as the ʿĀdil Shāhs, Mamlūks and Ottomans.42 The Cochin kings,
who until then had been under the yoke of the Zamorins, found in the
Portuguese a strong ally. The region as a whole had both suffered
and gained from the Portuguese incursions. The local petty
kingdoms, merchants and brokers associated with or dissociated
from the Portuguese for personal gain.
The initial communications between the Portuguese and the
Zamorin ruler had no positive outcome for either side, as has been
documented in detail in many studies.43 He had his own reasons to
reject the proposals of the Portuguese, especially when Vasco da
Gama asked him in 1502 to expel from Calicut all Muslims who had
come from the Cairo and the Red Sea region. Zayn al-Dīn Jr tells us
that the ruler rejected the request, “for it was unthinkable that he
expel 4,000 households of them, who lived in Calicut as natives, not
foreigners, and who had contributed great profits to his kingdom”.44
This rejection exasperated the Portuguese, and led to a hostile
relationship with the kingdom. The situation was further aggravated
by some frantic political and military actions. In the ensuing conflicts
the Zamorin was more cautious, and he introduced campaigns and
strategies to strengthen the army, requesting help from every
individual and collective he could depend on. Simultaneously the
Ottomans were endeavouring to create and maintain a network in
the Indian Ocean in order to secure an economic base for
themselves. The Portuguese expansion threatened their dreams of
grabbing wealth from around the rim. The Ottomans kept in constant
touch with the minor kingdoms of the area, and the political and
religious elite responded to them positively by offering support in
their own self-interest. A new “invisible abode of Islam” began to
appear, as intended by the Ottomans. It was an area with three
distinctive features: first, no clear-cut geographical boundaries,
because the area was defined through mutual alliances against a
common enemy, the “cross- and image-worshipping” Portuguese;
second, no set religious restraints, since Hindu kingdoms such as
the Zamorins were embedded in the network; third, a maritime
Islamic world, where the natural wealth of spices and other
commodities had a crucial role to play.
Alongside their initiatives for diplomatic relations with the
Mamlūks and the Ottomans, the Zamorin wanted to mobilise a
strong navy for his kingdom. Indigenous Muslims and those of the
diaspora both had their own reasons to side with the Zamorin
against the Portuguese. He had always protected them in his
kingdom and facilitated their commercial and religious ventures. As
early as the first decade of the century they themselves tried to play
on the religious sentiments of the Mamlūks, who also had an interest
in maritime trade, to support the Zamorins against the Portuguese.45
The conflicts lasted for a century, involving various interested
groups, including the militia of Nayars, Muslims of the diaspora,
locals and converts, the rulers of Bijapur and Gujarat, and the
Ottomans. This situation interrupted the social, economic, cultural
and religious life of Malabar, in contrast to that of the powerful
communities and dominions under the Mughals in the hinterland,
which were scarcely affected by the battles. The constant
Portuguese attacks on religious establishments, the mosques and
learning centres, and on Muslim pilgrims, traders, and the
settlements on the coast and its waterways, made Muslim
intellectuals concerned more about their own survival than keeping
their distance from their cohabitants. This was reflected in the
contemporary writings of Muslim scholars. For the fuqahāʾ estate
those events created a crisis point in legal discourse arising from its
entanglement with issues such as the minority status of the
community.
In the Fatḥ, Zayn al-Dīn Jr recognised the secondary status of
the community and drafted particular rulings accordingly. Despite
their religious differences he recognised the Zamorin as a legitimate
ruler capable of dealing with Islamic affairs.46 For example, when he
discusses the appointment of judges he recognises a non-Muslim or
unbelieving ruler as a legitimate sultan, with the authority to select,
appoint or dismiss qāḍīs.47 This was unprecedented in Shāfiʿī
literature, including the Tuḥfa of Ibn Ḥajar or the Nihāya of Ramlī, as
one commentator later noted.48 For earlier Shāfiʿī scholars it was a
condition that the legitimate sultan must be a Muslim, something
inapplicable in a Malabari context. The issue of jihād also arose for
criticism. According to the existing legal formulations, only a Muslim
ruler (imām) could initiate and lead battles. Zayn al-Dīn revised this
standpoint to fit the sovereignty of the Hindu king, the Zamorin, so
that he could initiate the anti-Portuguese wars and legitimise the
participation of the Muslim laity and militia. In that way the conflict
became a religious battle, just as meritorious as jihād. In his most
renowned work for historians, Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, he explicates his
case, that it is his response to the recurring Portuguese atrocities
against Muslim travellers, pilgrims, merchants, mosques and
settlements. In this treatise, he encourages his audience to engage
in jihād against the Portuguese under the banner of the Zamorins.49
Zayn al-Dīn Jr’s reformulation of Islamic law with regard to such
avenues as the legitimacy of a qāḍī appointed by Hindu rulers or
waging jihād under them were part of the ongoing struggles of the
Indian Ocean Muslims after local and translocal ruptures in their life
and mobility. Asian overseas trade and related networks were under
threat because of the Portuguese interventions, but the indigenous
Muslim communities found ways to travel and even to trade as
pilgrims and transient scholars. In the sixteenth century, we see
numerous maritime Muslims travelling back and forth to Mecca,
which by the end of the century had become a “true global city” for
the first time in its history. The traders moved along the ocean
highroads as travellers to Mecca, a hub which connected numerous
regions. The actual composition of the Fatḥ is an illustration of this
prospect, as much as Zayn al-Dīn Jr’s many questions to the Arab
scholars in Mecca and Yemen were.50 The Malabari traders and
travellers were being repeatedly attacked by the Portuguese, but
they continued to make their way to Mecca and to send charitable
gifts for delivery to the Holy City. From Ponnāni itself, many ships set
sail to Mecca every year with charitable gifts, as recorded in
Portuguese documents.51 There were also many traders, pilgrims,
and migrants in these ships. They brought educational aspirants to
Mecca, and they also brought back many scholars which enhanced
the growth of communities and scholarly circles in the region.52 Zayn
al-Dīn’s own scholarly trajectory, if we are to believe the existing
accounts, demonstrate these religious, economic and juridical
entanglements. He changes the traditional Shāfiʿī narrative to cater
for the immediate contexts of the ongoing wars as he recognises the
Hindu ruler as a legitimate sultan in the Islamic legal framework, with
the ability to arbitrate in the juridical affairs of Muslims and to appoint
qāḍīs.
Apart from these aspects, a deliberate regional thrust appears in
the Fatḥ in a number of rulings and contexts, for which we give a few
examples. The chapter on ḥajj pilgrimage and elsewhere repeatedly
discusses the virtues of and rulings for sending gifts to Mecca,53 a
practice widely followed by Malabari Muslims in particular and South
Asian Muslims in general before, during and after the sixteenth
century. We find very few legal discourses in earlier texts of the
school with regard to charitable gifts sent to Mecca. There is no
discussion at all in the Minhāj. In the Tuḥfa, it is mostly mentioned
with rulings about receiving and distributing gifts for charity in the
city.54 This makes perfect sense, when we bear in mind that the text
was written in Mecca, where people living abroad in lands such as
Malabar would send their charitable donations. That the Fatḥ
discusses the matter of charity illustrates its attentiveness to the
regional circumstances. Primarily it addresses the fact that the whole
economic foundation of Mecca was dependent on assistance from
wealthy regions, such as the oceanic rim. In the text we also read
that the first human being and the prophet Adam made forty
pilgrimages on foot from al-Hind (the Indian subcontinent).55 A
connection between Adam and al-Hind can also be found in earlier
Islamic/Muslim chronicles and travel accounts,56 but only in the
sixteenth century do we witness Shāfiʿī legal texts making this claim,
and the Fatḥ brings this claim home.57
The Fatḥ also addressed many other regional issues. In the
discourses related to pure and impure animals it mentions a number
of insects found in tropical areas, stipulating that the excreta of
insects that live in water or between the leaves of the coconut tree
are not impure. It goes on to say that the leaf of the coconut tree is a
material used for thatching houses to prevent rain, and the insects
found in such thatching are exempted from impurity.58 The
consequences of this exemption are that if someone prays wearing
clothes stained with the excreta of such an insect or at a place so
marked, that prayer would not be invalidated, for it is hard to get rid
of such common insects. The reference to coconut leaves for
thatching is interesting in the light of an observation by the
Portuguese apothecary-cum-traveller Tomé Pires (d. ca. 1540). He
says that in sixteenth-century Malabar most people thatched their
houses with coconut leaves. Only the palace, temples, mosques and
the houses of a few great Kaimals were allowed tiles on the roof to
prevent others “from becoming too powerful in the land”.59 This
reflects socio-cultural and ecological conditions in the landscape of
Malabar within the Fatḥ and the social class it addresses whose
homes were mostly thatched rather than tiled.
With regard to the ecological environment, it discusses the
cultural values and the legal implications of some specific crops and
vines of the region. One example is its repeated reference to betel
leaves (Ar. tanbul and tānbūl; Mal. tānbūlam and veṟṟila), a tropical
vine that was and still is widely chewed in the oceanic littoral for its
stimulant and psychoactive effects, with or without areca nuts and
slaked lime. The Fatḥ says that the prayer and fasting will be
invalidated if one swallows spittle reddened from chewing betel.60 A
widow who observes compulsory abstinence for a few months after
her divorce or the death of her husband can chew betel, although
she is proscribed from several other everyday pleasures.61 Betel can
be thrown into a crowd, like sugar cubes, but it is better not to do so.
Likewise, picking it up from the ground is allowed, although that is
not recommended.62
Given the multi-religious context in which it was written, the text
also cautions its readers against activities that might lead to
apostasy and therefore corrupt their piety. It says that “walking to the
temple wearing their attire such as zunnār [sacred thread, called
yajñopavītam in Sanskrit and pūṇūl in Malayalam] or throwing
something that contains [verses from the] Qurʾān in dirt” would lead
to apostasy.63 If people were to do these things intentionally, they
would be asked to repent. If they did not repent, a heavy punishment
would follow: the ruler could kill them instantly. The multi-religious
context encouraged the author to deal with specific legal situations
not previously mentioned in the Shāfiʿī texts. One simple example is
the aforementioned provision for a widow to chew betel while under
the compulsory abstinence. This odd allocation in fact emerges from
a local Hindu custom which did not allow women and men to chew
betel if their partners or close relatives had died, as Zayn al-Dīn
explains in a different text.64 Before bringing this as a ruling in the
Fatḥ, he made sure with his colleagues and teachers in the Middle
East that there was no such proscription in Islam.65 However, with
regard to the text’s entanglements with other religions, Sebastian
Prange was mistaken when writing about its treatment of Hindus:

[A] detailed section deals with the question of when and how to
return the greetings of Hindus, and especially of Hindu women.
(The text advises that a Muslim man may return the greeting of
an elderly Hindu woman but not that of a younger one, and
under no circumstances should he salute a group of women
since gossip would inevitably ensue.) Another section counsels
on the proper behaviour when visiting the houses of Hindus,
which was a complicated issue for both sides of the encounter
due to the strict rules constraining commensality among Kerala
Brahmins. Elsewhere, the text deals with more specific social
situations that arise only after Muslims had become more fully
integrated into local society, such as the conditions under which
a Muslim could accept (or would have to refuse) an invitation to
a Hindu wedding.66

This is a misreading of the Fatḥ, because first and foremost the text
never uses the term “Hindu”. It also hardly engages with the Hindus
specifically, as Prange wants us to believe in the medieval Malabar
context. Instead, it uses generic terms such as kuffār (infidels) and
mushrikūn (polytheists) to refer to the wider religious communities.
As such, its treatment of these issues is no different from previous
jurists including Ibn Ḥajar, Nawawī or even al-Shāfiʿī, and therefore it
includes barely anything specific to the local Hindu context on these
issues.67 Moreover, the text does not refer to greetings from infidel or
non-Muslim women, let alone Hindu women. It is referring to
greetings between Muslim women and Muslim men. Even more, the
text says just the opposite of what Prange understands about a man
saluting a group of women. It actually says: “If he greets a group of
women, one among them must return [the greeting], because there
is no fear of misconduct (fitna).”68
This distorted reading does not exclude the fact that there are
still localised formulations of Shāfiʿī law in the Fatḥ. Along with its
treatment of sending donations to Mecca, entering temples with
sacred threads, avoiding the excreta of tropical insects, using the
leaves of the coconut tree for thatched houses, it also deals with
several other mundane yet legally and religiously important concerns
of the oceanic region. A telling example is its treatment of divorce
formulae in languages other than Arabic as being valid even if the
foreign words do not literally mean divorce.69 The author clarifies the
foreign formulations in another text, citing Malayalam idioms such as
“nyāyam” and “bayanam”.70 This ruling possibly emerges from a
question Zayn al-Dīn asked Ibn Ḥajar, as the same question “from
Malabar” also appears in a fatwā collection of Ibn Ḥajar.71 It also
resonates with a similar and contemporaneous discussion on divorce
in the Shaḥrī dialect of Ẓufār in coastal Oman.72 All these instances
demonstrate the detailed use of maritime regional language in the
substantive Shāfiʿī texts, utilising the oceanic networks of scholarly,
juridical and philological exchanges in the sixteenth century.
The regionality apparent in the Fatḥ is amplified in a fatwā
collection by Zayn al-Dīn, Ajwibat al-ʿajība ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība,
“Wondrous Answers to Rare Questions”. It is a collection of answers
given by Arab jurists to the questions he had raised on many
peculiar legalistic problems faced by the Muslim community of
Malabar in the sixteenth century.73 During his probable stay in the
Middle East, Zayn al-Dīn could have raised these issues when
questioning his teachers in Mecca and Yemen.74 They include the
validity of a judge appointed by an unbelieving ruler, religious life in a
non-Muslim kingdom, use of a local language instead of Arabic in
rituals, and social mixing in and commercial transactions with non-
Muslim communities. In the Fatḥ we find the same type of legal
questions occurring in varying tones and emphases, so much so that
the special circumstances of the region are blended into a general
Shāfiʿī legal discussion. As Wael Hallaq and Brinkley Messick have
demonstrated, the substantive legal texts “stripped” the contextual
inferences of fatwās to incorporate the rulings into a universal
doctrinal framework.75 The intentional regionality in the text is,
however, entangled with the normative tradition of discussions of
Islamic legal ideas and practices, despite the differences that
naturally arise.
The regionality in the text appeals to the wider context of the
tropical subcontinent and beyond. Its appeal in the subcontinent
derives from references, such as the one to al-Hind mentioned
earlier, which brings the whole Indian subcontinent into focus, and
even more into its framework. Sri Lanka is brought into the picture,
where folklore circulating in the sixteenth century and earlier said
that Adam had arrived first in the island after he had been expelled
from paradise.76 The Mount of Adam there became a site of
pilgrimage for people from the subcontinent and also from the Arab
world as early as the seventh to the ninth centuries, according to
another folklore tradition in another text quoted by Zayn al-Dīn.77
This general reference to al-Hind and similar narratives and many
regionalised legal rulings have contributed to giving the text a wider
appeal among the Shāfiʿī clusters of the subcontinent and the Indian
Ocean in general.
 Intersections of Trade and Estate
Malabar had a strong connection with the Middle Eastern centres of
Islamic learning, particularly with Mecca, and this was able to
facilitate the production and dissemination of the Fatḥ. In the
sixteenth century, travel in the Indian Ocean increased, with more
itinerants, traders, warriors, scholars, mystics and refugees from
Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Yemeni, Ethiopian, Malay,
Swahili, Javanese and Sumatran backgrounds participating. Many
Malabari Muslims joined this web of global mobility and found their
way to Mecca as pilgrims, students and traders. Malabar maintained
a strong and direct connection with Mocha, Aden and Jeddah, major
ports for pilgrims and traders of the time.78 Portuguese officials and
Jesuit missionaries expressed their concern about such “religious
movements” from the region to Mecca. Various provincial councils
held at Goa asked their coreligionists to prevent Muslims from
travelling to Mecca and returning with copies of the Qurʾān and other
religious texts. Yet the indigenous Muslims still found ways to reach
the Middle East, and many people including Yemenis and Persians
made their way from there to Malabar. Their presence in large
numbers changed the balance of the intermixed legalisms in the
social landscapes in which Ḥanafīsm, Mālikīsm and even Shīʿīsm
had coexisted, and Shāfiʿīsm began to dominate the scenario.
Precisely when the Yemenis arrived in Malabar is a matter of
dispute among scholars. Stephen Dale traces the presence of the
Ḥaḍramīs back to the mid-eighteenth century, looking at the
renowned Ḥaḍramī clan of Malabar, the Bā ʿAlawīs.79 It has been
argued that the ʿAydarūsīs were the first Ḥaḍramīs to land in the
region, but again only in the early eighteenth century.80 According to
a list of Islamic scholars and religious specialists who functioned on
the Malabar coast in the fourteenth century, prepared by Sebastian
Prange on the basis of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s travel account, there are hardly
any Yemenis (not to mention Ḥaḍramīs), while there are references
to scholars from Oman, Persia, China, Mogadishu, Baghdad and
Mecca.81 By the sixteenth century, there were some nominal
individual Ḥaḍramīs active in the region, but not the ʿAydarūsī and
Bā ʿAlawī clans. In a mosque-college at Tānūr, north of Ponnāni, a
certain Ḥaḍramī named Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥaḍramī
taught and functioned as a muftī in the sixteenth century.
Interestingly, the only fragmentary reference we have about him also
relates to the movement of Islamic legal texts across the Indian
Ocean world: A manuscript of the Tanbīh by Shīrāzī kept at Tānūr
mentions that he donated it to the mosque-college library in 1568
(975 AH).82 It also says that he copied this manuscript while he was
a teacher and muftī in that port town, he followed the Shāfiʿī school
in law and Qādirī order in Sufism, and he was educated at al-Azhar
in Cairo. More interestingly, all these details are written in Persian on
a separate piece of paper which has been pasted onto the
manuscript. That points to the next group of Shāfiʿīs that arrived on
the coast.
Persian Muslims were also crucial in the spread of Shāfiʿī ideas
on the Malabar coast. They were present in the region from the
fourteenth century onwards, if not earlier.83 Persian Sufi orders and
ideological streams enjoyed a remarkable following. In the sixteenth
century we have particular evidence from the Portuguese chronicler
Duarte Barbosa, who notes the presence of Persians in and around
Calicut.84 He differentiates between Persians and Khurasanis.
Shokoohy identifies those Persians as people from southern Persia,
mainly from the area around the port of Hormuz who arrived in
Malabar by sea.85 The Khurasanis were from north-eastern Iran, and
reached the coast overland. Both groups must have been following
Shāfiʿīsm according to contextual evidence. The Khurasanis
included people from such strong Shāfiʿī centres as Nishapur,
Bukhara, Herat, Merv, Faryab, Taloqan, Gharjistan, Tus or Susia,
Sarakhs, Gurgan and Balkh.86 In this regard, the evidence of the
arrival of Bukhārī clans sheds light on the Persian role in spreading
the school in Malabar.
After the Ṣafawid ruler Ismāʿīl I conquered Uzbekistan, which
included Bukhara, in 1512, defeating the army of Muḥammad
Shaybānī (d. 1510) in a series of battles, he began his campaign to
convert the local Sunnī population to Shīʿīsm. As stated in Chapter
1, the indigenous Sunnīs were left with three options: convert, be
killed or flee. Many of the religious elites fled, and we have
references to the first Bukhārīs to arrive on the Malabar Coast at this
time: one Sayyid Aḥmad Jalāl al-Dīn al-Bukhārī (d. 1569) landed at
the port of Vaḷapaṭṭaṇam in 1521.87 He came with his wife and
claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad, as the
Ḥaḍramī Sayyids would do later. He was appointed as qāḍī of
Vaḷapaṭṭaṇam.88 His son Ismāʿīl studied at Calicut with a renowned
scholar of the time, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz bin Aḥmad bin Fakhr al-Dīn (d.
1601), who was possibly the grandson of the same Fakhr al-Dīn
reputed to have founded the Fakhriyya Syllabus of Malabar. Ismāʿīl
became a jurist and later moved to Cochin, where he died. He was
buried at Koccaṅṅāṭi in 1612. His son Muḥammad (d. 1677) moved
to Paravaṇṇa, another port town, and his grandson Ismāʿīl (d. 1720)
to Karuvantirutti near Cāliyaṃ, an old port to the south of Calicut.89
The Bukhārī clan, still active in religious spheres across Malabar,
claims ancestry to one of these individuals.
Most of the Bukhārī Sayyids in Malabar were renowned scholars
of Shāfiʿīsm. By contrast, only a few of the Ḥaḍramī Sayyids in the
region became famous as jurists. The ancestry of the Bukhārīs to the
Prophet Muḥammad is disputed, but not that of the Ḥaḍramīs. They
had a religious and spiritual authority ascribed to them inherently,
while the Bukhārīs had to earn it through the additional quality of
Islamic education. Yet the Bukhārīs affirm a strong Persian Shāfiʿī
element, contributing to the dominance of the school on the coast.
Persian literature and cultural traditions had an impact in a new
creole language of Arabi-Malayalam which flourished among the
indigenous Māppiḷas in the mid-sixteenth century. Zayn al-Dīn Sr
translated a Shāfiʿī text from Persian into Arabic and utilised many
more Persian texts as his prime references. Furthermore, we should
bear in mind that Persian even became a lingua franca on the
Malabar Coast up until the eighteenth century, competing with
Portuguese.90 A language cannot spread and survive to achieve
such a status without the influence of its native speakers.
 The Egyptians comprised another significant micro-community
which contributed to the spread of the school around the rim in
general and in Malabar in particular. On various earlier occasions we
have mentioned their role in disseminating the school’s ideas, such
as al-Shāfiʿī’s immediate students, maritime Kārimī merchants,
itinerant scholars, merchant-scholars, or business exiles in Yemen
and elsewhere. They were also active in Malabar in some of these
roles. For the focus of this study, an important feature representing
their engagements on the coast is the spectacular Miṣrippaḷḷi (the
Egyptian Mosque) in Ponnāni. It is situated to the west, and within
walking distance, of the main congregational mosque-college where
the Fatḥ’s author and the Makhdūm family were based. The
wonderful architectural complex represents a long history of many
Egyptians who once were religiously, legalistically, commercially and
politically active in the area and contributed to the life of the school
there. Popular narratives associate its establishment with the arrival
of the Mamlūk navy, under the command of Amīr Ḥusayn al-Kurdī,
on its way to Diu and Chaul to fight against the Portuguese between
1507 and 1509, but we cannot be sure that this particular Egyptian
force ever camped at Ponnāni.91 The historian of that time and from
that locality, Zayn al-Dīn Jr, the author of the Fatḥ, makes no
mention of those troops coming to Malabar, despite his accurate
descriptions of them and their battle at Chaul and Diu. If it cannot be
related to this particular navy, the origin and establishment of the
mosque can be seen as a representative of other Egyptian militias
and people who frequented the Indian Ocean. Its military aspect is
emphasised by its distinctive architectural style. It differs from the
other old mosques of Ponnāni but is comparable to that of the
Kuññāli Marakkārs, the admirals of the Zamorins at Kōṭṭakkal, further
north of Ponnāni and Calicut. In another mosque in Ponnāni called
Teruvattu Paḷḷi is the tomb of one Sayyid ʿAlī al-Miṣrī, an Egyptian
who, according to popular belief, was martyred in the fight against
the Portuguese.92 The establishment of a separate mosque within a
small area that already had many mosques indicates that this
Egyptian micro-community had a semi-permanent attachment to the
place and its religious community.
There was another important but largely neglected micro-
community that contributed to the influence of the Shāfiʿī school in
Malabar: the scholars from East Africa.93 One of the earliest
references to such a jurist comes from Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who writes in the
mid-fourteenth century that he met one Faqīh Saʿīd from Mogadishu
working at Ezhimala (Hīlī) in northern Malabar. This jurist had
travelled from Mogadishu to Mecca and Medina and studied there for
fourteen years in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. He
had been in touch with many scholars of the Holy Cities as well as
with their rulers, Abū Numayy in Mecca (r. 1254–1301) and Manṣūr
bin Jammāz in Medina (r. 1300–1325). After his education there, he
left for India and China before he finally settled down in the small
port town of Ezhimala. There he collaborated with Faqīh Ḥusayn,
possibly the author of Qayd al-Jāmiʿ, the first known Shāfiʿī text from
Malabar.94 Two other remarkable examples come from the port town
of Calicut, where two mosques were established and maintained by
two East African Muslims. One of these mosques has an oldest
surviving mosque inscription on the entire Malabar coast, and it says
that the mosque was established by one Shihāb al-Dīn Marjān or
Rayḥān, a former slave possibly from Ethiopia.95 The second
mosque is noted for its outstanding architectural style, built in the
fourteenth century, but maintained by two notables from Entebbe in
present-day Uganda, one Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAntabī in 1607/1608 or
1618/1619, and possibly his grandson ʿUmar al-ʿAntabī in
1677/1678.96 In the inscription, the former is identified as “tāj al-
muslimīn” (Crown of the Muslims) and the latter as “raʾīs al-
muslimīn” (Commander of the Muslims), indicating the high positions
they had acquired among the local and translocal oceanic Muslims.
Faqīh Saʿīd, Shihāb al-Dīn Marjān or Rayḥān and the ʿAntabīs are
examples of many more East African scholars who arrived in
Malabar and became involved in its religious circles, and their
contributions deserve further research.
That there were so many such people, Persians, Egyptians,
Somalis, Ugandans and non-Ḥaḍramī Yemenis, who arrived on the
Malabar coast from all over the Indian Ocean world and contributed
to its religious, legal and economic prospects clearly indicates how
the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of law materialised in the micro-region. In no
way is Malabar exceptional, rather it simply epitomises the trends in
the larger cosmopolis. Relatedly, these multiple communities, as
evident in fragmentary yet crucial sources, also demonstrate that the
Ḥaḍramīs were not the only group that contributed to the influence of
Shāfiʿīsm in the region. These communities functioned there with a
close association to the maritime mercantile elites. There was a
landowning agricultural community among the Māppiḷa Muslims in
the hinterlands of Malabar, but their role is yet to be studied. The
religious and legalistic enterprises of the Makhdūm family in Ponnāni
were financed by wealthy merchants and also by laypersons with
lower incomes. Numerous inscriptions found on walls and doors of
the mosque-college confirm this scholarly–mercantile interaction.
The nākhudas, merchants, brokers and settlers of a diaspora all
contributed to the maintenance of the institutions, establishment of
hostels, salaries for teachers and stipends for students.97 Not only
this mosque-college but many other mosques and religious
institutions were founded and funded by the Muslims from the wider
oceanic world and by the local community, especially by the
mercantile-cum-royal house of ʿĀlī Rajas of Cannanore.
Apart from the obvious statements in Zayn al-Dīn’s Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn supporting the mercantile and religious priorities of
Muslims in the region, many formulations of the Fatḥ also suggest a
close association between trade and estate. It discusses in about
100 pages – a quarter of the text – diverse commercial laws, some
of which are directly related to oceanic trade or scholarly–mercantile
exchanges. Some telling examples are his discussion of laws of
jettison, shipwreck, lease of books, trade in sacred scripture,
commenda, commercial disputes, disputes with agents and powers
of attorney. All these topics must have been informed by the
contemporary praxis among the micro-communities, which also
facilitated the circulation of the text around the oceanic rim.
 Receptivity and Circulation
The Fatḥ appealed to the wider world of Shāfiʿīs along the Indian
Ocean rim thanks to its diligence regarding the regional contexts. It
made its way into the Shāfiʿī clusters in many oceanic regions that
connected to its distinctive approaches in socio-cultural, political,
economic and ecological aspects more than to any other text from a
Middle Eastern context. The acceptance in the maritime littoral,
however, was also partly due to the text’s reception in the Middle
East itself, especially in Mecca and Yemen.
The popularity of the Fatḥ owes much to its precision,
comprehensiveness and simplicity, as discussed earlier. It was
certainly a help to many intermediate students studying Shāfiʿī law
inside and outside institutional frameworks, such as madrasas and
mosque-colleges. It became a dependable intermediate work in the
curricula of Shāfiʿī institutions from the Eastern Mediterranean to the
Eastern Indian Ocean, and it is still a prominent “textbook” on which
Shāfiʿī legists depend to teach Islamic law to the general public in
open sessions on specific occasions in mosques or during the
sacred month of Ramaḍān. The Fatḥ and Shāfiʿīsm support one
another through such public juridical learning in disseminating
Islamic knowledge.
During the lifetime of Zayn al-Dīn, the Qurra must have been
widely read, taught and circulated in scholarly circles, a fact which
motivated him to write his own commentary. Both the base text and
the autocommentary attracted more commentaries from South and
Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Middle East. The Qurra has
attracted only two commentaries and two poetic versions, but its
autocommentary has about twenty supercommentaries, a dozen
translations and three abridgements. As for textual progenies, the
Fatḥ received more attention than the Qurra, which was given only
indirect attention. Nevertheless, a nineteenth-century Indonesian
scholar, Muḥammad bin ʿUmar Nawawī al-Jāwī, commonly known
as Nawawī al-Bantanī, focused on the Qurra when he produced his
commentary entitled Nihāyat al-zayn. As will be discussed in the
next chapter, this shows us how the Qurra spawned its own
intellectual endowments of legal, social and educational significance
for the benefit of a broader spectrum of the population from
Southeast Asia to the Middle East. In the early twentieth century a
Malabari scholar, Muḥammad Musliyār bin Aḥmad Arīkalī (d. 1952),
wrote a poetic version of the Qurra; and another Malabari professor
in Riyadh also did so recently.98
The autocommentary had an appeal outshining that of the
Qurra. Once introduced to the Fatḥ, many scholars appreciated it on
different levels and its legacy was nurtured through various
educational practices, textual descendants and legalist discourses
across the Shāfiʿī world. Its legacy is well illustrated over the
centuries by the many commentaries, supercommentaries,
translations and abridgements it attracted. One nineteenth-century
Shāfiʿī scholar praised the Fatḥ in words that became an emblematic
description:
 A wondrous book is the Fatḥ al-muʿīn
Includes all that was, in other books hitherto unseen. …
Rules of our school of law are discussed in its sections.
Even Arabs appreciated the quality of its compilation.99

There were different methods of teaching, memorising and

circulating the Fatḥ which added to how it was regarded in the
Islamic world, especially as it was a Shāfiʿī text coming from outside
the Middle East. Learning the Qurra byheart, or even the whole of
the Fatḥ, was a practice for Shāfiʿī legal aspirants in South Arabia
and South|East Asia. In that way they could use its exact wording in
discourses, debates, fatwās and speeches. That is an exercise very
common in the Islamic world for, as noted in Chapter 4, many
Yemeni students learned the Minhāj byheart.100 Memorising exact
phrases and sentences was considered a mark of a high standard of
competence and knowledge. Sacred scriptures, such as the Qurʾān
or the classical ḥadīth texts, could be recited from memory, and so
texts on the law, theology and even on grammar and logic were
similarly memorised. Short texts such as the Qurra would have been
relatively easy to memorise; others were more voluminous.
For students who had already finished their basic training in
substantive law of the school and were looking for something
broader and more analytical, the Fatḥ offered the best option. The
Tuḥfa and Minhāj required much time and a deep knowledge of legal
hermeneutics and substantive law as well as of language, whereas
the Fatḥ could be learned in a year or two even along with other
subjects. This fitted the purpose of intermediate students of the
school, especially those who flocked to the Middle East for their
education or combined their pilgrimage with an aspiration for
education.
The Fatḥ has been taught in many Shāfiʿī educational
institutions in East Africa, South Arabia, Central and South|East
Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean. The historical origins for its
introduction into that wider world are hard to trace. However, we can
note some limited references for how the text came to specific
regions, identifying a historical moment that provides possibilities for
“thick descriptions”. Many students and student-pilgrims from the
Indian Ocean rim who arrived at Mecca studied the text there, took it
back home, and taught and popularised it in existing or nascent
educational centres. The increased migrations to Mecca and across
the Indian Ocean contributed to its reception on a wider level.
Teachers in the Middle East and the new migrants could hardly resist
the demands of students who wanted to study such a simple,
precise, comprehensive and now celebrated text as the Fatḥ.
Despite its regional roots in Malabar, the reputation of the Fatḥ grew
in Mecca and in many other Meccas. By the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, if not earlier, the Fatḥ thus had become a
notable Shāfiʿī text that was taught around the Indian Ocean rim. Its
many commentaries, abridgements, glossaries, marginalia and
poetised versions, whether in Arabic, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia,
Malayalam, Urdu, Kannada, Swahili or Tamil, tell us about its
reception against the more widely known texts of the school. It was
also translated into many South and Southeast Asian languages and
they will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8. Here I shall briefly
outline a few of its commentarial progenies to demonstrate the
breadth of its circulation.
In the South Asian coastal belts the biggest supporters of the
legacy of the Fatḥ come from the author’s own home, Malabar. The
Makhdūm family to which he belonged continued their hegemony in
religious and more specifically legal affairs of the Māppiḷa Muslim
community. Many Makhdūms made contributions from the sixteenth
century until the twentieth. Even so, their authority was questioned
by what has been identified as a Shīʿī mystical sect of the Koṇṭōṭṭi,
known in the hinterlands of Malabar from the late eighteenth century
until the early twentieth, when they finally conceded to the
majoritarian Sunnīs. During this time the educational centre of
Ponnāni was controlled by the Makhdūms, who dominated all Sunnī
articulations of Islam by producing generations of scholars who
spread “Ponnāni Shāfiʿīsm” from Malabar across the oceanic littoral.
The central text in the Ponnāni system of legal education was the
Fatḥ, which was mostly taught by the leading teacher of the
Makhdūm family in each generation. I have found ḥāshiyas written in
and around Ponnāni in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and
they continue to be circulated in manuscript form.101
The important ḥāshiya from the Makhdūm family is a
commentary by Zayn al-Dīn Makhdūm the Last (d. 1887).102 This
ḥāshiya, which its author identifies as a sharḥ, takes the Fatḥ as the
base text and disregards its “autocommenteriness” to the Qurra. It is
in three volumes and has been published. It has a special
significance, not only as a progeny of the Fatḥ but also as one
located in the literary corpus produced from Ponnāni in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the Shīʿī cluster of the
Malabari fuqahāʾ estate challenged the religious authority of Ponnāni
through passionate theological and legalistic debates, most works
written and published by the Sunnī-Shāfiʿī cluster were polemics
against their opponents.103 Against that background, this ḥāshiya
demonstrates what was normal in Ponnāni’s educational spheres in
developing scholarship that continued to flow as an undercurrent to
the sectarian debates. It also shows an attempt by a descendant of
the Makhdūms to overcome the “damage” caused by the Shīʿī
cluster’s challengers, a move to reclaim the religious authority that
Ponnāni and the family had over Islamic life in Malabar.
The teaching of Ponnāni spread in Malabar with the emergence
of new educational centres established by the graduates of the
Ponnāni college. By incorporating the Ponnāni curriculum into the
existing centres the Fatḥ attracted intense interest from teachers and
learners. The practice of taṣḥīḥ, which commonly existed in Arabian
educational centres, found a route to new and established centres
where the Fatḥ was also repeatedly subjected to taṣḥīḥs, producing
numerous glossaries, marginalia and sometimes even abridgements.
Taṣḥīḥ (Ar. rectification, Mala. “nannākkal”) literally means correcting
mistakes in manuscripts, but it has a more positive meaning in the
educational environs. It includes correcting mistakes (widely called
taṣḥīf),104 but more generally it is an exercise for students to cross-
check the references in a text they are studying, to read
supplementary material on particular portions in preparation for a
class, and to note in the margins supportive or contradictory
viewpoints from other texts. Mostly this was done in advance of the
lectures to specify a student’s question on the text and to generate
debate with the teacher. In the Fatḥ, the usual cross-references were
checked against the works of Ibn Ḥajar, and students went further
according to the availability of manuscripts. Most students had their
own personal copies for independent taṣḥīḥs. Although many of
these are lost today, I located a number of taṣḥīḥ manuscripts of the
Fatḥ in Malabar that highlight a range of discourses and everyday
issues raised by law students of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.105
While taṣḥīḥ belonged to an institutional setting of learning and
teaching, some individuals continued their engagements with the
Fatḥ even after graduation. Through collective or individual
collaboration many legists took part in maintaining the legacy of the
text in a number of different ways. Most important among them are
their ḥāshiyas, in which they produced partial or complete
commentaries and glosses.106 The text was also a point of serious
debate, discussion, clarification and fatwās, in which peers
communicated with each other when convenient. A historical
reconstruction for such discussions that happened in the scholarly
collectives would be a laborious task, but we now know of an
interesting collection of three ḥāshiyas on the Fatḥ by four close
friends in the second half of the twentieth century. They were written
by Niramarutūr Bīrān Kuṭṭi Musliyār (d. 1983), K. K. Abū Bakr Ḥażrat
(d. 1995), Veḷḷiyānpuraṃ Zayd ʿAlawī Musliyār (d. 1992), and
Kariṅkappāra Muḥammad Musliyār (d. 1988). They studied together
under Pāññil Aḥmad Kuṭṭi Musliyār (d. 1946), a graduate of the
Ponnāni mosque-college and a professor at Tānūr for decades. After
their graduation from Tānūr they were appointed as qāḍīs, imāms or
lecturers at different institutions in Malabar. Every weekend they
gathered together and engaged in discussions in which the Fatḥ was
the starting point for many issues. Even though they would examine
other texts extensively, they finally returned to the Fatḥ for their
concluding statements.107 Eventually the first two, Niramarutūr and
Abū Bakr Ḥażrat, co-authored a commentary entitled Fatḥ al-mulhim,
and the other two wrote their own independent ḥāshiyas.
Karinkappāra’s work became so popular among teachers and
students of the Fatḥ that they all tried to copy it down from whatever
manuscript copies they could lay hands on. When the printing press
became popular in the region this ḥāshiya was lithographed, and it
continues to be reprinted in hundreds of copies by a printing press in
Malabar. By contrast, the Fatḥ al-mulhim was published only once.
Veḷḷiyānpuraṃ’s work was never published, but the manuscript is
preserved in a personal collection.108
Apart from these prose commentaries, there also are certain
poems on the Fatḥ, which are different from the Naẓm Qurra of
Arīkalī and the Naẓm al-wafy of Faḍfarī mentioned earlier. Two
poetic summaries introduce the Fatḥ and express an appreciation of
its content and form. One by Farīd al-Barbarī is a poem that was
widely circulated among and memorised by the students of the Fatḥ.
It lauds the text’s merits and when reciting it before beginning a class
on the Fatḥ it makes students affirm their own appreciation of
learning such a prestigious work. Another poem in Arabic by an
unknown author asks the reader to accept the Fatḥ as the best
companion for excelling in Shāfiʿī law.109
 In the overwhelming Shāfiʿī heritage of Sri Lankan Islam, the
Fatḥ has found its place in religious educational centres. The
Makhdūm family, in a way that is similar to its genealogical parallels
on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, has been extensively active
in the country and they have been influential in Islamic legal
discourses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.110 The Tamil
translation of the Fatḥ from Tamil Nadu was in circulation among the
Tamil Shāfiʿī population there through the “circulatory regime” of the
Tamil language and literature.111 The establishment of “Arabic
colleges” since the late nineteenth century across the country and
the revival of Islamic education certainly contributed to the
dissemination of Shāfiʿī texts and ideas. The ethnic Malay
community largely depended on Tamil Shāfiʿī institutions and
scholars for their religious needs, for the communities shared the
same Islamic legal ideas and norms which bound them together.112
At least since the sixteenth century, the Sri Lankan Muslims had kept
close contact particularly with Malabari Islamic scholars and
institutions, and many of them are said to have been educated in
Malabar for centuries according to a local historian.113
In Southeast Asia, the Fatḥ was well accepted by the scholarly
communities and its legacy continues. It currently features in the
traditional curricula, presented with several glosses, marginalia and
in translation. The curricula followed in the educational institutions
across the archipelago from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth
centuries are yet to be studied thoroughly. For the moment, if we
follow the same method as for Malabar and the Hijaz, looking into
the texts produced by eminent scholars of their respective regions,
the general tendency of the region was to confine itself to the
religious sciences, with less attention to the rational sciences. This is
analogous to the wider pattern over the Indian Ocean. Within the
religious sciences we saw that Malabar moved from a mystical
orientation towards Islamic law, but the trend in Southeast Asia was
in the opposite direction. The students (and by implication their
teachers) became interested more in learning Sufism than law, and
the works produced in the following centuries demonstrate this.
Indeed, a few Islamic legal texts written since the seventeenth
century were nominal compared to the number of Sufi works
produced in the region in the period. This is not to ignore the
presence of Islamic law (both legal theory and substantive law) in the
curricula of dayahs, pondoks, suraus and pesantren, along with
rational sciences such as logic, grammar and philosophy.114 Indeed,
the Fatḥ was taught widely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
as a number of biographical entries on the Indonesian scholars
indicate, possibly as part of a rejuvenated interest in Islamic legal
texts.115
In the early 1880s, L. W. C. van den Berg, who gained familiarity
with the situation in Java while working as an advisor for the Dutch
colonial government on local languages and Islamic law, listed the
legal texts taught in the Javanese pesantren. He said that the Minhāj
and its textual progenies appealed to the fuqahāʾ there, especially
the Tuḥfa. He mentions the Fatḥ as the last “very popular text”
among Javanese scholars, who call it Kitab Patakoelmoengin.116
Van den Berg’s rival, Snouck Hurgronje, undertook a similar exercise
in Sumatran institutions but he did not mention the Fatḥ’s use there.
He wrote about Minhāj’s popularity in Padang highlands and the use
of the Tuḥfa and Nihāya in Java.117 A century later, Martin van
Bruinessen conducted research in the Indonesian pesantren and
bookshops looking for kitab kuning (Ind. “yellow books”, a term used
to refer to the Islamic literary corpus taught at pesantren). He
elaborated on how the Tuḥfa has been overshadowed by other texts,
and “an Indonesian edition of this text does not even exist”.118 The
Fatḥ and its two commentaries, the Iʿāna and Tarshīḥ, were widely
circulated in the region. The first commentary was more popular than
the second as “a major work of reference”. In addition to this,
another important aspect to be noted is the almost complete
absence of any legal texts from Palembang, according to a list G. W.
J. Drewes prepared on all extant and known manuscripts from
Palembang now kept in public libraries. Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm by Ranīrī
was the only legal text available there in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries; all other works deal with multiple themes, such
as Sufism and dogma.119 This might tell us something about the
general orientation that scholars in the archipelago maintained in
their discipline. This is confirmed when we compare the list of works
authored by Acehnese scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Nevertheless, we have to be a bit cautious here. While
most scholars treat the seventeenth century as the “golden age” of
Acehnese history in many realms, including intellectual activities,
they view the eighteenth century as a period of inertia. The
Indonesian historian Erawadi questioned this argument. He provided
a long list of works written by Acehnese scholars, many of whom
were educated and active in Mecca.120 However, their works deal
with Islamic law only infrequently. Indeed this trend confirms what
Ranīrī said about the scholarly orientations of the Acehnese in the
sixteenth century. His uncle went to Aceh to teach Islamic law but
had to return since the students were more interested in Sufism and
related studies.121
Regarding the Fatḥ in particular, there was an interesting
development in Southeast Asian legalist spheres in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the wider reception of
its commentaries. One commentary of the Fatḥ, Iʿāna, grew into a
text of great significance for educational centres, legal discourses
and fatwās. Of late the Tarshīḥ has been utilised by the clusters in
the archipelago. The Fatḥ was also translated into several Southeast
Asian languages as we shall discuss later.122 In a number of fatwā
collections produced by jurists from or in Southeast Asia the Fatḥ
and the Iʿāna play an important role as sources of reference.123 Very
few scholars attempt to consult the Tuḥfa for an in-depth analysis;
the Fatḥ and Fatḥ al-qarīb are the usual references. We can easily
understand from the Southeast Asian experiences that not only was
the Minhāj marginalised, but the Tuḥfa itself was also relegated to
being of interest to only a few scholars, when we compare the status
of these two texts in relation to the Fatḥ. Yet neither text completely
disappeared from Southeast Asian circles. We know that Hurgronje
talks about their use in Padang and Java in the late nineteenth
century, and he obtained a copy of the Minhāj from the region.124
In East African religious educational centres the Fatḥ was also
considered to be a significant text and was taught widely. The
presence of several manuscripts of the text indicates its popularity
and use among the predominant Shāfiʿī clusters. The biographer of
East African Shāfiʿīs, Abdullah Saleh Farsy, says: “Both the Iʿāna
and the Fatḥ are well-known legal tracts and widely read in East
Africa.”125 Randall Pouwels noted in the late twentieth century that
the Fatḥ is “one of the most commonly read religious works on the
East African coast”.126 In Zanzibar, despite the presence of a strong
Ibāḍī legal tradition, Shāfiʿīsm has been followed by the majority of
Muslims, and its scholars and educational centres received the Fatḥ
in large numbers. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Zanzibar
became the “cultural and intellectual centre of East Africa”, attracting
fuqahāʾ from all around the coast and the Comoros, thanks to its
increasing commercial development and the Busaidi sultanate’s
supportive measures.127 Besides the Lamu region (mainly Pate, and
later Siyu), the Banadir coast, the Comoros and Mombasa had also
been centres of Shāfiʿī legalism, their fuqahāʾ often affiliating with
and shuttling back and forth to Zanzibar.
The most prominent East African Shāfiʿī scholar from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ʿAbd Allāh Bā Kathīr, is
said to have learned the Fatḥ and its commentary Iʿāna from the
commentator himself at Mecca. Bā Kathīr arrived in Mecca in 1888,
five years after the composition of the Iʿānat, and attended lectures
delivered by the commentator on this work. During his teaching
career in Zanzibar and Lamu he taught texts by the author of the
Iʿāna, such as Durar al-bahiyya.128 We have no specific account of
him teaching the Iʿāna as such, but we presume that he must have
engaged with the text in his academic career. The continuing use of
the Fatḥ and Iʿāna for teaching has been recently reaffirmed in more
than twenty-five religious educational institutions in Tanzania.129
In Somalia we find that the Qurra is used more widely than the
Fatḥ. Among the dozen and a half mukhtaṣars/matns generally used
by the Shāfiʿī fuqahāʾ for educational, juridical and fatwā purposes,
as listed by the indigenous scholars, the Qurra has been mentioned
along with the Minhāj and Fatḥ al-qarīb.130 The Tuḥfa has been listed
as one among five mabsūṭs, together with the Nihāya of Ramlī, the
Umm of al-Shāfiʿī and two works by Nawawī, the Rawḍa and
Majmūʿ. Other general listed works taught and used in Somalia are
not so different from those in the Southeast or South Asian Shāfiʿī
clusters. Based only on these lists we are unable to prioritise the
order of reception of one text over another. Further historical
evidence is needed. Ḥasan Makkī Muḥammad, in his illustrious
study of Somalia, has provided the name of a possible commentary
on the Qurra, entitled Sharḥ Saʿīd bin Muʾallif [li] Qurrat al-ʿayn bi
muhimmāt al-dīn and covering 444 pages.131 He mentions that
neither the name of the author nor that of the scribe is given in the
text, and not even the date of composition. But from its title, the text
a priori can be taken as a commentary by Saʿīd bin Muʾallif on the
Qurra. The importance of the manuscript is that “it is a commentary
on one of the legal texts circulated extensively in Somalia”.132 On the
basis of a short excerpt, it appears to be a loose commentary based
on the Fatḥ. We are not certain whether all the manuscripts have
survived in the last three decades in the war-stricken country, but the
text certainly indicates the region’s active participation in the textual
longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm, as is evident from several other works
produced by scholars from the region.
Regarding the reception, perception and usage of the Fatḥ
among the East African Shāfiʿī clusters, a passage from Farsy,
talking about Sayyid ʿUmar bin Aḥmad bin Sumayṭ, is relevant:

Also, his father taught him the entire Fathu’l-Mu’in at the same
time that Sayyid Umar was teaching in the Malindi Friday
Mosque. When he was teaching in the Malindi Mosque it was
their usual practice for his father to teach him the very lesson he
was going to teach in the mosque that same day.
Many times he beseeched his father to instruct him in the
Minhaj and his father refused, telling him, “The Minhāj is not a
book on legal practice; rather, it is only a book of legal theory.”
After he had persevered a long time he was told to study it
under the supervision of Sh. Abdallah.133

This passage demonstrates how a prominent Shāfiʿī cluster in the

Swahili Coast depended on the Fatḥ to transmit the substantive
laws, in the private home as well as in a public space such as a
congregational mosque. The Fatḥ stands as an effective textbook to
transmit traditional (Islamic) knowledge from a father to his son in an
intimate familial setting and from an established scholar to his wide
audience through a prevalent mode of public teaching and learning.
It also shows Fatḥ’s competition with the Minhāj, which otherwise
stood as the most prominent text of the school. Thanks to the
perseverance of Sayyid ʿUmar, both he and the Minhāj succeeded in
the end.
 The text has been circulated in South|East Africa not only as a
textbook and source material on the school, but it has also been
exchanged as gift, endowment and donations. Across the Islamic
world, this sort of reciprocal exchange of manuscripts was common
and many educational institutions and libraries benefited from such
contributions from the community at large, especially as the
manuscripts were expensive. One telling example comes from
nineteenth-century Lamu, where a local Ḥaḍramī elite, Bwana
Mkubwa bin al-Shaykh bin Abī Bakr al-Ḥātimī, endowed a copy of
the Fatḥ for “all the Muslims” or “his children, grandchildren, and
their successors in lineage”.134 Two endowment documents attached
to the manuscript in an envelope suggest these two different
beneficiaries: one is restricted to his family members while the other
is generalised for the entire Muslim community. This latter seems to
be his final version, since it also clarifies its overseers as jurist
members in the family over generations. In either scenario, the
endowed manuscript shows a different way in which the Fatḥ, and
other Islamic texts, was exchanged in the community with precise
attention to its utilisation and conservation over several generations.
The acceptance of the Fatḥ in the Central Asian regions is
evident primarily through the marginal presence of Shāfiʿī
educational centres. Central Asia was mostly dominated by Ḥanafīs
or Shīʿīs, and the influences of Shāfiʿīsm were limited after the early
sixteenth century. In the Central Asian parts of Kurdistan, Shāfiʿī
Sunnīs formed a minority group compared to their Shīʿī and Yazīdī
co-religionists on the subcontinent, mainly in Azerbaijan, Armenia,
Georgia and Transcaucasia. In the eighteenth century, some noted
Shāfiʿī jurists emerged in the region as a consequence of their
movement to Mecca. We see this with many Kurdish scholars, who
wrote ḥāshiyas on the Tuḥfa.135 Another important scholar was
Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī, with whom the Jāwī scholar
Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjarī (author of the Malay Shāfiʿī text Sabīl
al-muhtadīn) studied, together with many other Indonesian students
in the eighteenth century. He wrote a supercommentary entitled
Ḥawāshī al-Madaniyya on Ibn Ḥajar’s other commentary called
Manhaj al-qawīm.136 He also penned a widely circulated treatise on
the legal jargon and technical phrases of the Tuḥfa. Through people
like them, who were educated in Mecca, the Fatḥ must have arrived
in Kurdish areas. In the South|East and Central Asian mélange there
were many Kurdish teachers and colleagues historically connected
with Mecca and Medina. Thus the transmission of a text like the Fatḥ
would not have been extraordinary. South|East Asian scholars took
the text to Mecca and from Mecca the Kurdish ʿulamāʾ took it to
Kurdistan. The existence of a Kurdish scholarly network travelling
along the Indian Ocean rim, from South Africa to Southeast Asia, is
well established, and hence the movement of ideas and texts like the
Fatḥ would have been very prospective.137 In a similar vein, the
spread of the text as well as other Shāfiʿī texts to the Caucasus
regions via the Meccan connections needs further study. The most
important group in this network is that of the Dāghistānī scholars,
particularly ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Sharwānī, mentioned earlier as an
important commentator on the Tuḥfa. The school was definitely
present in the area long before them though.138
 In the twentieth century, much of the Muslim population in areas
of Central Asia and the Caucasus were controlled by the Soviet
Union. At that time religious educational centres often stopped
functioning or went underground, and we can see little reference to
Shāfiʿī texts such as the Fatḥ being taught in the area. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union, political and social turmoil overtook the
smooth functioning of the madrasas. Intermittent revivals of the
madrasas caused Shāfiʿī texts, such as the Fatḥ, to be taught again.
The partial revival of the Shāfiʿī madrasas parallel to secular
educational centres enabled the Fatḥ to develop as compulsory
reading for students of Islam in Kurdistan. After their primary
education in Islamic sciences, all students had to study the Fatḥ
either by itself or along with other texts. The Fatḥ thus became “the
most popular textbook, and the extensive commentary on it, Iʿānat
al-ṭālibīn, the most often used work of reference in Kurdish
madrasa”.139
 Conclusions
What we see reflected in intellectual engagements related to the
Fatḥ and its commentaries after the sixteenth century is the
decentralisation of Islamic knowledge through the active participation
of the Indian Ocean Muslim communities. The central roles that the
heartland of Islam in general and the nucleus of Shāfiʿī legal thought
in particular played in the intellectual traditions, and by extension in
the everyday lives of Muslims of the oceanic littoral, began to be
more fluid, when works such as the Qurra and its autocommentary
the Fatḥ and scholars such as Zayn al-Dīn instigated a revived
version of Islamic law. I identify this phenomenon as a historical
process of Muslims reimagining the centre from the fringes, a
process reflected in the rise of metaphorical “little Meccas” such as
Ponnāni. When educational migrants from the South|East Asian and
African coastal belts returned to their homelands from prime centres
of Islamic learning such as Mecca, they helped to revitalise a
network of educational institutes in the Indian Ocean littoral. By their
frequent scholarly engagements through writings, lectures, fatwās
and debates, many centres of learning acquired a distinguished
position in the opinion of local Muslims. Their graduates managed to
communicate with the wider spectrums of religious discourses
through the same language, yet emphasising their own geographical
and cultural priorities. In this way, a much more vibrant Islam came
to the forefront of the socio-religious lives of these Muslims. Their
foremost reference point on different issues of their “discursive
everyday life” became such local centres of Islam. That catalysed
the intensification of multiple centres along the Indian Ocean as
opposed to one single centre for the whole Muslim community,
though ritualistically that centre was still relevant for pilgrimage, daily
prayers and so forth. This development in the sixteenth and later
centuries leads us to one essential reality, that Mecca has been
reimagined and multiple Meccas have emerged.
The rise of these little Meccas along the Indian Ocean rim
cannot be seen as directly delineated from the “original” Mecca.
These centres and their fuqahāʾ estates asserted their scholarly
genealogy with Mecca in different ways. Many South|East Asian and
African students and scholars tried to be disciples of Ibn Ḥajar and
the like. While some of them did indeed succeed in gaining
studentships with him, including the Gujarati scholar Ṭāhir Patanī (d.
1578) and the Deccani Sufi Alī al-Muttaqī (d. 1567), others did not.
Those who did not get studentships might claim to have been
disciples of Meccan scholars, or they had that claim attributed to
them. That is very clear in the hagiographies related to Zayn al-Dīn
Jr’s scholarly journeys, especially if we connect with it the popular
narratives of Ibn Ḥajar’s visit to his student at Ponnāni. This
trajectory of common narratives, along with the historical
development of Ponnāni to become another Mecca, illustrates that
the centre was being recreated in local places, and alternative hubs
were strongly engrained events and activities of the actual centre.
The consequences of this historical rupture were deep-rooted.
The Shāfiʿīsation process of the Indian Ocean was strengthened,
and Malabar’s story stands as representative of that. I identify this as
another wave in the global spread of Shāfiʿīsm. Historically it is
explicit in the production of new legal texts that directly connect to
the textual longue durée of the school. The Fatḥ demonstrates this,
with its obvious lineage to a Meccan voice which echoes many
alternations of priorities. It led to the emergence of religious elites on
the Indian Ocean rim, with much stress on the exclusivity of
scholars, predominantly the Shāfiʿīs, who blended the specific
cultural contexts with the broader trends. This was a distant product
of the stringent juridical vision presented by Ibn Ḥajar, in which
scholars were asked to follow the dress codes that enable them to
be identified in public spheres, and commoners were prohibited from
wearing the same clothes.140 Although the scholars followed these
instructions, they also added new local dimensions befiting their
socio-cultural customs. These developments simply aimed at
constructing a higher group or class of scholarly elites within the
believing community by way of a localisation process. Accordingly,
scholars in the Indian Ocean arena from now on took on a separate
identity, class, power and consciousness by virtue of their
accomplishments.
The textures in the base text and its autocommentary represent
the remarkable conversations of a Shāfiʿī jurist with the juridical
frames of his school and against the conceptual and geographical
limits of his predecessors, and these encouraged future generations
in the oceanic littoral to undertake similar paths of intellectual
explorations. The self-commentary gave the author opportunities to
explain himself as well as to identify his individual stance as part of
the longer discursive tradition while intentionally initiating a textual
family. His self-consciousness and self-interpretative endeavours in
the autocommentary did not restrain his future interlocutors in their
own contributions to the textual longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm from
engaging with the base text or its commentary. We turn to these
aspects in the next chapter.

1 Pūntānam Nambūtiri, Jñānappāna.

1 There are many manuscripts of the Fatḥ preserved in different

collections on the Indian Ocean rim and beyond, some of which
are available in the public domain, especially those from Indonesia
and Kenya. Here I cross-reference four major manuscripts
because they are complete: Ponnāni Makhdūmiyya Library
(henceforth Ponnāni) 145; Ponnāni 113; Islāḥ al-ʿUlūm Tānūr
(henceforth Tānūr) 142 (undated, but endowed on 1198/1784) and
Tānūr 144 (1207/1792). A few other important manuscripts are
Ponnāni 138; Ponnāni 141; Tānūr 143 (undated but eighteenth
century); Tānūr 145 (undated and incomplete); Museum Aceh
07_488; Leiden Or. 2286 (with Javanese glosses, 1276/1860);
King Saud University Riyadh (hereafter Riyadh KSU) 347
(1263/1847); and Riyadha Mosque Lamu (henceforth Lamu)
EAP466/1/9 (early nineteenth century). Many manuscripts are
incomplete or similar to those discussed here, although a closer
scrutiny might reveal further dimensions. I do cite some of these
(especially the Lamu and Riyadh ones) whenever the relevant
folios are extant. The text has also been printed multiple times
since the late nineteenth century. It was printed first in 1870 at the
Bulaq Press in Cairo, and was reprinted three years later with a
supercommentary by ʿAlī bin Aḥmad Bā Ṣabrīn. In the following
years, several other publishers in Egypt, India, Lebanon, Malaysia
and Singapore printed multiple editions. Here I use a recent
“critical” edition by Bassām ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Jābī based on
earlier editions, not any manuscripts (Limassol: al-Jaffān wa al-
Jābī & Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2005).

2 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Malaybārī, Maslak al-atqīyāʾ wa manhaj al-aṣfīyāʾ fī

sharḥ Hidāyat al-adhkiyāʾ ilā ṭarīqat al-awliyāʾ, Ponnāni MS. 5, fol.
6a says that the uncle was also called Zayn al-Dīn (bin Ahmad),
whereas another document from the family records in Cochin
name him as Ibrāhīm. For discussion on the basis of these records
see Mehrdad Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture of South India: The
Sultanate of Ma’bar and the Traditions of the Maritime Settlers on
the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts (Tamil Nadu, Kerala and
Goa) (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 241; Sebastian R.
Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar
Coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 111–112.

3ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Malaybārī, Maslak al-atqīyāʾ, Ponnāni MS. 5, fol.

6b.

4Mahmood Kooria, “Doors and Walls of Mosques: Textual longue-

durée in a Premodern Malabari Inscription”, in Social Worlds of
Premodern Transactions: Perspectives from Indian Epigraphy and
History, ed. Mekhola Gomes, Digvijay Kumar Singh and Meera
Visvanathan (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2020), 128–151.

5 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Malaybārī, Maslak al-atqīyāʾ, fols. 4b–6b.

6 See, for example: Rafīq ʿAbd al-Barr al-Wāfī, “al-Juhūd al-

fiqhiyya li al-Imām Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn al-Makhdūm al-Malaybārī
wa duwaruhu fī nashr al-Maḏhab al-Shāfiʿī fī al-Hind” (PhD diss.,
al-Azhar University, 2014); P. Muhamed Kunju, “The Makhdums of
Ponnani” (PhD diss., University of Kerala, 2004); O. P. Mayankutty,
“Role of Makhdums in the Anti-Colonial Struggles of Sixteenth-
Century Malabar” (PhD diss., Calicut University, 2007). Apart from
these doctoral dissertations, also see semi-complete or complete
hagiographical works such as Kōyakkuṭṭi Musliyār, Qaṣīdat al-
Makhdūmiyya: Khwājā Zayn al-Dīn Taṅṅaḷum Avaru Makan ʿAbd
al-ʿAzīz Makhdūm Taṅṅaḷum Mattuṃ Manāqib (Ponnāni: Muṭṭikkal
ʿAlī bin ʿAbd al-Qādir, 1887); M. A. Bīrānkuṭṭi Fayḍī, Shaykh Zayn
al-Dīn Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāni Jumuʿattu Paḷḷiyuṃ (Ponnāni:
Ponnāni Valiya Jumuʿattu Paḷḷi Paripālana Committee, 1994);
Husain Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāniyuṃ (Ponnāni: Jumuʿattu
Paḷḷi Paripālana Committee, 2010), 120–125.

7A short bibliography of its translations could be found at K. K. N.

Kurup, “Foreword” in Shaykh Zainuddin Makhdum, Tuḥfat al-
Mujāhidīn: A Historical Epic of the Sixteenth Century, trans. S.
Muhammad Husayn Nainar (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust
and Calicut: Other Books, 2005), xiv–xv.

8 The exact location of his birth in Malabar is a matter of dispute

among biographers. While most say he was born in Cōmbāl where
his father was based as a religious judge, some scholars say he
was born in Ponnāni, the family home of the Makhdūms.

9His other teachers included ʿIzz al-Dīn bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-
Zumarī, Wajīh al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin Ziyād, and ʿAbd al-
Raḥmān bin al-Ṣafā.

10Some of his noted colleagues included Abū Bakr bin Sālim al-
Ḥaḍramī, Aḥmad bin Sayyid, Shaykh ʿAydarūsī Ahmadabad, ʿAlī
al-Qārī, and Shaykh bin ʿAbd Allāh al-Saqāf al-Ḥaḍramī.

11For a summary of such accounts, see Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ

Ponnāniyuṃ, 120–123.

12Various manuscripts of the Qurra, the Fatḥ and the Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn available in different collections of South Asia and
Europe are dated at the earliest to the eighteenth century.

13Amjad Rashīd Muḥammad ʿAlī, “al-Imām Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī

wa atharuhu fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī” (MA diss., Jordan University,
2000), 29. For his sources, see the next footnote.

14 He refers to Khayr al-Dīn al-Zarkalī, Tartīb al-aʿlām (Beirut: Dār

al-ʻilm lilmalāyīn, 1985), 3: 64. Apart from this contradictory
information on his father, the year of his death is given as 1579,
corresponding to the Hijri year 987. That contradicts the fact that
Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, widely ascribed to him, provides accounts of
Portuguese incursions in Malabar until 1583. A person who died in
1579 does not recount events which happened four years
afterwards. Almost all historians who have written on this text
agree that he died after 1583. This error in the date of Zayn al-
Dīn’s death as well as in his father’s name persists in other Arabic
texts, especially those published in Egypt. For example, see Abū
al-Wafā al-Marāghī, al-Maktabat al-Azharīya: Mulḥaq fihris al-
kutub al-mawjūda bi al-Maktabat al-Azharīya ilā sanat 1382 h.
(Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Azhar, 1962), 7: 108.

15 Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāniyuṃ, 122–123.

16Most people say he was born in 938/1524. The disputes are

mainly about the year of his death. Jurjī Zaydān says it was in
987/1579, Raṇṭattāṇi gives the date 1028/1619. See ʿAbd al-
Munʿim Nimr, Tārīkh al-Islām fī al-Hind (Beirut: al-Muʾassasat al-
Jāmiʿiyya, 1981), 89–90; Jurjī Zaydān, Tārīkh ādāb al-lughat al-
ʿArabiyya (Cairo: Hindawi Foundation for Education and Culture,
2013), 1126; Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāniyuṃ, 124.

17 On this wider religious network of Malabari Muslims in the

sixteenth century and before, see Prange, Monsoon Islam.

18For a list of his ten works, see Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ

Ponnāniyuṃ, 124–125.

19 Kurup, “Foreword”, xiii–xvi.

20For example, Ḥaḍramī sayyids such as Ḥasan Jifrī (d. 1767)

and Sayyid Faḍl bin ʿAlawī (1824–1900), who both studied at
Ponnāni.

21 Francis Robinson, “Ottomans–Safavids–Mughals: Shared

Knowledge and Connective Systems”, Journal of Islamic Studies
8, no. 2 (1997): 151–184; for a criticism of his arguments on the
Ottoman cases, see Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Myth of ‘The
Triumph of Fanaticism’ in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman
Empire”, Die Welt des Islams 48, no. 2 (2008): 196–221.

22 The Ottoman-controlled Hijaz or Egypt, which was a centre of

Islamic education until Istanbul was raised to this position in the
sixteenth century and the coastal areas outside the Mughal power
which networked into the Middle Eastern patterns of education are
outside the purview of Robinson’s focus. According to his
conclusions and appendices, the “rational sciences” played a
significant role in the Safavid and Mughal spheres, where Islamic
law or scriptural disciplines were marginal.

23Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Sunni Muslim Scholars on the Status of

Logic, 1500–1800”, Islamic Law and Society 11, no. 2 (2004):
213–232.

24 ʿAbd al-Naṣīr Aḥmad al-Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī, Tarājim al-ʿulamāʾ

al-Shāfiʿīyya fī diyār al-Hindiyya (Amman: Dār al Fatḥ, 2010), 64.

25 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Malaybārī, Maslak al-atqīyāʾ, Ponnāni MS. 5,

fol. 6b.

26Some of the remarkable figures are ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (1508–1586),

Shaykh ʿUthmān (1504–1583), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Senior (1541–
1619), Jamāl al-Dīn Qāḍī (d. seventeenth century),ʿUthmān
Makhdūm (d. 1619), ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Junior (d. 1619), Muḥy al-Dīn
Kuṭṭi (lived in 1729), Nūr al-Dīn (d. 1740), Khwājā Aḥmad alias
Kōyāmu (d. 1747), Muḥammad (d. 1752), Kuññaḥammad (d.
1756), Aḥmad (d. 1766), Kuṭṭi Ḥasan (d. 1783), ʿAlī Ḥasan (d.
1785) and Paḻayakattu Aḥmad Kuṭṭi (d. 1801). On each of them,
see Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāniyuṃ, 118–130.

27The same family still exists with a limited religious outreach.

They continue to teach at the college and its satellite centres,
provide legal clarifications and lead religious rituals and
ceremonies in the locality.

28 Their works include Kifāyat al-farāʾiḍ fī ikhtiṣār al-Kāfī, Ḥāshiya

ʿalā al-Irshād (by Zayn al-Dīn Sr), Mutafarrid, Arkān al-ṣalāt (ʿAbd
al-ʿAzīz), Qurra, Fatḥ, Ajwibat al-ʿajība, Iḥkām aḥkām al-nikāḥ and
Fatāwā al-Hindiyya (Zayn al-Dīn Jr).
29 Those include Maqāṣid al-nikāḥ and Farāʾiḍ al-multaqaṭ. K. M.
Muhammad, Arabi Sāhityattinu Kēraḷattinṯe Saṃbhāvana
(Tirūraṅṅāṭi: Ashrafi Book Centre, 2012), 63–65, 71–72.

30The notion stemmed from the idea that the ideal time and
believers were to be found in the time of the Prophet, his
companions and their successors, and quality decreases as time
passes. This attitude is related to apocalyptic ideas in Islam.

31 Such statements in the Ottoman contexts have been analysed

in D. A. Howard, “Ottoman Historiography and the Literature of
‘Decline’ of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, Journal of
Asian History 22, no. 1 (1988): 52–77.

32BL, Ms. Islamic 2807e: Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, “Tuḥfat al-

mujāhidīn fī Baʿḍi Akhbār al-Burtughāliyyīn”, fol. 112a; Royal
Asiatic Society, Ms. Arabic 28, Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn fī baʻḍ akhbār al-Burtughālīyīn, 3.

33 The origin of Malayalam as a written language is a matter of

historical and political debate, but certainly the language and script
spread across the region by this time, as numerous inscriptions
and texts testify.

34 Malaybārī, “Qurrat al-ʿayn bī muhimmāt al-dīn” in his Fatḥ al-

muʿīn, Ponnāni 145, fol. 5; Ponnāni 113, fols. [2b–3a]; Tānūr 142,
fols. 5b–6a; Tānūr 144, fol. 4a–b; Leiden Or. 2286, fols. 2b–3a;
Riyadh KSU 347, fols. 1Bb–2a; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī,
35. The Riyadh KSU 347 has two folios numbered 1, and it and
Leiden Or. 2286 miss “bi” in the title, whereas Tānūr 142 does not
highlight “bi muhimmāt al-dīn” at all as part of the title.
35 Ponnāni 145, fol. 2; Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 1b; Ponnāni 113, fol.
[1b – some words are missing due to termite attack]; Tānūr 142,
fol. 4b; Tānūr 144, fol. 2b (in the title the copyist missed the term
al-‘ayn but inserted it later); Riyadh KSU 347, fol. 1Ab (cf. note
34); Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 31.

36See the discussion on East Africa under the sub-title

“Receptivity and Circulation”.

37 Ponnāni 145, fol. 5; Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 2b; Ponnāni 113, fol.
[2b – some words are missing due to termite attack]; Tānūr 142,
fols. 5b–6a; Tānūr 144, fol. 4a; Riyadh KSU 347 fol. 1Bb;
Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 35 (he adds “such as” (mithl)
after “other eminent mujtahids”. Leiden Or. 2286 uses the
masculine form khātim (instead of khātimat al-muḥaqqiqīn), thus it
also connotes the “seal” (khātam) of verifiers.

38 On the works of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (bin ʿAbd al-Karīm bin Aḥmad)

bin Ziyād al-Zabīdī, see Ismāʿīl Bāshā al-Baghdādī, Hadiyyat al-
ʿārifīn: Asmāʾ al-muʾallifīn wa āthār al-muṣannifīn (Beirut: Dār
Ihyāʾ al-Turath al-ʿArabī, 1951), 545–546. He wrote many works
on controversial but trivial ritualistic and matrimonial issues among
Shāfiʿī scholars and the fuqahāʾ estate of his time. In the Tānūr
142, fol. 5b, a glossator adds the nisba Zabīdī to his name.

39 Muzjad was a qāḍī of Aden from 1493 until his death. On his life
and contributions, see ʿAbd al-Qādir bin Shaykh ʿAydarūs, Tārīkh
al-nūr al-sāfir ʿan akhbār al-qarn al-ʿāshir, ed. Aḥmad Ḥalū,
Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ and Akram al-Būshī (Beirut: Dar Sader
Publishers, 2001), 127; ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ibn al-ʿImād, Shaḏarāt al-
ḏahab fī akhbār man ḏahab, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Arnāʾūṭ and
Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūṭ (Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1991), 8: 169; Zarkalī,
Tartīb al-aʿlām, 1: 188. The glossators add the nisba Zabīdī to his
name in Tānūr 142, fol. 6a; Tānūr 144, fol. 4a.

40On other works of Muzjad, see Baghdādī, Hadyat al-ʿārifīn, 140.

His fatwās were collected by his son al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn and further
improved with additions by Ibn al-Naqīb. His Tuḥfat al-ṭullāb wa
manzumat al-Irshād is a poetical legal text of 5,840 lines.

41 BL, Ms. Islamic 2807f: Muḥammad al-Kālikūtī, “al-Fatḥ al-

mubīn”; BL, Ms. Islamic 2807e: al-Malaybārī, “Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn”, fols. 127a–128a; Royal Asiatic Society, Ms. Arabic 28,
al-Malaybārī, Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, 33–35.

42Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce:

Southern India, 1500–1650 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 252–342.

43For a detailed reading of the Portuguese–Zamorin relationship,

see Michael Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The
Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).

44BL, Ms. Islamic 2807e: Malaybārī, “Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn”, fol.

128v; Royal Asiatic Society, Ms. Arabic 28, al-Malaybārī, Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn, 36; the translated quote is from M. N. Pearson,
“Corruption and Corsairs in Sixteenth-Century Western India: A
Functional Analysis”, in The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia
before Dominion, ed. Blair B. Kling and M. N. Pearson (Honolulu:
University Press of Hawaii, 1979), 26.
45Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine
Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1994), 112–113; for the wider picture, see
Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).

46 On the political affiliations of the local Muslim jurists, see

Mahmood Kooria, “An Abode of Islam with a Hindu King:
Circuitous Imagination of Kingdoms among Muslims of Sixteenth-
Century Malabar”, Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 1, no. 1
(2017): 89–109.

47Ponnāni 145, fol. unpaginated [528]; Ponnāni 113, fol. [249b];

Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 288b; Tānūr 142, fol. 253a; Tānūr 144, fol.
310a; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 612. The relevant folios
are missing in Lamu EAP466/1/9 and Riyadh KSU 347. Leiden Or.
2286 does not highlight a term for the authority (dhū shawka) as
part of the Qurra.

48Abū Bakar Shaṭā aka Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn (Cairo:

Maṭbaʿat al-Āmirat/al-Mīriyya, 1883), 4: 253.

49BL, Ms. Islamic 2807e: Malaybārī, “Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn”, fols.

130a, 133a–b; Royal Asiatic Society, Ms. Arabic 28, Malaybārī,
Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, fols. 39, 45–47.

50 Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība, Ponnāni

MS. 1203 [also numbered 2598]; Zayn al-Dīn Malaybārī, Ajwibat
al-ʿajība, ed. ʿAbd al-Naṣīr Aḥmad al-Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī (Kuwait:
Dār al-Ḍiyāʾ, 2012).
51Michael N. Pearson, Pious Passengers: The Hajj in Earlier
Times (London: C. Hurst, 1994), 163, 175.

52To compare this process with similar trends on the Coromandel

coast towards the end of this century and throughout the next, see
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The
Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean,
1590–1665”, Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 503–530.

53Ponnāni 145, fols. 241, 252, 429; Ponnāni 113, fols. [115a,
122b–123a, 177a]; Leiden Or. 2286, fols. 124a–b, 125b, 188b;
Tānūr 142, fols. 116a, 121a–b, 172a; Tānūr 144, fols. 145b, 151a–
152a, 210; Lamu EAP466/1/9, fols. 157, 165–166, 251; Malaybārī,
Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 302, 313–314, 423–424.

54 Mecca FS 85, fol. 27a–b; Riyadh KSU 4886.3, fol. 25a–b; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 7: 13; Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī,
Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj, ed. Anas al-Shāmī (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2016),
8: 132.

55Ponnāni 145, fol. 238; Ponnāni 113, fol. [108b]; Leiden Or.
2286, fol. 115a; Tānūr 142, fol. 110a; Tānūr 144, fol. 138b; Lamu
EAP466/1/9, fol. 146; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 282.

56 For an early account of the story by the ninth-century Muslim

traveller, Sulaymān al-Tājir, see Eusèbe Renaudot, Ancient
Accounts of India and China by Two Mohammedan Travellers Who
Went to Those Parts in the 9th Century (London: S. Harding,
1733), 3.
57 Besides the Fatḥ, such distinguished commentaries of the
Minhāj as the Tuḥfa, Mughnī of Sharbīnī and Najm al-wahhāj, all
written in the sixteenth century, also make the same claim. Shams
al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī, Mughnī al-muḥtāj ilā
maʿrifat alfāẓ al-Minhāj, ed. Muḥammad Khalīl ʿAytānī (Beirut: Dār
al-Maʿrifa, 1997), 1: 672; Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Khaṭīb al-
Sharbīnī, Iqnāʿ fī ḥall al-alfāz Abī Shujāʿ, ed. ʿAlī Muḥammad
Muʿwwad and ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub
al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), 1: 497; Kamāl al-Dīn Abī al-Baqāʾ Muḥammad
al-Damīrī, Najm al-wahhāj (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2004), 3: 393.
Many of these authors refer to Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Ibn
Yūnus’ Taʿjīz, an abridgement of Ghazālī’s Wajīz. Mecca FS 83,
fol. 394b; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fol. 273a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fol.
368a; Riyadh KSU 2148, fol. 387a; Riyadh KSU 566, fol. 182a; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 4: 3; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 4: 508–734,
5: 5–170.

58Ponnāni 145, fols. 46–50; Ponnāni 113, fols. [17b–19b]; Leiden

Or. 2286, fol. 22a–b; Tānūr 142, fol. 21a; Tānūr 144, fol. 24b;
Lamu EAP466/1/9, fols. 15–19; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī,
80–83.

59Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, ed. and trans. A.
N. Cortesão (London: Hakluyt, 1944), 1: 81.

60 On prayer and then fasting, Ponnāni 145, fols. 108, 214;

Ponnāni 113, fols. [45b, 102a]; Leiden Or. 2286, fols. 50a, 108a;
Tānūr 142, fols. 51b, 104a; Tānūr 144, fols. 66b, 131b; Lamu
EAP466/1/9, fols. 59, 135; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 147,
267. It is striking how the editor Jābī from Cyprus describes betel
in a footnote, while none of the Indian Ocean manuscripts qualify
it, for it was widely popular in the littoral. The Tuḥfa does discuss
betel in passing, referring to an earlier jurist, in the laws and
etiquettes of food. He mistakenly considers betel as part of “some
Indian tree” whose leaves are commonly consumed. Mecca FS
86, fol. 192b; Riyadh KSU 7850, fol. 158a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa
(Cairo), 10: 43; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 11: 648–649. For the
same discussion in a collection of fatwās by the Fatḥ’s author, see
Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība, Ponnāni MS. 1203, fol. 16a–b.

61 Ponnāni 113, fol. [218b]; Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 241; Tānūr 142,
fol. 215b; Tānūr 144, fol. 264a; Lamu EAP466/1/9, fol. 319;
Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 527. In Ponnāni 145, the
concerned folios (a major section on marital laws, in fact) are
missing.

62 Ponnāni 113, fol. [206b]; Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 224a; Tānūr 142,
fol. 201b; Tānūr 144, fol. 248a; Lamu EAP466/1/9, fol. 306;
Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 495. In Ponnāni 145, these
folios are also missing, as mentioned.

63 Ponnāni 145, fol. [491]; Ponnāni 113, fol. [235a]; Leiden Or.
2286, fol. 265b; Tānūr 142, fol. 235a; Tānūr 144, fol. 288a; Riyadh
KSU 347, fol. 24a (there is a scribal error for the word for “attire”);
Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 572. In Lamu EAP466/1/9, the
concerned sections are missing in digitalisation. Leiden Or. 2286
has an interlinear commentarial note in Malay resonating the attire
with the ones of “infidel Jews” (kāfir yahūdi).

64BL, Ms. Islamic 2807e: Malaybārī, “Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn”, fols.

124b–125a; Royal Asiatic Society, Ms. Arabic 28, Malaybārī,
Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, 28. For a similar description, see Duarte
Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the
Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants,
trans. Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Hakluyt Soceity, 1921),
2: 12 and 15.

65 Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība, Ponnāni MS. 1203, fol. 53a.

66 Prange, Monsoon Islam, 117.

67For example see Mecca FS 86, fols. 114b–115a; Riyadh KSU

7850, fol. 95a; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 9: 223; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa,
ed. Shāmī, 11: 201–203.

68Ponnāni 145, fol. [512]; Ponnāni 113, fol. [243b]; Leiden Or.
2286, fol. 278b; Tānūr 142, fol. 245a; Tānūr 144, fol. 300b;
Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 595.

69 Ponnāni 113, fol. [212a]; Leiden Or. 2286, fol. 231b; Tānūr 142,
fols. 207b–208a; Tānūr 144, fol. 255a; Riyadh KSU 347, fol. 59a–
b; Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Jābī, 508–509. In Ponnāni 145
and Lamu EAP466/1/9, the concerned folios are missing (in
digitalisation for the latter).

70Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība, Ponnāni MS. 1203, fol. 47b (also

see similar local formulae for marriage in fol. [38b]).

71 Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, al-Fatāwā al-kubrā al-

fiqhiyya (Cairo: ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Aḥmad Ḥanafī, 1938), 4: 129.

72R. B. Serjeant, “Notes and Communications: A Sixteenth-

Century Reference to Shaḥrī Dialect at Ẓufār”, Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies 22, nos. 1–3 (1959): 128–
130.

73 Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība, Ponnāni MS. 1203.

74 For example, compare the discussions on the appointment of

judges by an unbelieving ruler and its influence in the rulings of the
Fath. Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība, Ponnāni MS. 1203, fols. 56a–
59a. I shall discuss this in detail in the next chapter.

75 Brinkley Messick, Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Wael Hallaq, “From
Fatwās to Furūʿ: Growth and Change in Islamic Substantive Law”,
Islamic Law and Soceity 1, no. 1 (1994): 29–65.

76 For example, see a fourteenth-century narrative of Adam’s Feet

in Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾib al-amṣār wa-ʿajāʾib al-
asfār, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-ʿUryān and Musṭafā al-
Qaṣṣāṣ (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-ʿUlūm, 1987), 610–611.

77BL, Ms. Islamic 2807e: Malaybārī, “Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn”, fol.

121a; Royal Asiatic Society, Ms. Arabic 28, Malaybārī, Tuḥfat al-
mujāhidīn, 20.

78Mahmood Kooria, “‘Killed the Hajj Pilgrims and Persecuted

Them’: Portuguese Estado da India’s Encounters with the Hajj,
16th Century”, in The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, ed.
Umar Ryad (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 14–46.

79Stephen Dale, “The Hadhrami Diaspora in South-Western India:

The Role of the Sayyids of the Malabar Coast”, in Hadrami
Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–
1960s, ed. Ulrike Freitag and William G. Clarence-Smith (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 175–184.

80Abdul Jaleel PKM, “Hadrami Sayyid Diaspora in Kerala and

Singapore: A Comparative Study” (PhD diss., Jawaharlal Nehru
University, 2015).

81Sebastian Prange, “The Social and Economic Organization of

Muslim Trading Communities on the Malabar Coast, Twelfth to
Sixteenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of London, 2008), 141.
For a revised version, though without this table, see Prange,
Monsoon Islam.

82 The hijri year appears as 675 but that is most unlikely for its
colophon names the scribe, one Ḥusayn bin Aḥmad bin Ismāʿīl al-
Anṣārī, and he finished writing it in AH 806/1404. Abū ʾIsḥāq
Ibrāhīm bin ʿAlī al-Shīrāzī, Tanbīh, Tānūr Iṣlāḥ al-ʿUlūm Arabic
College.

83This is not to overlook the obvious presence of such non-

Muslim Persians as the Zoroastrians and Christians in Malabar, for
which we have inscriptional and textual evidences from the first
millennium CE.

84 Barbosa, Book of Duarte Barbosa, 2: 76.

85 Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture, 146.

86 C. E. Bosworth, “Khurāsān”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

87 These descriptions and dates are from: al-Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī,
Tarājim al-ʿulamāʾ, 86–87. Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture, 239,
cites “the local records” on Sayyid Ismāʿīl and says that he is the
son of Aḥmad Jalāl al-Dīn al-Bukhārī and is said to have died in
769/1367–1368. Shokoohy states that the records are unattested,
and does not make clear what local sources he references.

88 al-Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī, Tarājim al-ʿulamāʾ, 82.

89 al-Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī, Tarājim al-ʿulamāʾ, 75–76.

90Gagan Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-

Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 197.

91The popular narrative can be found in K. V. ʿAbdu Raḥmān

Kuṭṭi, “Prathama Adhiniveśa Viruddha Pōrāṭṭam”, Bodahanam 15,
no. 18 (2015): 62–76.

92 Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāniyuṃ, 98–99.

93For the broader East African–South Asian legal nexus, see

Mahmood Kooria, “Un agent abyssinien et deux rois indiens à La
Mecque: Interactions autour du droit islamique au XVe siècle”,
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 74, no. 1 (2019): 73–103.

94Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 572. See Chapter 2 for details on
the Qayd al-Jāmiʿ.

95Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy 1947–48, no. B94, Annual

Report on Indian Epigraphy 1965–1966, no. D137.
96Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy 1965–1966, no. D53;
Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture, 168.

97On many inscriptions found in this mosque, see Kooria, “Doors

and Walls of Mosques”.

98 Abū Suhayl Anwar ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Faḍfarī,

al-Naẓm al-wafī fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī (Riyadh: Dār al-Ṣamīʿī, 2013);
Arīkalī’s Naẓm Qurrat al-ʿayn li matn Fatḥ al-muʿīn is unpublished
and it is now lost.

99Farīd bin Muḥy al-Dīn al-Barbarī, endorsement poem to Sayyid

Bakrī, Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn (Cairo: Dār Ihyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya,
1927).

100Cf. Dale F. Eickelman, “The Art of Memory: Islamic Education

and Its Social Reproduction”, Comparative Studies in Society and
History 20, no. 4 (1978): 485–516.

101The best examples are Ponnāni 113; Ponnāni 138 and

Ponnāni 141 with marginal commentaries and glosses throughout.
These ḥāshiyas do not provide exact dates of lettering or authors’
names.

102 Shāfiʿī al-Malaybārī, Tarājim al-ʿulamāʾ, 85.

103 For example, see Anonymous, Majmuʿat Fatāwā al-ʿulamāʾ wa

al-aʿlām al-mutaʿallaqat bi al-firaqat al-mubtadiʿat al-liʾām al-
zanadiqat al-mallāʿin al-rafḍat al-mutashayyikhat al-ibāḥiyyin al-
waradat ilā qaryat Koṇṭōṭṭi min diyār Malaybār, uncatalogued MS.
Jifri House, Calicut; Puttanviṭṭīl Aḥmad Musliyār, Ḥayāt al-dīn wa
mamāt al-maʿānidin, athavā Hidāyat al-ikhwān fī radd al-bustān
(Ponnāni: Nalakattu Muḥammad, 1892).

104 See F. Rosenthal, “Taṣḥīf”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

105 The C. H. Mohammed Koya Chair for Studies on Developing

Societies at University of Calicut has been collecting and
preserving various such taṣḥīḥ manuscripts of the Fatḥ, a project
still ongoing.

106 Some of the complete ḥāshiyas on the Fatḥ include those by

Kuññi Muḥammad Musliyār Kōṭancēri (d. 1934), Shihāb al-Dīn
Aḥmad Kōya Shāliyātī (d. 1955), and a three-volume one by
Aḥmad Shīrāzī al-Nādāpuramī (1851–1908), a Malabari scholar
born in Cēriyaṃ (Maṅkaṭa) but who moved into Nādāpuraṃ,
where he died and was buried. His patronym Shīrāzī is an
Arabization of his hometown Cēriyaṃ and it should not be
confused with Shiraz in Iran. A partial ḥāshiya is Tanshīṭ al-
muṭāliʿīn by ʿAlawī bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Tānūrī al-Naqshabandī
(d. 1929) as far as the chapter on prayer. For biographies of these
scholars, see Nellikkuttu Muḥammadali Musliyār, Tuḥfat al-akhyār
fī tārīkh ʿulamāʾ Malaybār, MS in his family collection; C. N.
Aḥmad Moulavi and K. K. Muhammad Abdul Karim, Mahattāya
Māppiḷa Sāhitya Pāranparyaṃ (Calicut: Published by the authors,
1957); C. S. Ḥusayn, “Musāhamāt ʿulamāʾ Malaybār fī al-adab al-
fiqh bi al-lughat al-ʿArabiyya” (PhD diss., Calicut University, 2004).

107In a personal conversation, ʿAbd Ṣamad Fayḍī told me how he

had witnessed many of their debates.

108
Veḷḷiyānpuraṃ Zayd ʿAlawī Musliyār, Ḥāshiyat Fath al-muʿīn,
MS. in his family collection.
109 Muḥammadali Musliyār, Malayālattile Mahārathanmār, 29.

110 As we see in the case of ʿAbd al-Ṣamad bin Muḥammad

Ibrāhīm al-Makhdūmī (1912–1996), a noted Shāfiʿī scholar of
twentieth-century Sri Lanka.

111 Aḥmad Muḥy al-Dīn, Tuḥfat al-ṭāmiʿīn fī tarjamat Fatḥ al-muʿīn

(Madras: City Press, 1929), is digitised and preserved by
Southeastern University of Sri Lanka; cf. Torsten Tschacher,
“Circulating Islam: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in
the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar and Nusantara”, in Islamic
Connections: Studies of South and Southeast Asia, ed. R. Michael
Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, 2009), 48–67.

112 The first such Arabic college was Madrasat al-Bārī, established
in 1884 at Weligama in the Southern Province, followed by those
in Galle (1892), Kinniya (1899), Maharagama (1913) and Matara
(1915). See M. A. Nuhman, Understanding Sri Lankan Muslim
Identity (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2004),
28; Aboobacker Rameez, “The Ethnic Identity of Malays in Sri
Lanka: The Challenges of Assimilation and Their Responses”
(PhD diss., National University of Singapore, 2015), 280, 300,
329–330; Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and
Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019).

113 S. Anuzsiya, “Development of Education of Muslims during the

Portuguese, Dutch and British Rule in Sri Lanka”, Kalam: Journal
of Faculty of Arts and Culture 2–3 (2004): 70–72.
114Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī, Bustan al-salatin Bab II, Pasal 13, ed. T.
Iskandar (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Pustaka, 1966), 32–35; cf. M.
Hasbi Amiruddin, “The Response of the ʿUlamāʾ Dayah to the
Modernization of Islamic Law in Aceh” (MA diss., McGill University,
1994), 47–49.

115For example, see Yūsuf al-Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir wa al-

durar fī ʿulamāʾ al-qarn al-rābiʿ ʿashar (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa,
2006), 526–527, 1619, 1475, 1659.

116L. W. C. van den Berg, “Het Mohammedaansche

godsdienstonderwijs op Java en Madoera en de daarbij gebruikte
Arabische boeken”, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 31 (1886): 533.

117C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Een en ander over het inlandsch

onderwijs in de Padangsche Bovenlanden”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-,
Land- en Volkenkunde (4e volgreeks) 7, no. 2 (1883): 57–84; C.
Snouck Hurgronje, “Sajjid Oethman’s gids voor de priesterraden”,
Indisch Tijdschrif van het Recht 63 (1894): 722–744.

118Martin van Bruinessen, “Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic Script

Used in the Pesantren Milieu; Comments on a New Collection in
the KITLV Library”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
146, nos. 2–3 (1990): 226–269.

119G. W. J. Drewes, Directions for Travellers on the Mystic Path:

Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī’s Kitāb Fatḥ al-Raḥmān and Its Indonesian
Adaptations: with an Appendix on Palembang Manuscripts and
Authors (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), Appendix.
120Erawadi, Tradisi, wacana, dan dinamika intelektual Islam Aceh
abad XVIII dan XIX (Jakarta: Departemen Agama RI, 2009).

121 Ranīrī, Bustan al-salatin, 33.

122 For example, see Aliy As’ad, Terjamahan Fat-hul Mu’in, 2 vols.
(Selangor: Klang Book Centre, 1988); Abul Hiyadh, Terjamah Fat-
hul Mu’in, 3 vols. (Surabaya: al-Hidayah, 1993); Achmad Najieh,
Terjemah Fathul Mu’in Makna Jawa Pegon dan Indonesia, 4 vols.
(Surabaya: al-Miftah, n.d.).

123For example, see Muhammad Afifi Akiti, Defending the

Transgressed by Censuring the Reckless against the Killing of
Civilians = Mudāfiʿ al-maẓlūm bi radd al-muhāmil ʿalā qitāl man lā
yuqātil (no place: Aqsa Press and Warda Publications, 2005), 38;
Mohamad Atho Mudzhar, “Fatwās of the Council of Indonesian
Ulama: A Study of Islamic Legal Thought in Indonesia, 1975–
1988” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1990), 79,
177.

124Snouck Hurgronje, “Le guide des zélés croyants”, De Indische

Gids 5, no. 1 (1883): 531–544.

125Abdallah Salih Farsy, The Shaf’i Ulama of East Africa, ca.

1830–1970: A Hagiographic Account, trans., ed. and annot.
Randall L. Pouwels (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989), 95.
The quote is from a note by the translator.

126Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent, Cultural Change and

Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 236 n. 115. The
other text he mentions is the khuṭba (preface) of the Minhāj. The
preface is too short to be read independently, and thus it must
have been a commentary written on the preface by the Swahili
jurist Shaykh Muḥy ad-Dīn (1794–1869).

127Randal Pouwels, “Introduction” to Farsy, The Shaf’i Ulama of

East Africa, iii.

128 Farsy, The Shaf’i Ulama of East Africa, 84.

129C. van de Bruinhorst, “Raise Your Voices and Kill Your

Animals”, Islamic Discourses on the Idd El-Hajj and Sacrifices in
Tanga (Tanzania): Authoritative Texts, Ritual Practices and Social
Identities (Leiden: ISIM and Amsterdam University Press, 2007),
115.

130 Aḥmad al-Quṭubī, “Turuq tadrīs al-Qurʾān al-karīm wa al-ʿulūm

al-Islāmiyya wa al-ʿArabiyya fī al-Ṣūmāl” (PhD diss., Omdurman
Islamic University, 2000), 149–152; Muḥammad Shaykh Aḥmad
Muḥammad, “al-Maḏhab al-Shāfiʿī fī al-Ṣūmāl: Maʿālim wa
malāmih min wāqiʿ al-tafāʿul al-bīʾī”, Majallat al-Sharīʿa wa al-
Dirāsat al-Islāmiyya 9 (2007): 260–263.

131 Ḥasan Makkī Muḥammad, al-Siyāsāt al-thaqāfiyya fī Sūmāl al-

kabīr (Qarn Ifrīqiyā), 1887–1986 (Khartoum: Dār al-Markaz al-
Islāmī al-Ifrīqī, 1990), 67–68.

132Aḥmad Muḥammad, “al-Maḏhab al-Shāfiʿī fī al-Ṣūmal”, 275–

276.

133 Farsy, The Shaf’i Ulama of East Africa, 102.

134 For the transcription and translation of the endowment deeds,
see John Hunwick and R. S. O’Fahey, “Some Waqf Documents
from Lamu”, Sudanic Africa 13 (2002): 11–13. However, they
introduce Zayn al-Dīn as a Ḥanafī jurist, which is incorrect. They
also misread Bwana Mkubwa’s surname as Khātimī.

135 See Chapter 5, n. 93.

136 On Sulaymān al-Kurdī’s connections with the Indonesian

students, see Martin van Bruinessen, De Turcicis Aliisque Rebus
Commentarii Henry Hofman Dedicati, ed. Marc Vandamme
(Utrecht: Instituut voor Oosterse Talen en Culturen, 1992), 205–
227.

137 For example, see Martin van Bruinessen, “The Impact of

Kurdish ʿUlama on Indonesian Islam”, Les Annales de l’Autre
Islam 5 (1998): 83–106.

138On many Shāfiʿī jurists from Daghistan, see Naḏīr al-Durkilī al-
Tunī, Nuzhat al-aḏhan fī tarājim ʿulamāʾ Dāghistān, ed. and trans.
Michael Kemper and Amri R. Sixsaidov (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz,
2004).

139 van Bruinessen, “Kitab Kuning”, 240, n. 40. Most of this

information is from personal communication with the author at
Universitas Gadjah Madah, 26 June 2014.

140Mecca FS 83, fols. 264a–268a; Riyadh KSU 7850.1, fols.

197a–199a; Riyadh KSU 4886.1, fols. 251a–258a; Riyadh KSU
2148, fols. 264a–268b; Riyadh KSU 566, fols. 126b–128a; Ibn
Ḥajar, Tuḥfa (Cairo), 3: 33–39; Ibn Ḥajar, Tuḥfa, ed. Shāmī, 3:
341–378; cf. Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Darr al-
ghamāma fī ḏurr al-ṭaylasān wa al-ʿaḏabat wa al-ʿimāma (Miṣr:
Maṭbaʿat al-Saʿāda, n.d.), of which some manuscripts are kept at
Muḥammadiyya Library Chennai and Salarjung Museum
Hyderabad.
◈
From voyaging in the oceanic scape of the sixteenth century,
the ship slowly slides into the nineteenth century, with even
more challenges ahead. The greatest challenge was a
technological advancement, the steam engine.
By 1825 a ship from Britain travelled to India powered by
steam, yet still dependent on the power of sail. The
imbalance changed dramatically by the 1860s, as now the
Suez Canal had been broadened and opened up for large
ships to pass.
Talk to your captain! Does he want to adopt the new
technology or stick to the old? Many smaller dhows continued
in that way. Perhaps he prefers a combination of both skills.
Whatever decision you and he take, bear in mind there is
a long way to go in multiple directions this time. Between the
Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Java Sea and Red Sea. This
wide choice of routes enabled by better ships and
technologies has bestowed new vistas for itinerants on the
ocean. Thanks to such mechanisation, Cairo now became
more connected to Mecca, and Mecca became more
connected to Malacca than ever before.
A Muslim author of Tamil-Yemeni origin who had
travelled multiple times on sail ships would recount in Malay
in the mid-nineteenth century when he was visiting a
steamship anchored in Singapore:
 I was full of excitement at the thought of seeing the
steamship, for I had never seen one before, and nor had
any of my forefathers. … My first impression of the
[steam]ship was a big, long, low object, painted black,
that looked like a duck lying in the water. … I was struck
totally speechless at the sight of the amazing steam
engines. … The speed of the ship was nine miles per
hour, and thus it could sail from Singapore to Melaka in
approximately thirteen hours, and whether the wind was
behind it or against it made no difference to its speed.1

This author, Munsyi Abdullah joins you in the ship for he

himself had undertaken several voyages within and beyond
Southeast Asia, especially to Mecca, and left behind
accounts of his excursions on ships under both sail and
steam.
At this time we will observe with close attention the
fluctuations in Java and Mecca. We have already seen Mecca
in detail, but now the city has become an archetype of its time
thanks to the gradual advancements in globalisation. Java is
comparatively new in our narrative. Here the Dutch were in
the full swing of colonisation after the bloody wars they had
fought against the Portuguese and the British as well as
against the local rulers such as the Mataram. Mecca
continued politically under the Ottomans, even though the
local sharīfs were revolting against them, and the European
empires were trying to intrude into the city through spies,
informants and bureaucrats, causing paranoia among
Muslims.
In the multi-directional journeys, two more notable
members join our crew. One is Nawawī al-Bantanī, who
travels from Java to Mecca. The other is Sayyid Bakrī. His
father had travelled from a Mediterranean town to Mecca a
few years earlier. In the city, the texts of the school provided
them common grounds to advance themselves, at a time
when their sort of thinking was under threat.
True to the Malay adages, they were not launching their
boat in the drought, rather they were running ampat tiang, a
“ship of four masts”, in the wake of new forms of modernity
and globalisation. Accounts of Bantanī and Bakrī testify to
this.
 7
The Supercommentaries
◈

In the long history of Shāfiʿī textual circulations, the nineteenth

century is the next most important stage. The century is generally
recognised as a watershed moment in the history of globalisation, for
with it came large-scale industrial revolution, major innovations in
technology and communication, and expansive European
colonisation. Legal spheres also experienced considerable
advancements in the century through such developments as global
trends of codifications, legal pluralities and effective marshalling of
law for colonisation. All these headways marked a gradual progress
in the repertoire of global law that had been taking shape as an
unfathomable presence in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
nineteenth century fine-tuned those historical fissures. It could
provide more intensity thanks to the obvious advantages of evolution
over time and a continued escalation in population. The Shāfiʿī
school made its own contributions to this global trend. This and the
next chapters explore the gradations of this process in which Shāfiʿī
texts contributed to and benefited from the eventual globalisation,
modernisation, technological advances, legal and intellectual
networks, and mobility of people, ideas and texts. This chapter
focuses on two supercommentaries on the Qurra via its
autocommentary Fatḥ to analyse internal responses within the
school to textual longue durée, coinciding with and influenced by
several major historical developments across the world.
There was a huge increase in the reception of the Qurra–Fatḥ
and their progenies in the nineteenth century. How did the Shāfiʿī
fuqahāʾ in the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean areas
receive and perceive texts such as the Fatḥ and its commentaries?
To what extent did the increasing prospects of globalisation,
modernisation and technologies influence, impede and/or advance
the textual longue durée of the school and how does the
commentarial orb reflect broader developments? Addressing these
questions, this chapter demonstrates that the nineteenth century was
a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm and Islam at large in
terms of its geographical, intellectual and cultural realms, due to new
challenges and prospects it encountered in the wider society and
specifically among Muslims. The existing internal and inherent
divisions in the school were reconciled through constant efforts of its
jurists, and this synthesis addressed a larger division in the Islamic
world. Faced with new trials from political and legal entities and a
few minor but radical sections of the community the traditional body
of believers united against what they called bidʿa or false invention.
Fatḥ’s future journey represents a wider pattern in the nineteenth-
century Islamic world that shows a major part of the intellectual
community abstaining from state-sponsored codification processes
and deprecating the so-called “modernist reforms”.
This chapter focuses on the Nihāyat al-zayn (henceforth Nihāya)
by Nawawī al-Bantanī and Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn (henceforth Iʿāna) of
Sayyid Abū Bakr Shaṭā al-Dimyāṭī, widely known as Sayyid Bakrī,
both of whom were mentioned briefly in the previous chapters.1 I
shall take both texts together to demonstrate better substance for the
synthesis in nineteenth-century Shāfiʿīsm. They represent different
geo-cultural and political backgrounds, as much as they reflect
common trends of their time in adapting the attitudes of many
divisions in the school. I do not focus on the “regionality” of a
particular place or its contextual influences in the new developments
as I have done earlier, but I do emphasise nineteenth-century Mecca
in order to argue that it is the time rather than the place that is
embedded in the formation of a “traditionalist-legalistic block” against
contemporary developments in religious and political arenas.
 Life and Career of the
Supercommentators
Nawawī al-Bantanī and Sayyid Bakrī lived in Mecca at the same
time, and they wrote their respective texts, the Nihāya and Iʿāna,
more or less simultaneously. How familiar they were with each other,
not to mention friendship, is a matter of doubt.
Nawawī al-Bantanī was an influential author and teacher widely
appreciated in the Malay world for his commentary on the Qurʾān
entitled Marāḥ labīd li kashf maʿnā al-Qurʾān al-majīd.2 He was born
and brought up in Tanara in Banten, West Java.3 After an initial
education at the Javanese pesantren and a short career teaching in
his hometown, he went to Mecca in 1828 aged fifteen and settled
there until his death. Many Javanese scholars in the nineteenth
century acted similarly due to increased scholarly travel across the
Indian Ocean rim.4 His life and career “are particularly interesting not
because they were unique, but precisely because in many respects
they resemble those of other Jawi ulema”.5 Once he arrived in
Mecca, he studied with at least three Southeast Asian (usually
referred as Jāwī in Arabic sources) scholars and three other
prominent Arab teachers. The Jāwī shaykhs were ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-
Bima (1780–1854), Aḥmad Khaṭīb bin ʿAbd al-Ghaffār Sambas
(1802–1872) and Aḥmad bin Zayd (d. nineteenth century).6 Among
the non-Jāwī teachers, the most relevant for our study is Sharwānī,
the author of a famous commentary on the Tuḥfa we discussed in
Chapter 5. The only text Nawawī al-Bantanī studied with him was the
Tuḥfa.7 For Nawawī al-Bantanī the most important teacher was the
Egyptian scholar Yūsuf al-Sunbulawaynī (d. in or after 1867) with
whom he studied for fifteen years. He is said to have also travelled to
Medina to study with the Ḥanbalī jurist and ḥadīth scholar
Muḥammad Khaṭīb Dūmā (d. 1890), and to Egypt and Syria.8
His career in Mecca lasted for seven decades, during which he
attracted many Indonesian students, mainly Javanese or even
Bantenese, and a few Indians.9 He was renowned among
Indonesian students for his learning and also for the stand he is
assumed to have taken against Dutch colonialism. His writings do
not convey an explicit anti-Dutch political stance, but this is widely
assumed by his hagiographers and followers.10 Most of his students
returned to Indonesia and built careers locally and regionally as well-
known scholars and leaders. However, he chose to remain in Mecca,
teaching and writing.
Nawawī al-Bantanī’s audience was mostly composed of
Indonesians, particularly Javanese, but he wrote his books in Arabic.
In the longer Shāfiʿī intellectual tradition of Southeast Asia, the
scholars chose to write in Malay (once written in Arabic script, it is
called Jāwī) or other local languages, and he was one of the few
Javanese scholars who began writing legal texts in Arabic. That
contributed to a construction of his legacy in the longer Southeast
Asian tradition of Shāfiʿīsm.11 His choice of language was primarily
an outcome of the synthesis between geography and law which
happened in the nineteenth century. Its implications were interesting
and far-reaching. Apart from his commentaries on the Qurʾān and
the Qurra, his works include mystical texts such as Marāqī al-
ʿubūdiyya (a commentary on Bidāyat al-hidāya by Ghazālī),
theological treatises such as Qāmiʿ al-ṭughyān and ethical works
such as ʿUqūd al-lujayn fī bayān ḥuqūq al-zawjayn. Many of these
texts had entered the curricula of Southeast Asian pesantren by the
early twentieth century and still continue to be taught as kitab
kunings. The wide popularity of his texts in religious education
motivated one scholar to call him the “intellectual master” of
pesantren.12 After the rise of female pesantren and female ʿulamāʾ
with critical readings of kitab kuning, the last text, ʿUqūd al-lujayn,
was read critically and was questioned for its clear male-chauvinistic
elements and misogynistic arguments. A few female ʿulamāʾ
produced an annotated critical edition.13
Among Nawawī’s non-Javanese teachers not mentioned
previously, one in particular needs our attention: Aḥmad al-Dimyāṭī
(d. 1853), who migrated from Damietta in Egypt to the Hijaz.14 A
large number of Shāfiʿīs who were very influential in scholarly circles
of Mecca, Medina and Cairo in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries came from this small port in the Nile Delta in the Eastern
Mediterranean, equidistant from Cairo and Alexandria. Apart from
Aḥmad al-Dimyāṭī, Indonesian, Indian and Swahili students also
studied with several other scholars from Damietta,15 many of whom
were either sons or grandsons of Muḥammad Shaṭā Zayn al-Dīn bin
Maḥmūd bin ʿAlī (d. 1850), who had migrated to Mecca at the end of
the eighteenth century, taught at the Masjid al-Ḥarām (Holy Mosque)
and attracted students from all over the world.16 The most important
of these, not only for the students of that time but also for the future
history of the Fatḥ, was his son Sayyid Bakrī, the author of the Iʿāna.
When Sayyid Bakrī was only three months old his father passed
away. He grew up under the tutelage of his brother ʿUmar, who was
seven years older. Even as a child Bakrī was known to be bright. He
had memorised the Qurʾān at the age of seven, and followed that
with many other core texts of law, logic, grammar, etc.17 Later he
studied with Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān (1816–1886), whom the Dutch
orientalist Snouck Hurgronje had met and called the “Rector” of the
Meccan University. Bakrī wrote a laudatory memoir on his teacher
entitled Tuḥfat al-Raḥmān fī manāqib Sayyid Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān.18
Nawawī al-Bantanī is also said to have studied with Zaynī Daḥlān.
After his education, Bakrī spent most of his time reciting the
Qurʾān, teaching and writing. He mainly taught legal texts such as
the Tuḥfa and Fatḥ, and many Indonesian, Hijazi, Egyptian and
Swahili students attended his lectures. He also taught his own
books, such as his commentary on the Fatḥ. He commented on the
Fatḥ and also on the Tuḥfa but he could not finish his commentary
on the Tuḥfa, reaching only as far as the section on commercial law.
That work remains unpublished. He dealt at least twice with the
works of Ponnāni scholars. Apart from the Fatḥ, he wrote a
commentary on the aforementioned mystical treatise Hidāyat al-
aḏkiyāʾ by Zayn al-Dīn Sr entitled Kifāyat al-atqiyāʾ wa minhāj al-
aṣfiyāʾ, the same text on which Nawawī al-Bantanī also wrote a
commentary.19 His other works include two treatises on the
legitimacy of following the old opinions of al-Shāfiʿī against a new
one concerning the issue of organising many congregational prayers
on Friday in the same locality, an unfinished commentary on the
Qurʾān and a compilation of his fatwās.20 Bakrī used to deliver
lectures from his own compositions which he sent for publication
afterwards. During his stay in Mecca, Snouck Hurgronje had also
met Bakrī and wrote about him briefly.21
Bakrī died at the age of forty-three. He left three sons, Aḥmad,
Ḥusayn and Ṣāliḥ, who all became famous scholars. Sadly, like his
father, Bakrī also died while his children were very young. Their
uncle ʿUmar looked after them, as he had looked after his brother
Bakrī when their father had died more than forty years earlier. ʿUmar
was supported by Bakrī’s elder son, Aḥmad (1882–1914), who also
taught his two younger brothers.22 But all of them eventually had a
better life. Ṣāliḥ (d. 1950) did especially well as a close associate of
the first king of Saudi Arabia, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz bin ʿAbd al-Raḥman Āl
Saʿūd (1875–1953), and he followed a successful career after his
extensive travels in India, and in Malayan and Arab lands.23
Although Bakrī and Nawawī al-Bantanī both lived in the same
city, were both taught by the same teacher, Zaynī Daḥlān, both
studied the same texts at almost the same time, we have no clear
evidence that they knew each other. They would have had plenty of
chances to meet even if not for friendship, but there were just as
many chances for them not meeting. Nawawī remained mostly in the
Jāwī quarter. He taught students at his home, and never considered
teaching at the Holy Mosque where many Arab, Indian, Swahili and
Jāwī scholars taught. When Hurgronje asked him why he did not
teach at the Holy Mosque, where many other Jāwīs less
knowledgeable than him gave lectures, he answered modestly: “If
they have attained such high honour, then assuredly they have
earned it.” He also said that his ugly clothes “did not accord with the
distinguished appearance of the Arabic professors”.24 These words
indicate not only his modesty and humility, but also his detachment
from other contemporary teachers in the city, even though he had
contacts with most famous ones, including Zaynī Daḥlān. His
colloquial Arabic was not fluent, which may have been another factor
separating him from potential colleagues. From Bakrī’s viewpoint, his
father had a strong connection with the Jāwīs, since his chief
assistant was a Javanese named ʿAbd al-Shakūr. Hurgronje has
written in detail about the warm-hearted relationship between ʿAbd
al-Shakūr and his benefactor Muḥammad Shaṭā.25 The former
ended up marrying the three daughters of the latter, one after the
other when they died in succession. They were all sisters of Sayyid
Bakrī. ʿAbd al-Shakūr was the one and only Javanese scholar in the
city standing equal to Nawawī al-Bantanī, and it is quite possible that
he initiated a connection between Sayyid Bakrī and Nawawī al-
Bantanī. But no explicit evidence is available. Intellectually they
swam in the same stream with the same current, as can clearly be
seen in the Nihāya and Iʿāna.
 Profiles of the Texts
The Nihāya was published as a single volume at the end of July
1881. Two years later the Iʿāna was completed, on 27 August 1883,
in four volumes. In the Nihāya Nawawī al-Bantanī does not say what
motivated him to write the text. All he says in the introductory part is
that with this commentary on the Qurra of “Zayn al-Dīn bin ʿAbd al-
ʿAzīz bin Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī al-Fannānī” he aims to help the
colleagues “who are underprivileged like me”.26 The use of the term
“underprivileged” could indicate the author’s humility and modesty,
which distinguished him among his contemporary scholars in the
city. Hurgronje notes: “In social intercourse of any kind he rather
joins courteously in the conversation, than dominates it, and never
starts any scientific discussion without cause given by others. An
Arab who did not know him might pass a whole evening in his
society without noticing that he was the author of about twenty
learned Arabic works.”27 Also, such self-deprecating terms as qāṣirīn
are usual in Arabic and Islamic texts to excuse possible deprivations
and faults. A rather interesting comment on the term was made by
an anonymous annotator (possibly Nawawī al-Bantanī himself),
referring to “the pursuers of primary education”.28 From that we
could infer that the text targeted Shāfiʿī students at primary levels.
What is most interesting in the Nihāya are, first, its attempt to
incorporate itself into the textual longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm and,
second, its engagement with the Qurra, even though it had a well-
known autocommentary. To take the second dimension first, the fact
that Qurra’s own author explained the text in detail through self-
conscious and self-interpretative modes in the Fatḥ did not stop
Nawawī al-Bantanī from revisiting the base text and providing his
own commentary. In this regard, he does not seem to have believed
that a text, a juridical text for that matter, can have only one single
authoritative interpretation as given by the author himself. Instead,
the author’s reading of his own text is only a possible reading that
should be understood with the possibility of there being other
interpretations.
Regarding the first dimension, we read in the Nihāya: “Whatever
is written in this book is none of my own. It is all taken from the
phrases of [previous] authors (May God make them useful to us!
Amen).” He elaborates further that his main source of reference is
Nihāyat al-amal by Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī
(d. 1886), a lesser known text in the school.29 Abū Khuḍayr was
another scholar from Damietta who lived and died in Medina and
who contributed significantly to the Shāfiʿī legal tradition. He was a
student of Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī at al-Azhar University before he built up
a career in Medina. His Nihāyat al-amal is an unconventional legal
text, for it brings theology and mysticism into legal discussions. The
amalgamation of theology, mysticism and law has been a
foundational characteristic of “archetypal scholars” in the Sunnī
tradition.30 In his analysis of Bājūrī and many of his predecessors,
Aaron Spevack demonstrated how the same scholar combined these
three disciplines in his career. All the scholars under his focus wrote
separate texts in each field, and we rarely see anyone combining all
three in a single text. Nihāyat al-amal is such a text, and can easily
be identified as an “archetypal text”.31 A closer reading shows that
Nawawī al-Bantanī took his arguments, articulations and even
phrases in the Nihāya from the Nihāyat al-amal.
Yet al-Bantanī differs from Abū Khuḍayr’s approach by not
amalgamating too much theology and mysticism with law. Nihāya’s
main focus is on legal discussions, and so it stands close to the
approach of Zayn al-Dīn in the Fatḥ or other texts that we have
discussed so far. These legal discussions are again taken from a set
of other texts familiar to us: the Nihāya of Ramlī, and the Tuḥfa and
Fatḥ al-jawād of Ibn Ḥajar. He also used another Nihāya, a
commentary on the Ghāya, and many unnamed
supercommentaries.32 His statement, “whatever is written in this
book is none of my own. It is all taken from the phrases of [previous]
authors”, thus sounds like a statutory confession for not writing
“anything new”. What is more, the statement itself is taken from Abū
Khuḍayr’s Nihāyat al-amal word for word.33 Writing a commentary in
this way on an earlier text is unprecedented in the textual tradition of
the school and most commentators have been trying to articulate
their ideas in their own words without depending on the exact
quotations of earlier scholars. What then is the distinctive
contribution of the Nihāya?
Before answering this question within an etic framework let us
briefly engage with the internal approach of the school that allows
this sort of textual practice without any suggestion of outright
plagiarism. This is not a means of keeping a “reputation for
orthodoxy”, or to avoid the suggestion of “making what is new is the
work of a heretic”, a label given by Hurgronje to describe the work of
Sayyid Bakrī, specifically his Iʿāna.34 Rather, it was part of a different
intellectual engagement developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in Southeast Asia as well as in the Middle East. Many
followers of this new method rarely revealed their name or identity in
the works they produced. It was an act of compiling different sources
into a single coherent narrative in order to lead the reader to a
variety of possible options and meanings. The compilers selected a
particular theme and took portions from renowned texts of the school
on the issue, and left it to the reader’s choice and ability to prioritise,
to hierarchise, which of the given opinions to follow. A good
command of the legal maxims and textual history of the school was
required for correct use of such texts. A beginner could use them
with a high possibility of deviance. A Southeast Asian manuscript,
possibly from nineteenth-century Java now kept at Leiden University
Special Collections, is a good example of this method.35 It deals with
the legal issues of marriage, and draws passages from the Fatḥ and
Anṣārī’s Fatḥ al-wahhāb, the famed abridgement of the Minhāj.
Infrequently, it also has glosses in Javanese with references to other
texts of the school. The author is anonymous, but clearly the person
had a good command of the Shāfiʿī textual tradition to string the
texts together as pearls in a chain. If there were no intermittent titles
given for the texts before the excerpts, one would not know that the
passages are taken from two otherwise unrelated texts written
thousands of miles and many decades apart.
Nawawī al-Bantanī followed this method in his oeuvre with his
own additions. He did not follow this method only in the Nihāya. His
most controversial text, ʿUqūd al-lujayn, is an exemplary compilation
of passages from nine previous texts. There are many ways in which
he differs from his predecessors when using the strategy. In earlier
texts we do not see a foundational text when putting the passages
together, whereas Bantanī followed the architectonic format of the
Qurra. He compiled the passages as its commentary, clearly differing
from the style and arguments of the Fatḥ. The end product is the
Nihāya, which builds up a discursive narrative through thematic
interconnections between different issues. Occasionally Bantanī
provides additional glossaries to help the reader with problematic
phrases or wordings. This might be because his intended target
audience for the text was the “pursuers of primary education” that he
alluded to.
Moreover, the Nihāya decontextualises its source texts as a
valid method to generate new legal opinions. It admits what has
been done by stating: “Whatever accuracies this text has, it should
be ascribed to these people.” As I have demonstrated with regard to
the politics and economy of citations, the organising of multiple
passages from authoritative texts and assigning them as possible
interpretations for another text indicate that a systematic selection of
meanings is consistent with an author’s politics and preferences. It
also illustrates the urge of a scholar to show the text’s intellectual
close continuity to the larger textual tradition of the school.
Furthermore, by taking a different route from his contemporary
scholars in the city, who wrote a commentary on the Fatḥ, by
choosing to write a commentary on the Qurra, Bantanī demonstrates
his aim of synthesising different intellectual streams of Shāfiʿīsm.
 The Iʿāna of Bakrī differs from the Nihāya in all these respects.
It adopts a more conventional method of writing a supercommentary.
In it he explains each word and ruling of the base text in his own
words and does not endeavour to cite earlier works as laboriously as
the Nihāya does. On his self-doubt before he “felt at ease” in writing
it, Sayyid Bakrī says:

While God gave me opportunity to read the Fatḥ al-muʿīn to

intelligent students in front of the Holy Mosque, I wrote some
glosses on the text, analysing its meanings and explaining the
structure. I was able to finish it by the grace of God. Then, in the
year [12]96,36 a group of students asked me to repeat the
teaching of the text exclusively with the glosses, in order not to
lose them. I hesitated to do so, as I was not the right person for
it. But the students repeatedly asked me. I asked (istakhartu)
God by the mediation of the Prophet. At last, I felt at ease.37

It was a usual practice in the Islamic textual world for the author to
dictate and even teach his or her own text. He finished writing it in
1883 and five years later, in 1888, a student from East Africa (ʿAbd
Allāh Bā Kathīr) attended his lectures on this work and recounted his
experience.38 Hurgronje notes that he was one of the few scholars to
read their own work as lectures.39 On a related note, many
Indonesian students too had attended his lectures on the Fatḥ and/or
Iʿāna, as their biographical entries confirm.40
The Iʿāna is noted for its own simplicity of language, as well as
for its simplifying of Fatḥ’s occasional linguistic complexity. A
significant contribution of the Iʿāna is the way it adds to our
understanding of Fatḥ’s position in the longue durée of Shāfiʿī legal
formulations, which otherwise are overlooked. We become more
aware of the regionality displayed in the Fatḥ through the
commentary of the Iʿāna, as it connects a number of rulings with the
previous works of the school. An example is our earlier discussion of
how the Fatḥ raised the problem about the Hindu “sultanate” of
Zamorins of Calicut as a legitimate ruler equal to a Muslim ruler
eligible to appoint and dismiss qāḍīs. On that point, there are three
layers of text: first, the base text Qurra; second, its autocommentary
Fatḥ; third, its supercommentary Iʿāna. The Qurra says only: “If a
powerholder appoints an ineligible [as qāḍī], it is annulled.”41 The
Fatḥ comments: “If a sultan even if he is an unbeliever, or
powerholder”, thus adding and emphasising on a ruler who can also
be an “unbeliever”, on which Iʿāna comments: “This maxim (ghāya)
is not mentioned in the Tuḥfa, Nihāya [of Ramlī], or other texts. It is
problematic, because it is conditional for [the legitimacy of] a sultan
that he is a Muslim. Therefore, the sultanate of an unbeliever is not
valid and his leadership (imāma) is not legitimate.”42 This position of
the Fatḥ emerges from a detailed discussion the author had through
the fatwās he sought from contemporary Meccan and Yemeni jurists
on the specific context of Malabar, and the Iʿāna’s author may not
have had access to these materials.43
On the one hand, the three layers of text illustrate the textual
longue durée of the school. On the other hand, the Iʿāna tells us how
Fatḥ’s articulations differ from its Middle Eastern counterparts or
predecessors, such as the Tuḥfa and Ramlī’s Nihāya. This passage
also shows how the Iʿāna adds its own voice by standing against the
articulation of the Fatḥ by clearly stating that its addition of
“unbeliever” contradicts the foundational viewpoint of the school on a
legitimate sultan. Iʿāna’s dissent is understandable in its political
context, which is not very different from the contexts of the Tuḥfa and
Ramlī’s Nihāya in terms of the religious affiliation of rulers: at both
times the Ottomans were in control of the region.
The Iʿāna also introduces new fatwās of contemporary scholars
to its commentary. It adduces, for example, a fatwā of his teacher
Zaynī Daḥlān on the issue of the ceremony after funerals. It
incorporates recent developments in grammatical and literary
cultures of the Arab world of the time. It also brings in elaborate
discussions on a number of varying issues, not limiting itself to legal
discourses alone. Hence it amalgamates stories from Islamic history,
Sufi teachings and poems and quotations with legal implications.
The prime focus of course is on Shāfiʿī law and that too with an
emphasis on the works of Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī. It tries to synthesise
their disagreements in particular issues, as explained in the following
pages.
 Politics of a Time
Thanks to a number of remarkable developments in the nineteenth
century, Mecca developed into more than the isolated educational
place it was before the arrival of Ibn Ḥajar, and more than the Islamic
cosmopolitan hub it became after he lived there in the sixteenth
century. The dramatic changes in global politics, culture and
technology as much as the internal dynamics of the Islamic world led
to the transformation of the city from a geographically determined
location to a chronologically infinite space as a representative of its
global trials. The contexts and careers of the Nihāya and Iʿāna as
well as their authors were affected by this expanded complexity of
Mecca, a situation which is crucial for a better understanding of their
politics.
If we follow the conventional political narrative of Mecca as a
place ruled by a specific polity by the late nineteenth century,
Ottoman supremacy and the authority of their representative emirs
were constantly questioned in the city, often by the traditional
sharīfate. The sharīfs were not alone in this, for the scholars also
actively took part in the conflicts for strong legal and theological
reasons. There were many dramas. In the conflicts, the Ottoman
emirs or the sharīfs were often arrested, betrayed or murdered in
Mecca or Istanbul. To elaborate on this would require more space
and would simply follow the lines of a usual political history.44 My
interest in these developments is the motivations of eminent Shāfiʿī
scholars, such as Zaynī Daḥlān, in taking the side of the sharīfs
against the Ottomans. Strongly basing himself in the legalistic
tradition of Shāfiʿīsm in particular and of Sunnīsm in general, Daḥlān
vehemently opposed many reforms introduced by the Ottomans. The
dynastic legal codes and texts (Tur. ḳânûnnâmes) brought by sultans
were now forcefully implemented through the qāḍīs, who were
supposed to be members of the fuqahāʾ estate and represent the
legal authority of the sultan. They also had to combine the Sharīʿa
with the sultan’s rules (Tur. ḳânûn), even though many rules were
contradictory to or underestimated the legal diversity within Sunnī
tradition. The introduction of new dress codes and the abolition of
slavery are examples of the issues that elicited resistance. The
scholars in the city, as well as elsewhere in the contemporary
traditional circles, opposed these reforms as “false innovations” (Ar.
bidʿat sayyiʾa). Raising these issues, they sided with the Sharīfs in
their fight against the sultan.45 These discursive disagreements,
though ostensibly political, were deeply grounded in Shāfiʿī-Ḥanafī
approaches towards the changing situation and reforming
measures.46
In this typical narrative of conflict between a central empire and
its provincial machinery, with scholars taking part on one side or the
other, we must ask where in the texts of the Nihāya and Iʿāna their
authors stand. We know that both authors studied with Daḥlān, and
so it is quite possible that they all belonged to the same political
stream. However, the story is rather more complicated than this
conventional political narrative. In the case of the Nihāya, its author
Nawawī al-Bantanī was not active in the politics or social life of the
city. Rather he restricted himself to the Jāwī quarter, where he felt
more comfortable teaching and interacting with his pupils. Since the
majority of his disciples were Jāwīs, this was an added reason to
assume that he belonged to the political undercurrents of Southeast
Asia. There the regionality of Mecca breaks, and it becomes a
microcosm of the contemporary global political scenario. In the
choices Bantanī made in life we can see more of a Javanese aura
than the regional politics of Mecca. With regard to Java and the
Javanese acts of resistance against Dutch colonialism, Mecca has
been portrayed as “a refuge of rigid Islamic fundamentalism”, in
which Bantanī and his colleagues, such as Khaṭīb Aḥmad Sambas
and Ḥājī ʿAbd al-Karīm, supposedly had leading roles.47 This is
furthered by some of Bantanī’s biographers, who preferred to believe
that he hated Dutch colonialism, although the contemporary
narratives are quite to the contrary.
In the wake of increasing colonialism across the Muslim worlds
of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, a remarkable number of
South|East Asian and African Muslims found a safe abode in Mecca,
where non-Muslim political entities were strictly prohibited. Many of
them aspired at least to reach Jeddah as an entry point for the safe
and sacred world they craved. Yet the place was not free from the
presence of Dutch and British colonialists, directly through officials
like Snouck Hurgronje or indirectly through informants and spies like
Raden Aboe Bakar.48 Without necessarily knowing they were there,
a few anti-colonial Muslims arguably tried to mobilise support for
their rebellious activities. In the case of Nawawī al-Bantanī, the
rebels involved in the Banten Revolts of 1888 thought that if he and
Ḥājī ʿAbd al-Karīm returned to the region and joined the “Holy War”
then the rebellion would succeed. This was the ground on which the
Dutch colonial government thought of banning him from returning, an
idea which Hurgronje protested against.49 In a letter to the governor
general on 7 June 1889, Hurgronje argued that banning such an
esteemed intellectual would affect the prestige of the government,
and that Bantanī himself did not have even the slightest inclination to
return. He wrote that Bantanī is “far too intelligent” and “too deeply
grounded in orthodoxy” to engage in or approve the rebellion. “For
without having ever tried to cooperate with the Government, he has
striven against its most fanatical enemies, the base mystical orders
… Surely he and his circle belong to the elements with which the
government could easily find a fruitful modus vivendi.”50
Assuming that Nawawī al-Bantanī never tried to cooperate with
the colonial government, and that his life presented a “fruitful modus
vivendi” with it, we search to see if he articulated this position in the
Nihāya, and find that in fact he did. One example is on the issue of a
non-Muslim ruler’s appointment of qāḍīs that we discussed earlier,
where the Nihāya has a subtly similar approach to Zayn al-Dīn. We
mentioned in the previous section that the Qurra says only: “If a
powerholder appoints an ineligible [as qāḍī], it is annulled.” On this
the Nihāya gives a detailed commentary, obviously depending on
previous texts of the school. At the end of this discussion it says: “If
people suffer from the rule of a woman, a slave or a blind man
(confirmed as such), the judgement will be necessarily annulled, but
not [the rule] of an unbeliever.”51 This is the only place where he
addresses the issue of an unbelieving governor or ruler, and it
approximates to the argument that Zayn al-Dīn made in his Fatḥ
centuries earlier. For Bantanī, the appointment of a qāḍī by an
unbelieving political entity remained valid even if the people suffered
from their rule. This ruling should be read along with the fact that he
wrote this in the early 1880s, when the Dutch colonial government
was moving towards recognising Sharīʿa courts as legitimate legal
units. His contemporary Ḥaḍramī-Javanese scholar Sayyid ʿUthmān
ʿAlawī (1822–1914) published a detailed monograph one year later
explaining foundational judicial structures and rules of Shāfiʿīsm for
judges and members of these religious courts.52 Compared to
Sayyid ʿUthmān’s work, Bantanī’s pronouncement is rather subtle.
But in many other contexts the Nihāya is explicit in explaining its
political position. To understand that, we need to go beyond the
conventional political narratives and zoom into the internal dynamics
of contemporary Islam, showing how Wahhābū Islam was
strengthened as a political movement, questioning the foundational
features and elements of Sunnī Islam.
In that respect, the Iʿāna follows the same path as the Nihāya in
standing within a traditionalist narrative, against the reformist and
fundamentalist ideas propagated by the Wahhābīs and the like.
Before addressing this issue, it would be useful to give brief
consideration to the political setting of the Iʿāna in the conventional
frame, where Islam was still politically dominant and colonialism had
not taken over. It does not agree with the position of the Nihāya on
such rules as an unbeliever having authority over Islamic matters,
and this certainly makes sense if we understand the text in its
context. Iʿāna’s political view is not nearly as complicated or
elaborate as that of the Nihāya, because its author always belonged
to the “abode of Islam”. His father had migrated from Damietta to
Mecca, where Sayyid Bakrī was born and grew up. Yet both regions
were set in the same imperial arena of the Ottomans, not much
different from the contexts of Ramlī or Ibn Ḥajar in terms of the
religious affiliation of contemporary rulers. His direct disapproval of
Fatḥ’s position, and indirectly of Nihāya’s too, on the issue of an
unbeliever being a legitimate ruler is an epitome of this unchanged
political context in which they hardly encountered a non-Islamic
political entity. But the situation in sixteenth-century Malabar or
nineteenth-century Java was very different. In conventional politics
both texts thus differ in their standpoints.
However, the Nihāya and Iʿāna both firmly shared the same
position, just as many other texts produced in the city and across the
Muslim world did in that period, opposing the emerging political
expressions of Islam when they were entangled with attacks on
traditional textualism. As much as both authors stood isolated from
political entities in their places, they did not hesitate at all to
subscribe to broader movements for defending the Islamic tradition
in general and Shāfiʿī law in particular. That kind of political stand
makes their agreements more interesting, and it also again tells us
that Mecca was not so much a place but rather a time, representing
wider intellectual trends in the century.
 Education during “Reform”
The role of Medina in the late eighteenth century as a hub of
revivalist thought has been well articulated by scholars, whereas
Mecca’s position remains to be studied. On the basis of my
examination of the lives and contributions of some noted figures in
the city, I presume that it was a bastion of archetypal Islam and
opposed much of the emerging “false innovations”. It is difficult to
substantiate the evidence for a sharp distinction between the
intellectual inclinations of the two cities, although the overall
pedagogical and textual streams each city undertook indicate such a
division. At least four commentaries were produced belonging to the
Fatḥ family in and around the second half of the nineteenth century
in Mecca alone, and those are not insignificant works. Many
commentaries and supercommentaries on a number of earlier texts
of Shāfiʿīsm and of other Sunnī schools and on earlier theological
texts were being constantly produced in the city. That again was not
an exceptional trend for Mecca at that time. The broader trend
reverberated along the Indian Ocean rim from South Africa to East
Asia. Zaynī Daḥlān published numerous treatises, such as Fitnat al-
Wahhābiya or “Wahhābī Corruption”, targeting the ideologies of
Wahhābīsm. Many of his contemporaries as well as later scholars
from Mecca joined him. The Indian scholar Muḥammad Bashīr al-
Sahsawānī (1836–1908) countered the arguments of Daḥlān in his
renowned text Ṣiyānat al-insān ʿan waswasat al-Shaykh Daḥlān,
“Guarding the Humans against the Whispers of Shaykh Dahlan”.53
Many of these debates were anchored in the archetypal texts of
Islam in general and Shāfiʿīsm in particular. For whoever stood along
with Daḥlān it was a question of accepting traditional textual
knowledge as authentic. The ensuing polemics and debates laid
much focus on archetypal texts, whereas the Wahhābīs found them
irrelevant for the claims they were making. Against this background
the pedagogical method of the Sunnīs became extremely text-centric
in the nineteenth century in the wake of recurrent criticisms against
it.
The composition of the Iʿāna and Nihāya represent this
scenario. In the city the Fatḥ was an important intermediate text for
aspirants of law which consisted of academic-pilgrims and pilgrim-
students. They motivated many teachers to come up with
commentaries, glosses and marginalia, often refuting the new claims
made by the “reformists”. Such author-scholars attracted more
students than anyone else and the question was how close and
deep they could stand to the textual longue durée of Islam. In the
case of the Iʿāna, the author was delivering lectures from his own
published commentary. That served to increase his personal fame
and that of his text, for it was deeply rooted in the tradition.
Like their predecessors, these supercommentaries were written
with an educational purpose in mind. What was added now was the
dimension that the popularisation of new printing technology and
steam ships had expedited: the publication and wider circulation of
the supercommentaries leading to further intensity of text-centrism.
The growth in the number of students and their increased
opportunities for travel between distant lands of Islam further
accelerated the movement of newly published texts as well the old
ones. In the broader Islamic world, many existing and newly founded
religious educational centres utilised the Iʿāna and the Nihāya
together with the Fatḥ and associated earlier texts such as the Tuḥfa
and Minhāj, which were now also available in print. In the course of
time, more specialists of these texts arose along the rim and some of
them were known for being experts in particular sections of one of
the texts. The background to the fact that the Middle East still hosted
a plethora of higher educational centres was that other
supercommentaries on the Tuḥfa and the Minhāj were in wide
circulation.
Once the Nihāya and Iʿāna were printed and circulated they
began to take a vital place in the curricula. The Ḥaḍramī migrant
ʿAlawī al-Saqqāf’s Tarshīḥ is an explanatory critique of this
development. It emerged as a response to the immediate reception
of the Iʿāna in educational circles. Its publication did not have any
damaging effect on traditional modes of education related to either of
these texts; on the contrary it promoted them.
 Question of Region
To substantiate that the Iʿāna and Nihāya were influenced by the
Meccan customs and norms of the nineteenth century is challenging.
This is primarily because Mecca was not an exclusive geographical
legal space by that time, so different from its position in the sixteenth
century during the time of the Tuḥfa. Furthermore, to restrict the
Nihāya as a Meccan text would be as inappropriate as to locate it in
Java as an exclusive Javanese Shāfiʿī text.
Certainly there is a continuity in the many claims that Ibn Ḥajar
made with regard to the Meccan version of Shāfiʿīsm, in which he
took Meccan/Hijazi/Arab ideas of language and ethnicity as superior.
Yet there also we see some remarkable discontinuities. Both authors
assert that other cultures and customs are not substandard provided
that they remained within the purview of Islam in general and of the
school in particular. In the case of the Nihāya, Nawawī al-Bantanī’s
obvious background and collaboration with Jāwī cultures must have
been a significant component. In Zayn al-Dīn he had an intellectual
predecessor for this line of thought. Yet he did not address any Jāwī
customs that are portrayed by some of his contemporaries as
completely unacceptable in Islam. His silence on regional customs
and his reluctance to legitimise any of them again indicate a move to
synthesise geographical differences in law.
In the Iʿāna, we find no explicit encounter with a problem in
Egyptian and Arab/Hijazi identity that Ibn Ḥajar took up. This might
have to do with the fact that the Iʿāna’s immediate reference is the
Fatḥ, which followed the Meccan version of Shāfiʿīsm. We also do
not see in the text any conflict between Cairene and Meccan
opinions. Instead, we are intrigued to notice the ways in which its
author brings Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī and their respective works
together on the many issues. For example, we think of the way it
dealt with the Fatḥ’s legitimisation of an unbelieving ruler. It brought
both the Tuḥfa and Ramlī’s Nihāya together by saying that neither of
them made such a claim. This also indicates another synthesising
process that we will discuss shortly.
If not actually legalising local customs, the Iʿāna viewed many
current social and cultural debates in the city through the prism of
the law. Its examination of traditional ceremonies after funerals
includes a long discussion on the practice of serving food at the
deceased’s house on the day of the death. It opposes this practice,
referring to a recent fatwā as well as a ḥadīth in which the Prophet
asked neighbours to provide food for the family of the deceased on
that day. Sayyid Bakrī says that he came across a question and a
fatwā on this very issue, and he cites both of them in detail. It was
issued by Zaynī Daḥlān, his teacher and the chief judge in the city.
The Iʿāna further informs us that Ḥanafī, Ḥanbalī and Mālikī muftīs
also held the same opinion.54 Hurgronje describes the general
cultural practice in the city. After sunset on the day of the death
many relatives and friends would come to the house of the deceased
without being invited. Earlier it had been expected that food would be
served to all of them, but that had stopped following the fatwā and
only coffee would be served.55
 This is a case of a customary practice being prohibited by the
Iʿāna. But there are also occasions when the text elaborates on
historical events in the city. When discussing the ḥajj pilgrimage, the
author gives an elaborate history of the Kaʿba, following the
traditional historical narrative: the Prophet Ibrāhīm and his son
Ismāʿīl built the structure according to the instructions of the
archangel Jibrīl; it was renovated and maintained by the early
caliphs of Islam until modern times, and renovations were even done
while the author was writing the text: “A restoration inside the Great
Kaʿba took place in the month of Rabīʿ II, 1299 during the sultanate
and caliphate of … ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd II [r. 1876–1909], whom God may
help, son of the late sultan … ʿAbd al-Majīd bin Maḥmūd bin ʿAbd al-
Ḥamīd I [r. 1839–1861]. This renovation has been chronicled by …
Aḥmad bin Zaynī Daḥlān in a poem.”56 The Iʿāna follows this with a
poem that has a chronogram (following the abjad alphabetic
sequence) whose numeric calculation comes to the Hijri year 1299,
which corresponds to the year 1882.
 Intellectual Synthesis: Mecca with
Cairo
I have been suggesting throughout this chapter that the Nihāya and
Iʿāna represent syntheses of various sorts. Now is the time to
examine two of those syntheses clearly explicit in the making,
content and reception of both texts, an intellectual synthesis and a
geo-legal synthesis.
Citing Nawawī al-Bantanī’s statement in the Nihāya that
“whatever is written in this book is none of my own, it is all taken
from the wordings of [previous] authors”, we raised the question of
what he actually contributed if it contains only quotations from earlier
scholars. On the one hand, it incorporates the existing methodology
of compiling texts to formulate a coherent narrative with its policy of
citations; on the other hand, it significantly contributes to healing a
split existing in the school. Ibn Ḥajar’s Tuḥfa embodied the beginning
and the dissemination of a Meccan stream of Shāfiʿīsm, one which
was taken further by Zayn al-Dīn in his Fatḥ. In this sub-division of
the school, Fatḥ’s pronouncements were clearly expressed as
opinions based in the Meccan stream, whereas in its base text, the
Qurra, the pronouncements were elusive and ambiguous. By taking
the Qurra as his source, Nawawī al-Bantanī tried to synthesise this
split by bringing together the opinions of Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī into a
single narrative. In the nineteenth century, this approach had a vital
role. However, while a few scholars in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had endeavoured occasionally to merge
together conflicting opinions of both streams, either by writing
separate commentaries to the Tuḥfa and Nihāya of Ramlī or by
devising new modes of reconciliation, their voices were not loud
enough to cross the deepened divisions of the school. In the
nineteenth century, the Shāfiʿīs one after another engaged with this
split more collectively to bring about reconciliation.
A remarkable work from this time which had this end in view is
entitled Fatḥ al-ʿalī bi jamʿ al-khilāf bayn Ibn Ḥajar wa Ibn al-Ramlī,
written by a very young Ḥaḍramī scholar ʿUmar Bā Faraj Bā ʿAlawī
(1836–1857). He was born in Tarīm but died in Singapore at the
young age of twenty-one. Its title indicates that it seeks reconciliation
(jamʿ) of the disagreements between Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī. He took
more than 350 conflicting opinions from the texts of these scholars,
primarily from the Tuḥfa and the Nihāya, and sought interpretations
which would harmonise their divergences.57 The book covered the
section on ritual laws, as he had access only to those chapters in the
Tuḥfa and the Nihāya. Despite his early death, his text must have
circulated widely among Shāfiʿīs along the Indian Ocean rim
because its manuscript copies have been found in Singapore,
Hyderabad and Ḥaḍramawt.58
There were other similar attempts by scholars in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, as more fatwās and texts including the
Nihāya and Iʿāna explicate. ʿAlī Bā Ṣabrīn, the author of the first
known commentary of the Fatḥ entitled Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn, wrote a
short but analogous work in the early nineteenth century at the start
of his career. That work is entitled Ithmid al-ʿaynayn fī baʿḍ ikhtilāf al-
Shaykhayn. In it he looks into a number of disagreements between
Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī. Unlike ʿUmar Bā ʿAlawī, he neither elaborates
on the disputes nor refers back to the longer discourses in the school
on each issue. He says that he was motivated to write this work
during his journey across the Red Sea to Egypt in May 1844 after
reading Bushrā al-karīm by Saʿīd bin Muḥammad Bā ʿIshn (d.
1854).59 Bushrā al-karīm is a commentary on Masāʾil al-taʿlīm by
ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Bā Faḍl (d. 1512), a very famous text
among Shāfiʿīs, with the nickname “the Ḥaḍramī Muqaddima” (al-
Muqaddimat al-Ḥaḍramīyya).60 By writing a commentary on this
renowned text Bā ʿIshn also engaged with the legalistic conflicts
between the Meccan and Cairene versions of Shāfiʿīsm. ʿAlawī al-
Saqqāf, the author of another commentary on the Fatḥ, also joined
the debate by writing an abridgement to Muḥammad bin Sulaymān
al-Kurdī’s Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya, the pioneer text in this category of
reconciliatory attempts from the eighteenth century. A larger work in
this genre, however, came from an Iraqi Kurdish scholar, Shaykh
ʿUmar aka Ibn al-Qarahdāghī (d. 1926), who put together more than
1,800 conflicting opinions of Ibn Ḥajar, Ramlī and Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī
in a volume entitled Manhal al-naḍḍākh fī ikhtilāf al-ashyākh.61
These texts exemplify attempts of the Shāfiʿīs throughout the
nineteenth century to reconcile the conflicts among the jurists of the
school.
It was an indirect response to many other developments within
the Islamic tradition, especially as a consequence of the emergence
of transregional sects and individuals who questioned the very
relevance of such a “tradition”. Here I am referring to the much-
discussed Muslim “reformists”, ranging chronologically from
Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792), Muḥammad al-
Shawkānī (1759–1839), Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (1817–1898), Jamāl al-
Dīn Afghānī (1838/1839–1897) to Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905).
All of them set in motion their own movements, with or without
influencing each other, but fundamentally questioning the ways in
which Islam had been interpreted. Much has been written about
them. In fact most literature on Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is focused on them, and therefore I shall not discuss their
arguments.62 For the moment suffice it to say that as these new
entrants disapproved of the existing systems of Islamic scholarship a
major point of their criticism was Islamic law. If we trace the
genealogy of their protests, their attacks differed in many respects
from those of the earlier “reformists”, who had followed the tradition
of Islamic law.
Ibn Taymiyya, one of the prominent early reformists, is one
example. He is known for his criticisms against the general scholarly
consensus of his time and the methods of practising Islamic law. Yet
his disapproval was very much rooted in the frameworks and
jurisprudential hermeneutics of Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal, the eponymous
founder of the Ḥanbalī school. We already mentioned that Ibn
Taymiyya’s grandfather Majd al-Dīn had codified the Ḥanbalī law in
his Muḥarrar as similar to strands of the Minhāj (or more precisely of
Rāfiʿī’s Muḥarrar) in Shāfiʿīsm. Similarly, Ibn Taymiyya himself had
taught the Ḥanbalī school of thought at the oldest madrasa
established in Damascus exclusively for education in the school’s
laws, and he had advanced its substantive and theoretical
approaches throughout his writings and fatwās. His ideas had an
enormous impact among the Ḥanbalīs through his students, such as
Ibn al-Qayyim (1292–1350), as well as among the jurists of other
Sunnī schools that existed at the time at varied levels. In the
sixteenth century, however, Ibn Ḥajar strongly refuted Ibn Taymiyya’s
claims. He called him an “extremely stupid person” (jāhil ghāl),
“deviant and deviator” (ḍāll wa muḍill), and accused him of
intellectual blindness, deafness and indecency.63 Although Ibn
Ḥajar’s opinions had a wide impact in unifying other Sunnī scholars’
views against Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim, his antipathy towards
them was based on theological grounds more than on law. In legal
matters, Ibn Taymiyya’s opinions only reaffirmed the Ḥanbalī
positions. In contrast to this, the nineteenth-century “modernist”
reformists took a highly radical step by refuting the very legitimacy of
Islamic law as interpreted through the juridical corpuses and
attacked the very bases of traditional scholarly practices. Although
their theological and legal arguments can be traced back to Ibn
Taymiyya and the like, they distance themselves from the Ḥanbalī
school, for they do not want to imply that they belong to any existing
streams of Islamic law. They called themselves followers of a school
vaguely defined as the “school of the predecessors” (maḏhab al-
salaf), and so they were known as Salafīs and their ideology as
Salafīsm.
Traditional scholars responded to them in many ways, a side of
the story that has rarely been studied.64 Most traditionalists came up
with bitter polemical arguments, targeting the personality and piety of
these reformists, but a few attempted to counter the arguments
rationally and professionally. Another stream tried to stress the
merits and qualities of textual engagement by filling gaps targeted by
the critics. The major criticisms included lack of originality, coherence
and uniformity in the tradition and in the fuqahāʾs interpretations of
scriptures (resonating with the Orientalist critique of postclassical
legal literature) and claimed that they had arguably interpolated them
for their own benefits.
All these criticisms against the tradition of fuqahāʾ coincided
with another critique, one from the political entities, that had always
been looking for a more coherent and unified version of Islamic law.
Leading this call was none other than the Ottoman Empire, which
had started its codification process as early as the sixteenth century
by introducing a particular version of Ḥanafīsm throughout the
empire.65 Since their attempts in that early phase to combine
dynastic laws with Islamic law were particularly targeted at the
Ḥanafī school of law, resistance and support came from Ḥanafī
jurists. The responses of jurists of other schools, particularly of
Shāfiʿīs, who were predominant in the Hijaz at that time, are yet to
be studied. When codification processes became more rigorous in
the nineteenth century, we see clear evidence of resistance from
Shāfiʿī quarters. They were involved with contemporary political
conflicts between Mecca and Istanbul, in which Shāfiʿī jurists such
as Zaynī Daḥlān took sides against the Ottomans. Hence specific
facets of the codification became another justification for conflict, if
not the other way around, for the Meccan fuqahāʾ estate as well as
in other Arab lands. These aspects have been studied well, so for
our purposes it is enough to say that many of the Turkish codifiers
thought that Islamic law was chaotic, with no coherence or certainty,
and therefore something along the lines of the French civil code
would be an appropriate replacement.66 Although some of their
statements were so rhetorical that the very existence of Sharīʿa
courts and related legal systems came under an increased threat,
the courts did survive for a few decades on the basis of the codified
Mecelle before the final fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Against this backdrop of internal and external criticism, targeted
at Islamic law and the textual tradition, the practitioners and
upholders of the traditional stream were moving towards more
certainty in the diverse legal cosmopolis. All traditional scholars from
different schools, intellectual streams and mystical orders stood
together to defend what they thought to be the true Islam. Thus we
see in the broader Islamic world a number of different Sufi orders,
legal schools and theological sects which mostly came under the
Sunnī banner merging together or standing as a single body against
“false innovations”. On a few occasions, we even see some Shīʿīs
denouncing their sectarian faith, joining the Sunnī stream and
fighting against the reformist ideas. At the forefront of such a
unification of the traditional block in the mid-nineteenth century stood
scholars such as Zaynī Daḥlān, who authored at least two books
against the reformists.67 The implications of this unified block were
far-reaching, especially as we see a faster growth of “defensive
Islam” among the traditionalists.
Accompanying the internal unification of Shāfiʿīsm was another
major division, the split between the Meccan and Cairene versions of
the school. That is precisely what Shāfiʿīs such as the young ʿUmar
Bā ʿAlawī we mentioned earlier tried to heal. Their efforts to
reconcile the juridical differences between Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī and
the larger Meccan and Cairene sub-schools were expedited through
the increased circulation of scholars as students, teachers and
jurists, as well as texts, ideas and institutions, thanks to the new
industrial paraphernalia of steam liners, the printing press and postal
services. Although similar attempts were initiated in the eighteenth
century, through the efforts of scholars such as Muḥammad bin
Sulaymān al-Kurdī, they lacked an infrastructure to spread their
voice with the intensity and pace of their counterparts in the
nineteenth century. Against this background we should read a
statement by Nawawī al-Bantanī at the beginning of the Nihāya.

The majority of this is from the Nihāyat al-amal of Muḥammad

bin Ibrāhīm Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī, which is surely an
abundant rivulet, Nihāyat al-muḥtāj, and Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj of two
diadems: Muḥammad al-Ramlī and Aḥmad bin Ḥajar. Both of
them are undoubtedly two mainstays for later Shāfiʿīs.68

In the following pages of that text the author makes moderate

compromises between the Cairene and Meccan subdivisions by
combining both authors into a single narrative. An example of this is
in the case of mispronunciation of particular Arabic letters while
reciting the Fātiḥa chapter of the Qurʾān in prayer, something we
noted earlier was a matter of disagreement between Ibn Ḥajar and
the Cairene group. There the Nihāya follows the path of
reconciliation:
 Then if the meaning changes, such as in giving ḍamm or kasr to
the tāʾ of “anʿamta”, if one did that intentionally and knew it was
wrong, his prayer is invalid. If he had forgotten that he was in
prayer or was not aware of its prohibition, his recitation will be
invalid and he has to repeat it properly before rukūʿ. If not, his
prayer will be invalid as mentioned above. All these apply only if
he was able to pronounce the proper form and to learn it, as
discussed above. So if he was incapable of the correct form and
from learning it, then his prayer is completely legitimate and he
can lead the prayer for the ones like him. … If one who should
be able [to pronounce] a correct qāf mispronounces it as kāf, as
vulgar (ajlāf) Arabs do, his prayer is valid [even] with its
abomination.69

Here the Nihāya adopts a middle ground between the Tuḥfa and
Nihāya of Ramlī. Although he follows the opinion of the Nihāya
regarding the validity of the prayer with a mispronounced qāf,
despite a theoretical ability to pronounce it correctly, he condemns
an intentional mispronunciation with the consequential changes in
meaning. In this respect, he stands close to the approach of the
Tuḥfa. Yet Nawawī al-Bantanī stresses an ability or lack of it for an
accurate pronunciation as well the opportunity to learn it, two issues
which are inevitably limiting and therefore excusable in the Tuḥfa.
This blending of two streams giving each an equal importance is
present throughout the Nihāya of Nawawī al-Bantanī. Also this
aspect points towards his awareness of many non-Arab-speaking
believers of Islam who were not able to pronounce many Arabic
words and letters unless and until they attended Arabic educational
centres.70
The Iʿāna also follows closely this synthesising strategy,
especially because its author belonged to a scholarly Egyptian family
that had recently migrated to Mecca. In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries there was already an “accusation” against
Egyptian Shāfiʿīs residing in Mecca that they had been mixing
Cairene opinions with those of Mecca. This indictment was mainly
raised by “truly Meccan” or Hijazi Shāfiʿīs disagreeing mildly at an
earlier stage about the attempts at reconciliation. The late eighteenth
century scholar Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī is a first person
to note this:

This [following on from the works of Ibn Ḥajar] is what the

scholars of Two Holy Cities have been doing lately. Then
Egyptian scholars came to the Two Holy Cities, and they
persisted in prioritising Shaykh al-Ramlī in their lectures, to the
extent that their opinions spread across both cities.
Consequently even the ones with comprehension on the
opinions of both of them started to repeat them without
determining preponderance (tarjīḥ).71

This lack of preponderance is precisely what interested the author of

the Iʿāna. When discussing disagreements between Ibn Ḥajar and
Ramlī he chooses not to prioritise either of them. He neither limits
himself to opinions from where he originated (Cairo) nor integrates
those into the opinions of where he is living (Mecca). Rather he
maintains the trend of his time, when traditional scholars were trying
their best to accomplish a reconciliation. In this respect he chooses
to cite a particular fatwā that abandons tarjīḥ for another method,
takhyīr. This fatwā is given by another Egyptian scholar, Aḥmad al-
Dimyāṭī, who also built up a successful career in Mecca and was a
teacher of Nawawī al-Bantanī. In this long fatwā, Dimyāṭī mentions
all the major texts written as commentaries and supercommentaries
on the Minhāj since the late fifteenth century, and he addresses the
problem of contradictory opinions.72 He says that if the muftī cannot
determine preponderance, then a selection (takhyīr) of one of them
should be given. The selection process is interesting for what it
implied personally and professionally for the life of a jurist. The Iʿāna
follows this method of takhyīr and endeavours to explicate a middle
ground, minimising the disagreements between both the sub-
schools.
In the long run, this accommodation of Cairene legal
articulations with Meccan ones had a remarkable impact on the
South|East Asian and African Shāfiʿīsm, as later developments in
religious educational institutions in Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand,
Singapore, the Swahili Coast and the Comoros demonstrate, where
both the Iʿāna and Nihāya circulate widely. From the early twentieth
century on we see the works of Meccan and Cairene Shāfiʿīs
(including the Tuḥfa and Ramlī’s Nihāya) being circulated and taught
across the archipelago. This is not to suggest that the Iʿāna and
Nihāya brought on this change alone. Rather, they reflect an urge
and trend of the time to synthesise the internal conflicts of the
school, and their reception in religious educational centres
contributed to the acceptance of this synthesis.
 Geo-Legal Synthesis
Once we take the trajectories of the Iʿāna and Nihāya together with
the Fatḥ (or its base text the Qurra) in the textual longue durée of
Shāfiʿīsm, we cannot help but notice that there is another form of the
synthesis. The geographical–cultural differences in law become less
obvious under the umbrella of a more unified school.
Taking the Nihāya first, we can see a major factor in its choice of
language. The Southeast Asian fuqahāʾ are known to write their
works in Malay or its regional variants. The first available Shāfiʿī
legal text from the archipelago, the Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm by Nūr al-Dīn
al-Ranīrī, was written in the early seventeenth century in Malay with
a strong influence of Acehnese. Because of its Acehnese
predilection, an eighteenth-century scholar from Kalimantan,
Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjarī (1710–1812), was motivated to write a
commentary on it called Sabīl al-muhtadīn, which is the third Shāfiʿī
text from the region. In between, ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Sinkilī (d. 1693) wrote
Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb fī tashīl maʿrifat al-aḥkām al-sharʿiyya li Malik al-
Wahhāb, at the request of the Acehnese queen Ṣafiyat al-Dīn Tāj al-
ʿĀlam (r. 1641–1675). All these works were in Malay, and we have
many more legal texts from the region which were usually written in
Malay or a local variant. This was part of a wider phenomenon that
Ronit Ricci identified as the “Arabic Cosmopolis”, in which the Arabic
language and Arab cultural landscapes were localised by Muslim
communities in South and Southeast Asia.73 In her articulation, she
ignores the works produced in Arabic in these regions as early as
the fourteenth century. The Arabic works are more explicit in South
Asia (and East Africa) than in Southeast Asia, where people
continued to use linguistic variants highly influenced by Arabic. In the
nineteenth century there was a remarkable change in the
archipelago when a few people began writing in Arabic. These
writers were mostly recent Ḥaḍramī migrants, so it is no surprise that
they made Arabic their first choice. But in Nawawī al-Bantanī we see
a Javanese scholar, born, brought up and educated in many
pesantren of Java, and now beginning to write only in Arabic. This
was a growing trend in the Malay world among scholars, whether
they had been educated in Mecca and the Middle East in general or
at home. It indicates a geo-cultural synthesis to which the Nihāya
also contributed.74
On another level, the Nihāya emphasises the Shāfiʿī textual
longue durée mediated through the Qurra. Its dependence on the
Qurra is notable for the fact that such a text from an Indian coastal
context was not taken up by the Indonesian scholars in their juridical
engagements. If we look at the texts mentioned at the beginning of
the Nihāya as its major sources, they all belong to the sixteenth-
century Middle East. This enables us to identify how the Qurra and
the Nihāya connect to each other in the wider Shāfiʿī textual
tradition, by being strongly based on an oceanic Shāfiʿī text within its
Middle Eastern origins. Although the Qurra does not admit its
intellectual indebtedness to any text, the Nihāya takes up its
genealogy and inserts itself into the big Shāfiʿī textual families. This
viewpoint of Nawawī al-Bantanī leads him to introduce a second
layer of legalistic writing into the culture of oceanic Shāfiʿīsm
communicating with its Middle Eastern counterparts. From the
fourteenth century on we see scholars from the oceanic littoral
writing legal pamphlets, commentaries and abridgements for or
based on many Middle Eastern legal texts. But we hardly come
across any of them commenting on a text written in their own region.
That fact makes the Nihāya worthy of note, as it takes the Qurra as
its first point of reference and commentary, before it goes back to
Middle Eastern texts for legalist elaborations. Therefore, this
commentary by a Javanese scholar written in Mecca on a Malabari
text is in some ways an intellectual turning point for Shāfiʿī
discourse, partially disconnecting it from its main reference points
from Islamic heartlands by linking it to an intermediate text from the
maritime rim.
In a similar vein, Iʿāna’s engagement with the Fatḥ is also
remarkable as it is characteristic of a wider trend in its time and
context. Although many oceanic scholars have been writing works
on Shāfiʿīsm we do not see any scholar from the central Islamic
lands engaging with them by composing a text. But this attitude
changed in the nineteenth century, when we see Arab scholars
writing commentaries, supercommentaries or summaries on works
written by Malabari, Swahili or Javanese Shāfiʿīs. The Iʿāna
represents this “reverse journey” of oceanic texts, which now began
to influence new Shāfiʿī scholarship as much in the Islamic
heartlands as in the distant oceanic locales. Also it tells us that the
textual transmissions between the Middle East and the rest of the
Islamic world were not unidirectional but multidirectional. The
situation becomes even clearer once we follow the later reception of
the Iʿāna on the Indian Ocean rim, particularly in Malabar, where the
Qurra and Fatḥ were once produced.
This process towards a geo-legal uniformity under the traditional
banners of one school should be viewed, along with the
consequential process, as a phenomenon of regional customs mildly
asserting a distinct identity. Contradictions and reconciliations
between local customs and an assumed universal religion had been
in the air for some time, and they did not clearly break from each
other in the Islamic world until the early twentieth century. This was
in contrast to the trajectory of European legal humanists, especially
the Dutch Elegant School, who asserted the importance and identity
of customary laws against “universal” Roman and Canon laws.75 In
the Islamic world customs and religion as such did not create much
of a predicament primarily because “customs” were not fully
understood as different from “laws”. The “laws” of Islam itself (as in
“Islamic law”) resulted in a rather fluid legal system, in contrast to the
“law” of Rome or the canonical tradition. The codification processes
initiated by the Ottoman, British, Dutch and French empires, in their
homelands and in their colonies, presented a problem for the
traditional scholarship of Islam, which now had to address or
reassess its knowledge of “law” and “customs” within a less fluid,
less diverse and more formalised legal system. The longer tradition
of interconnectivity between Middle Eastern customs in Islamic law
books, mutual accommodation of customs and religions in positive
legal corpuses, and theoretical justification of both practices in either
“legal system”, were neglected once the proponents of customary
law dominated the discourse. They separated and juxtaposed a
single tradition. This development in colonial legal historiography,
that “longed for” certainty and formalism, can be interpreted as a
counterproductive development of the geo-legal syntheses which
had occurred in Shāfiʿī legal thought by the nineteenth century
through texts such as the Nihāya and the Iʿāna.
 Transformation of Circulation
In light of these syntheses, particularly in the Shāfiʿī world and
generally in “traditional Islam” in the nineteenth century, we are
inclined to ask what were the major financial sources of income for
the fuqahāʾ estate and its textual productions, especially at a
“chronological nodal point” like Mecca, where many scholars
protested against the Ottoman sultans. I suggest that in the Indian
Ocean economy the transregional charitable networks which had
been operating increasingly since the sixteenth century still played a
role in keeping scholarly enterprises in the city dynamic. Money
came for them more from a broadly conceived lower stratum than
from political and aristocratic entities above them. In that respect, the
religious economy of the Holy City was not so different from what it
was in the sixteenth or even the fifteenth century. But the pace and
quantity of contributions had intensified for the benefit of its scholarly
estate and its otherwise financially underprivileged population.
The British and Dutch and to an extent other European colonial
powers controlled the means and mobility of pilgrimage after
steamships came on the scene with various regulatory measures.
But still increased amounts of money were pumped into Mecca from
distant lands. In earlier times, many wealthy Muslims on the Indian
Ocean rim owned ships, which they used annually to send charitable
gifts, often collected from the poor as well as the rich, to Mecca.
Once steamships came in and almost completely took over maritime
transportation, those ship owners were marginalised and their ways
of sending donations were almost blocked. But there was a measure
of compensation thanks to the increased speed and tonnage of the
new ships. They carried far more passengers than sailing ships and
reached destinations more quickly. More pilgrims meant more
donations from ordinary people, wealthy merchants, nobles and
sultans for the city. For the later part of the century Snouck
Hurgronje gave detailed accounts of the donations made by sultans
and nobles of the Malay world, while some “pilgrim shaykhs”
exploited naive believers.76 He also noted scholars such as ʿAbd al-
Shakūr of Surabaya, to whom Javanese pilgrims paid enormous
sums for his teaching, guidance and awarding of licences: “The
Sheikh pays no attention to the details of the source of income. His
friends claim that he knows nothing about it and would forbid it if he
did … wallāhu aʿlam! (and God knows best!).”77 ʿAbd al-Shakūr was
a figure equal to Nawawī al-Bantanī, perfectly comparable in the way
he managed to mobilise his income. Yet Bantanī chose a rather
meagre way of life, as can be seen from the way Raden Aboe Bakr
Djajadiningrat (c. 1854–1914) writes about his personal encounters
with him. Djajadiningrat says that “he looks like a pauper, because
he is poor” and that he did not bother anyone seeking any support,
even though many were prepared to help him.78
Pilgrims, students and pilgrim-students arrived in large numbers
in nineteenth-century Mecca in occasional influxes. Many eventually
became permanent residents of the city, building successful careers
there. The first editions of the Iʿāna and the Nihāya can be taken as
a microcosm of such transregional characteristics of the city. We find
many instances from East Africa to East Asia of students and
scholars easily blending together. A few endorsement poems given
in the first and last volumes of the Iʿāna are a good example of this.
One is by Aḥmad bin Muḥammad Zayn al-Faṭānī (1856–1908), a
Jāwī literary scholar from Pattani (present-day Thailand) who
became an influential litterateur and publisher in Mecca. He was
appointed by the Ottoman government as a supervisor of a Malay
press established in the city.79 Another endorsement comes from his
student Muḥammad bin Yūsuf Ḥusayn al-Khayyāṭ, who also became
influential in the city through the Madrasa al-Khayyāṭ.80 The cost of
printing was taken on by someone called al-Hāj Abu Ṭālib al-
Maymanī. He contributed also to the costs of the Nihāya, which was
co-funded by another interesting figure from Kashmir, al-Ḥāj Fidā
Muḥammad al-Kashmīrī.81 Such benefactors provided the
sustenance for the fuqahāʾs intellectual ventures despite their
avoidance of state-sponsored positions.
The introduction, rise and massive use of printing presses by
Muslims in the nineteenth century provoked ardent disputes among
the fuqahāʾ on whether its use was permitted.82 Once its use was
generally approved, this technology along with steamships made a
significant contribution to the dissemination of Islamic legal texts.
The printed editions provide otherwise unknown historical particulars
of Shāfiʿī texts. In the first editions of the Nihāya and Iʿāna we are
told how the authors both participated in the printing and marketing
processes in close association with publishers, colleagues and
friends. Before any printing press had been established in Mecca
Nawawī al-Bantanī is said to have travelled to Cairo to seek a
publisher.83 He must have made this journey at the beginning of his
career as an author-teacher. At the time of the publication of the
Nihāya in 1881 one Ḥammād al-Fayyūmī al-ʿAjmāwī tells us that
publishers in Cairo rivalled each other to secure the publication
rights.84 That may be an exaggeration, for Ḥammād himself was
apparently successful in securing them according to his note at the
end of the Nihāya. For the Iʿāna, we know that Sayyid Bakrī worked
closely with the publisher and he gives the details of completing the
editing of each volume. Both texts were published in Egypt before
printing presses were established in Mecca.
Many pilgrim-students took the texts of their author-teachers
back to their homelands and disseminated them there through
colleges and libraries. Transmitting texts before the advent of this
technology was a difficult task because manuscripts were expensive
to produce and procure. Printing presses eradicated the problem and
intensified the course of Islamic textual dissemination. Many copies
of the Fatḥ, for example, were circulating in educational circles in
South Asia, which otherwise followed strong Ḥanafī curricula. It was
also published in Delhi in the twentieth century as well as in
Hyderabad and other Deccan regions. The quality and quantity of
the copies, the publisher’s notes and marginalia etc. of these
editions, along with those printed from the Shāfiʿī strongholds,
deserve further attention within the framework of book history. For
now, we may take the Hyderabad edition as an example. It was
certainly a city with a remarkable presence of Shāfiʿīs in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not earlier, mainly because
new Yemeni and Swahili migrants had arrived there in considerable
numbers. The introduction and publisher’s note in Urdu provide
some historical information.85 Its title page states that it is a second
edition of a book printed first in Beirut in Lebanon, and that it was
printed for free circulation. It declares the Fatḥ to be “the last work
among the considerable matns of the Shāfiʿī legal curricula”. It also
identifies the author as a student of Ibn Ḥajar of Mecca. In the
introductory pages we read that it was printed under the auspices of
many Hyderabadi fuqahāʾ, especially Ṣāliḥ Bā Ḥaṭṭab and his son
Sālim.86 Both of them held the position of “professor of theology and
rational sciences at the prestigious Niẓāmiyya University of
Hyderabad”. In the following pages the publisher describes the text’s
relevance as a work that has been printed many times in the Arab
world and taught across Peninsular India and Southeast Asia.
This edition with its use of Urdu and encouragement of the
Ḥaḍramīs exemplify the development of a hybrid culture, in which
Yemeni Ḥaḍramīs, Deccani Shāfiʿīsm and subcontinental Urdu are
mingled together. Throughout its evolutionary trajectories, Urdu was
primarily associated with Ḥanafīsm, though there are intermittent
cases where Urdu was used for Shāfiʿī writings.87 This is one such
case, one that was made possible by the Ḥaḍramī Shāfiʿīs who had
settled in Hyderabad and utilised the possibilities of new
technologies and the vernacular. This particular publisher had
published several other Shāfiʿī texts across half a century in Urdu
and Arabic, ranging from Risāla by al-Shāfiʿī and Mukhtaṣar by Abu
Shujāʿ to short treatises on specific concerns, and it was one of the
two important Shāfiʿī publishers in Hyderabad.88 The other publisher
focused mainly on Urdu texts catering for its immediate local
audience, while the former must have had both local and
transregional clientele.
This wider outreach does not mean that printing technology
completely replaced the old form of textual circulation. Manuscripts
retained their authority among the fuqahāʾ clusters. An enormous
number of manuscripts of the Fatḥ, Minhāj and Tuḥfa are still kept in
various collections on the Indian Ocean rim. They all contain
different marginalia and glosses, similar to the taṣḥīḥ practice
discussed earlier. In some manuscripts we find interlinear and
intermittent translations into Southeast Asian languages, including
some from Makasar, Acehnese and Javanese. A closer look at such
minute details of these translations illustrates different localisation
processes of these texts, Islam and its law through nineteenth- and
twentieth-century religious learning centres on the oceanic rim, as
we shall discuss in the next chapter.
The advent of printing technology in the world of textual
transmission of Islamic legalism has often been identified as a factor
that contributed to the decline of the commentarial tradition. Although
that technology gave commentaries a boost at the beginning,
scholars have argued that ultimately it put an end to this tradition. It
seems to be that the diffusion of printed texts along with the general
availability of multiple copies of commentaries is a disincentive for
students to extend the line of textual genealogy. Indeed, the
introduction of various technological devices, including print, audio,
visual, social and virtual media, has contributed to the decay of a
traditional mode of communicating texts that had developed through
the manuscript cultures. But those innovations have also led to an
even more beneficial transformation, with “audio”, “video” and
“virtual” commentaries for texts now forming a “hyper-textual”
genealogy for Shāfiʿī corpus.89 The technology has changed only the
form. New technologies have motivated traditional textualists to
explore new vistas of development to the advantage of their tradition.
 Rejection or Reception?
In the last one and a half centuries since their publication, the Nihāya
and the Iʿāna have travelled through very different trajectories in
their reception among Shāfiʿī jurists. The first edition of the Nihāya
was printed in 1881 and has been reprinted many times since. Its
acceptance probably has more to do with the scholarly personae of
Nawawī al-Bantanī than with its contents and structure, although
those are not negligible. Significant evidence comes from its very
first edition, in which the aforementioned Ḥammād al-ʿAjmāwī wrote
in an appendix that after Nawawī al-Bantanī had finished writing this
commentary the Cairene publishers competed to secure publication
rights.90 In his endorsement, ʿAjmāwī writes further on the qualities
of the author as a pious and learned man. He mentions hardly
anything about the content of the Nihāya, but generally comments on
the importance of legal texts and legal education.
The following trajectories of the Nihāya also point to this same
phenomenon of stressing it as a work by Nawawī al-Bantanī, rather
than that he was the author of the Nihāya. Many of his works have
been similarly studied, critically and uncritically, by traditional Shāfiʿīs
and researchers, who often dedicated monographs to them. They
focused on his works such as ʿUqūd al-lujayn, Naṣāʾiḥ al-ʿibād and
Afʿāl al-ʿibād, some of which have been critically analysed by Muslim
feminist groups who called out their patriarchal interpretations of
Islam and its laws. In contrast, the Nihāya usually received only a
passing reference.91 In listing his works, Hurgronje does not mention
the Nihāya or any of his legal texts. All he says is that he published a
few books on law from Cairo.92 This should be read along with the
fact that Hurgronje names and discusses a few of his other texts, as
well that Sayyid Bakrī’s Iʿāna has recurrent references.
That does not in fact mean that the Nihāya was badly received
by the Shāfiʿīs. The Nihāya has been a favourite text of Indonesian
students in pesantren. Martin van Bruinessen, in his study on the
kitab kuning of the pesantren tradition, notes that the text “is widely
used” while the Qurra itself “never became popular”.93 Its many
editions from different parts of Indonesia as well as from the Middle
East substantiate this further.94 Alex Wijoyo counts it as one of the
most famous legal texts of Bantanī among the Indonesian Shāfiʿīs.95
In this respect, its author’s intention of communicating with “the
pursuers of primary education” has materialised. Furthermore, the
Nihāya’s synthesis of conflicting sub-schools of Shāfiʿīsm also had
wider intellectual implications in the later development of Southeast
Asian Shāfiʿīsm in general and of Indonesia in particular.
The Iʿāna’s popularity is unquestionable, as our previous
references clearly demonstrate. During Sayyid Bakrī’s lifetime, the
text attracted students and teachers alike. The title page of its first
edition tells us that it was known among its admirers by two other
names: Qūt al-muḥtājīn ilā ibrāz daqāʾiq Fatḥ al-muʿīn and Itqān al-
muṭīʿīn fī bayān maʿānī Fatḥ al-muʿīn. This is probably due to its
popularity in manuscript form.96 Like the East African student Bā
Kathīr, many African and Asian students later recounted and
boasted that they had attended the author’s own teaching of the
text.97 Bakrī had a short life (as we said, he died at the age of forty-
three) but the text lived on and became one of the most trusted
supercommentaries in the Shāfiʿī world. In the first edition, many
people wrote poems and endorsements in appreciation of the author
and the text. Scholar Muḥammad bin Yusuf Ḥusayn Khayyāṭ wrote
two poems set out at the beginning of the first volume. Aḥmad al-
Faṭānī, the Thai overseer of the Malay press in Mecca and literary
scholar from Pattani, writes in the fourth volume:

Indeed the merit of the Iʿāna is exquisite, a book

In which verses are detailed, and scrupulous.
A treasure of all riches and resources,
Aspiring to get into it makes one wealthy.
In it are inquests before which heads of all
Intricacies drop and soothe.98

In the following decades the Iʿāna grew to be a favourite text across

the Shāfiʿī world. Wherever the Fatḥ was taught the Iʿāna was
referred to and highly valued. Its acceptance stretched from Middle
Eastern centres, such as Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Mecca and
Yemen to the South|East African and Asian worlds of Shāfiʿīsm. As
evidence for this, there are many editions from these regions and it
continues to be one of the prime references for Shāfiʿīs. In the longer
textual genealogy of the school, the Iʿāna stands as the last bastion
that was generally accepted within the school. This is not to forget
the fact that it also attracted critics, as mentioned previously with
regard to the Tarshīḥ, whose author believed that the Iʿāna was
flawed in many of its articulations.
Both the Nihāya and Iʿāna were rarely taught as exclusive
textbooks. Instead, both texts were used to provide teachers and
students with clarifications and explanations. They have also been
used as sources of fatwās, especially as the Iʿāna contained legal
clarifications by Meccan muftīs such as Zaynī Daḥlān on many
issues later than Qurra and Fatḥ.
 Conclusions
By juxtaposing our reading of the supercommentaries Iʿāna and the
Nihāya we come to appreciate a number of different phenomena in
the textual longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm. Both texts in relation to the
Qurra and Fatḥ primarily demonstrate that the circulation of Shāfiʿī
legal ideas, or Islamic ideas for that matter, were not always
unidirectional from a “centre” to a “periphery”. Rather, it was
multidirectional, in which many components of the period, region and
tradition played crucial roles. We see that a Shāfiʿī text and its
autocommentary originally written in sixteenth-century Malabar are
taken up by jurists of Indonesian and Egyptian backgrounds living in
Mecca to advance the long legal tradition of the school. This process
challenges the general assumptions of Islam’s intellectual and legal
peregrinations as unidirectional and diffusionist from the heartlands
to the peripheries. Instead, we see how the Shāfiʿī Muslims actively
partook in all ways in the advancement of their religion and its laws
in the heartlands as well as in distant lands.
Both the Iʿāna and the Nihāya also illuminate the multi-layered
processes of synthesis that the school went through in the
nineteenth century. In the wake of increasing attacks on Islamic legal
tradition from “Muslim modernists” and political “legal codifiers”, the
whole traditional block united as a single body, thereby healing many
divisions that had existed in their long tradition and committing to
resistance against a particular set of forces. A major synthesis was
in the intellectual realm, as the Cairene–Meccan division that had
existed was resolved by repeated efforts. A geo-legalistic synthesis
was also evident in the articulations of both texts. These syntheses
were a product of many criticisms that one “traditionalist bloc” of
Islam had to encounter at the hands of Muslim reformists and rulers.
Their ideas spread across networks of scholars, jurists, students and
teachers as well as texts and ideas, thanks to the intensified
technological innovations of the industrial age through ocean liners
and printing presses. As these supercommentaries were written for
educational and juridical purposes, the popularisation of printing
technology and steamships accelerated their wider circulation
leading to further intensity of text-centrism. The growth in the number
of students and their increased opportunities for travel across long
distances augmented the movement of new ideas and texts as well
as old ones.
In the course of time, however, they were partially marginalised
by the political rise of many “reformist” regimes. In the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia the Wahhābī ideology prevailed, and in the Republic of
Turkey the Ottoman caliphate was formally banished. These two new
political entities both exhibited extreme antipathy towards any
suggestion of traditional customs, practices, discursive Shāfiʿī law
and intellectualism. On the intellectual level, the ideas of “Muslim
modernists” predominated. Even so, traditional Muslim ideas
survived and still continue to disseminate Shāfiʿī traditions and
textualism in a number of different forms on the Indian Ocean rim.
The increase in multiple forms of vernacular translations along with
the establishment of religious educational institutions within and
beyond the Indian Ocean rim are evidence for this.

1 Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Bahwa ini churtra kapal asap

(Singapore: Kampung Bras Basah, 1843), trans. Annabel Teh
Gallop, Indonesia Circle 17, nos. 47–48 (1989): 13.

1 Unlike our previous texts from the age of manuscripts, both

Nihāya and Iʿāna are primarily written to be printed and the
authors communicated with the printing presses while finalising
manuscripts, as I shall discuss later. Ever since their first
publication in the late nineteenth century, they have been reprinted
multiple times. I depend on these first editions along with each
later edition.

2 ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa tarājim baʿḍ ʿulamāʾinā fī al-qarn

al-rabiʿ ʿashar li al-Hijra (Jeddah: al-Mamlakat al-ʿArabiyyat al-
Saʿūdiyya, 1982), 288, mentions the title of his tafsīr as al-Tafsīr
al-munīr li Maʿālim al-Tanzīl. He also mentions that he was the
author of around 100 works.

3 For his biography, the major sources are Aboe Bakar

Djajadiningrat, Tarājim ʿulamāʾ al-Jāwah, Leiden University
Special Collections, Or. 7111, unpaginated; C. Snouck Hurgronje,
Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century: Daily Life, Customs
and Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Chaidar, Sejarah pujangga
Islam Syech Nawawi Albanteni, Indonesia (Jakarta: Sarana
Utama, 1978); Alex Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten: Texts,
Authority, and the Gloss Tradition” (PhD diss., Columbia
University, 1997); Basri Basri, “Indonesian Ulama in the Haramayn
and the Transmission of Reformist Islam in Indonesia (1800–
1900)” (PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 2008), 74–109.

4 On the Indonesian scholars in Mecca and Medina, see Basri,

“Indonesian Ulama”.

5 Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten”, 29.

6 Djajadiningrat, Tarājim ʿulamāʾ al-Jāwah, unpaginated.

7 Hurgronje, Mekka, 186 and 269; ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa

tarājim, 72, 116 and 160.

8 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa tarājim, 288.

9 His most famous non-Indonesian student was ʿAbd al-Sattār al-

Dihlawī (1869–1936) of Indian origin. For a list of his important
Indonesian students, see Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten”, 80–
88.

10Chaidar, Sejarah, 40–41; Forum Kajian Kitab Kuning, ed. Wajah

Baru Relasi Suami-Istri: Telaah Kitab ‘Uqud al-Lujjayn
(Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2001), 208.

11On the interconnections between Shāfiʿī law and languages,

especially with regard to Nihāya and its core text Qurra, see
Mahmood Kooria, “Languages of Law: Legal Cosmopolis and Its
Arabic and Malay Microcosmoi”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society 29, no. 4 (2019): 705–722.

12Abd Rachman, “Nawawī al-Bantanī: An Intellectual Master of

the Pesantren Tradition”, Studia Islamika 3, no. 3 (1996): 81–114.
13Forum, Wajah Baru; Pieternella van Doorn-Harder, Women
Shaping Islam: Indonesian Women Reading the Qurʾān (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 190–191, passim.

14 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa tarājim, 288.

15Some of them include ʿUthmān bin Muḥammad Shaṭā (d. 1878),

ʿUmar bin Muḥammad Shaṭā (1843–1912), ʿAzab al-Madanī,
Muḥammad al-Sharbīnī, and Sayyid Bakrī. See ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
Siyar wa tarājim, passim.

16Aḥmad al-Sibāʿī, Tārīkh Makka: Dirāsat fī al-siyāsat wa al-ʿilm

wa al-ijtimāʿ wa al-ʿumrān (Riyadh: Taʾsīs al- Mamlakat al-
ʿArabiyyat al-Saʿūdiyya, 1999), 644, 660–661.

17
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa tarājim, 80, gives a list of the texts he
memorised as a child.

18 C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Een Rector der Mekkaansche

Universiteit”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van
Nederlandsch-Indië 36, no. 3 (1887): 344–395; Wijoyo, “Shaykh
Nawawi of Banten”, 74, explains the name of the author of this
manāqib, Sayyid Bakrī, in brackets as Abū Bakr ʿUthmān bin
Muḥammad Shaṭā. He mixes up Sayyid Bakrī’s name (Abu Bakr)
with that of his brother ʿUthmān. ʿAbd al-Jabbār does not mention
such a text among the writings of Bakrī, see ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar
wa tarājim, 81. This does not matter much however because ʿAbd
al-Jabbār does not mention many of his other works either.

19 Abū Bakar Shaṭā aka Sayyid Bakrī, Kifāyat al-atqiyāʾ wa minhāj

al-aṣfiyāʾ ʿalā Hidāyat al-aḏkiyāʾ ilā ṭarīq al-awliyāʾ (Cairo:
Maṭbaʿat al-ʿĀmir, 1885); Nawawī al-Bantanī, Salālim al-fuḍalāʾ
ʿalā Hidāyat al-aḏkiyāʾ ilā ṭarīq al-awliyāʾ (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-
Khayriyya, 1886).

20 For a list of his other works including the hagiography on

Daḥlān, see Khayr al-Dīn al-Zarkalī, Tartīb al-aʿlām (Beirut: Dār al-
ʿIlm li al-Malayīn, 2002), 2: 48; ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-
Muʿallimī, Aʿlām al-makkiyyīn min al-qarn al-tāsiʿ ilā al-qarn al-
rābiʿ ʿashar al-hijrī (Mecca: Muʾassasat al-Furqān li al-Turāth al-
Islāmī, 2000), 1: 561; Yūsuf al-Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir wa al-
durar fī ʿulamāʾ al-qarn al-rābiʿ ʿashar (Beirut: Dār al-Maʻrifah,
2006), 1: 519, 858; ʿUmar Riḍā Kaḥḥāla, Muʿjam al-muʾallifīn:
Tarājim muṣannifī al-kutub al-ʿArabiyya (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-
Risala, 1985), 1: 444.

21 Hurgronje, Mekka, 204–205.

22 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa tarājim, 65–66.

23 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Siyar wa tarājim, 124–127.

24Hurgronje, Mekka, 290. On his lack of fluency in speaking

Arabic, see 289.

25 Hurgronje, Mekka, 303–305.

26 The identification of Zayn al-Dīn as the son of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz is

incorrect, as discussed in the previous chapter.

27 Hurgronje, Mekka, 290.

28Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāyat al-zayn fī irshād al-mubtadiʾīn bi
sharḥ Qurrat al-ʿayn bi muhimmāt al-dīn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-
ʿĀmirat al-Sharafiyya, 1881), 2.

29 Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī, Nihāyat al-

amal li man raghib fī ṣiḥḥat al-ʿaqīdat wa al-ʿamal (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat
al-Maymaniyya, 1895).

30Aaron Spevack, The Archetypal Sunnī Scholar: Law, Theology,

and Mysticism in the Synthesis of al-Bājūrī (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2014).

31 Abū Khuḍayr depended for theological aspects on his teacher

Bājūrī’s commentary on Jawharat al-tawḥīd by Ibrāhīm al-Laqānī
(d. 1632). For the mystical part he referred to Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn by
Ghazālī, supplementing it with Nawawī’s Aḏkār and its summary
by Suyūṭī for chants and prayers. For the legal discussions he
mainly depended on the Ghāya family, on Khaṭīb’s commentary on
the Ghāya, and on Bājūrī’s supercommentary. Abū Khuḍayr al-
Dimyāṭī, Nihāyat al-amal, 4.

32 Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāya, 2.

33 Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī, Nihāyat al-amal, 4.

34 Hurgronje, Mekka, 205.

35 Leiden University MS. Or. 2287, multi-text manuscript.

36 Corresponding to 1879.
37 Abū Bakar Shaṭā Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat
al-Mīriyya, 1883), 1: 2.

38Shaykh Abdallah Salih Farsy, The Shaf’i Ulama of East Africa,

ca. 1830–1970: A Hagiographic Account, trans., ed. and
annotated by Randall L. Pouwels (Madison: University of
Wisconsin, 1989), 84.

39 Hurgronje, Mekka, 204.

40 For example, see Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir, 1475, 1619, 1659.

41 In few editions of the Iʿāna (not in the first edition), the wordings
of the Fatḥ “a sultan or a powerholder” have been identified as of
the Qurra. It seems to be a mistake if we look in the other editions
of the Qurra and the Fatḥ.

42 In bold font I give my translation of expressions the author

quotes from the original text of the Qurra. Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 4:
253. A word of caution: in the later editions of the Iʿāna, the
phrasing of the Qurra has been published erroneously making the
term “sultan” a part of the core text; thus: “If a sultan even if he is
an unbeliever, or powerholder”. This is incorrect and it might
motivate one to argue that the emphasis here is not on the term
unbeliever (kāfir) but on the “powerholder” (ḏū shawka). The first
edition of Iʿāna cross-checked by Sayyid Bakrī himself and
multiple editions of Qurra do not consider “sultan” as a part of the
core text. For the typographical error, see Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿānat al-
ṭālibīn (Cairo: Dār Ihyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1927), 4: 215.
43
Malaybārī, Ajwibat al-ʿajība ʿan al-asʾilat al-gharība, Ponnani
MS. 1203 [also numbered 2598], fols. 56a–59a.

44The details of the conflicts can be seen in Hurgronje, Mekka; cf.

Alexander H. de Groot, “Tradition and Reform in Ottoman Mecca
around 1884”, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Meeting on
Modern Ottoman Studies and the Turkish Republic, ed. E. van
Donzel (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten,
1989), 83–96.

45 See Zaynī Daḥlān’s al-Futūḥāt al-Islāmiyya baʿda muḍy al-

futūḥāt al-nabawiyya (Mecca: al-Maktaba al-Mīriyya, 1893), which
opposes many of the Ottoman reforms, for example against the
introduction of a uniform for the Ottoman army.

46 For the Shāfiʿī side of the story, see Daḥlān, al-Futūḥāt al-
Islāmiyya; cf. Hurgronje, “Een Rector”.

47Aloysius Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants’ Revolt of Banten in

1888: Its Conditions, Course and Sequel: A Case Study of Social
Movements in Indonesia (‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1966), 150.

48 On both of them see Michael F. Laffan, “Raden Aboe Bakar: An

Introductory Note Concerning Snouck Hurgronje’s Informant in
Jeddah (1884–1912)”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 155, no. 4 (1999): 517–542; Michael F. Laffan,
“Writing from the Colonial Margin: The Letters of Aboe Bakar
Djajadiningrat to Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje”, Indonesia and the
Malay World 31, no. 91 (2003): 358–380.
49Kartodirdjo, The Peasants’ Revolt, 201, citing Missive of the
Consul of Djeddah, 4 September 1889, no. 1079.

50C. Snouck Hurgronje, Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck

Hurgronje, 1889–1936, ed. E. Gobee and C. Adriaanse (‘s-
Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1965), 3: 1982–1983. The translation is from
Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten”, 89–90.

51 Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāya, 380.

52 Sayyid ʿUthmān bin ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAqīl al-ʿAlawī, al-Qawānīn

al-sharʿiyya li ahl al-majālis al-ḥukmiyya bi taḥqīq al-masāʾil li
tamyīz lahum al-ḥaqq min al-bāṭil (Batavia: Published by the
Author[?], 1881).

53Muḥammad Bashīr al-Sahsawānī, Ṣiyānat al-insān ʿan

waswasat al-Shaykh Daḥlān (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Manār, 1933).

54 Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 2: 170–171.

55 Hurgronje, Mekka, 161.

56 Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 2: 323. Between ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd II and his

father ʿAbd al-Majīd I, there were two other rulers: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r.
1861–1876) and Murād V (30 May - 31 August 1876).

57ʿUmar bin Ḥāmid Bā Faraj Bā ʿAlawī, Fatḥ al-ʿalī bi jamʿ al-

khilāf bayn Ibn Ḥajar wa Ibn al-Ramlī, ed. Shifāʾ Muḥammad
Ḥasan Hītū (Beirut: Dār al-Minhāj, 2010).

58Ḥasan Hītū, Introduction to Bā Faraj Bā ʿAlawī, Fatḥ al-ʿalī, 23–

24.
59ʿAlī Bā Ṣabrīn, Ithmid al-ʿaynayn fī baʿḍ ikhtilāf al-Shaykhayn
(Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 1996), 3.

60 Saʿīd bin Muḥammad Ba ʿIshn, Bushrā al-karīm sharḥ Masāʾil

al-taʿlīm al-Muqaddimat al-Ḥaḍramīyya (Jeddah: Dār al-Minhāj,
2004).

61 Shaykh ʿUmar Ibn al-Qarahdāghī, al-Manhal al-naḍḍākh fī

ikhtilāf al-ashyākh (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islamiyya, 2007).

62 For a recent survey, see Henri Lauzière, The Making of

Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016), 6–16. For an analysis through
legalistic perspective, see Malcolm H. Kerr, Islamic Reform: The
Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad Abduh and Rashid
Rida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

63Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya

(Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 114–117.

64 An exception to this trend is Spevack, Archetypal Scholar.

65Guy Burak, Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Ḥanafī

School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015).

66 Samy Ayoub, Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial

Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2020); Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts:
Law and Modernity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Wael
B. Hallaq, Sharī‘a: Theory, Practice, and Transformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
67Zaynī Daḥlān, al-Durar al-Saniyya fī al-radd ʿalā al-Wahhābiyya
(Cairo: Idārat Muḥammad Efendi, 1882); Zaynī Daḥlān, Fitnat al-
Wahhābiyya (Istanbul: Isik Kitabevi, 1978).

68 Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāya, 2.

69 Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāya, 61. The rukuʿ is the act of bowing

in the prayer.

70 For example, see an ethno-linguistic study conducted among

the Filipino Muslims, Sanuan I. Akkuh, “A Study of Arabic and
Islamic Influence on the Sama Culture” (MA diss., University of the
Philippines, 1990), 59–60. The author says that most Sama
Muslims find Arabic words difficult to pronounce and they spell it in
their own way.

71 Muḥammad bin Sulaymān al-Kurdī, Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya

fīman yuftā bi-qawlih min aʾimmat al-Shāfiʿiyya, ed. Bassām ʿAbd
al-Wahhāb al-Jābī (Limassol: Dār al-Jaffān wa al-Jābī &
Damascus: Dār Nūr al-Ṣabāḥ, 2011), 64.

72 Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 1: 22.

73Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the

Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2011).

74For further implications of this conversation for legal, linguistic

and liturgical exchanges see Kooria, “Languages of Law”, 705–
722.
75 Randall Lesaffer, European Legal History: A Cultural and
Political Perspective, trans. Jan Arriens (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 338–370; on the Dutch jurists’ emphasis
on ius proprium of Holland, its customary laws vis-à-vis the Roman
jurisprudence, see 360–361.

76 For this case, see Hurgronje, Mekka, 274.

77 Hurgronje, Mekka, 305.

78 Djajadiningrat, Tarājim ʿulamāʾ al-Jāwah, unpaginated.

79 Hurgronje, Mekka, 306.

80 Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 1: 1–2, 2a [unpaginated second title page].

81 For Iʿāna, see 4: 408; for Nihāya, 393.

82For the impact of printing on Muslim culture and the

advancement of religious authority, see contributions in James L.
Gelvin and Nile Green, eds. Global Muslims in the Age of Steam
and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014);
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Commentaries, Print and Patronage:
Ḥadīth and the Madrasas in Modern South Asia”, Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies 62, no. 1 (1999): 60–81;
Francis Robinson, “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and
the Impact of Print”, Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 229–
251.

83 Chaidar, Sejarah, 79–81.

84 Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāya, 393.

85Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, Fatḥ al-muʿīn (Hyderabad: Markaz
Tawʿiyat al-Fiqh al-Islāmī, 2003); similar to this is an edition from
Lahore, his Irshād al-ʿibād ilā sabīl al-rashād (Lahore: Maṭbaʿt
Muṣṭafā, 1910).

86 Ṣāliḥ Bā Ḥaṭṭab was born in Barkas (Barracks), a Ḥaḍramī

settlement in Hyderabad, and he was a prolific author. He is best
known for his collection of fatwās according to Shāfiʿī law, and his
biography of al-Shāfiʿī (Sīrat al-Imām Shāfiʿī). The latter work was
translated into Urdu by his student Rashīd Khwājah Sharīf, who
also was a professor at the Niẓāmiyya University.

87For other instances, see Muftī Muḥammad Sirāj al-Dīn Qāsimī,

ed. Fiqh Shāfiʿī: Tārīkh o taʿāruf (New Delhi: Ifa Publications,
2014), part 3: 289–443; Muftī Muḥammad Ḥusayn Qamar al-Dīn
Falāḥī, Shāfiʿī Maslak: Tārīkh aur khidmāt ke ā’yīne mein (Kokan:
Majlis-e Tahaffuz-e Sharīʿa, 2013).

88 Muftī ʿUmar bin Abūbakr al-Malāḥī, “Hydar ābād ke ʿUlamā

Shāwāfiʿ kī ʿIlmī Khidmat”, in Qāsimī, ed. Fiqh Shāfiʿī: Tārīkh o
taʿāruf, 325–348, esp. 342–345.

89 On these new hypertextual commentaries and their discursive

functions in the present contexts, see Mahmood Kooria, “Using the
Past and Bridging the Gap: Premodern Islamic Legal Texts in New
Media”, Law and History Review 36, no. 4 (2018): 725–752;
Mahmood Kooria, “Uses and Abuses of the Past: An Ethno-History
of Islamic Legal Texts”, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 7, no.
2 (2018): 313–338.
90Endorsement of Sayyid Ḥammād al-Fayyūmī al-ʿAjmāwī to
Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāya, 393.

91 Forum, Wajah Baru; Ahmad Asnawi, “Pemikiran Syekh Nawawi

al-Bantani tentang Afʿāl al-ʿIbād: Perbuatan manusia” (MA diss.,
IAIN Syarif Hidayatullah, 1984); Nury Firdausia, Pendidikan moral
dan spiritual dalam membangun karakter bangsa: Analisis kitab
Nashoihul ‘ibad karya Syaikh Nawawi al-Bantani (Jakarta:
Kementerian Agama RI, 2012).

92 Hurgronje, Mekka, 291.

93Martin van Bruinessen, “Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic Script

Used in the Pesantren Milieu; Comments on a New Collection in
the KITLV Library”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
146, nos. 2–3 (1990): 247.

94For a Middle East edition, see Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāyat al-

zayn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2002).

95 Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten”, 173–174.

96 Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 1: 2a [unpaginated second title page].

97 Marʿashlī, Nathr al-jawāhir, 1475, 1659.

98 Poem by Aḥmad al-Faṭānī on Sayyid Bakrī, Iʿāna, 4: 3.

◈
The ship now travels faster and wider compared to when it
started. You have come from the thirteenth century to the
nineteenth and twentieth with a few stops at the sixteenth.
Now you are blessed with steam engines and you are
connected with telegrams and typewriters. The dynamic is
more intense, with diverse personnel, abundant
paraphernalia, and contacts from all over the world.
All these have decreased the time and shortened the
distance for humankind. The distance between Manchester
and Melbourne is covered in a period never before imagined.
As if the world had contracted and time expanded. New
technologies have made people even busier, with less time to
think and more tasks to cover. Expectations in life have
become astronomical while expectancy of life has lingered. In
the wake of these new dilemmas, the ship can now criss-
cross the Indian Ocean more frequently. It can travel back
and forth between Zanzibar and Malabar or Mombasa and
Minahasa many times a year. It does not have to depend on
the cyclical whims of the monsoon. It can also venture into
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Even so, texts yet again steer our story. In new shapes,
but in old ones too. Now we see the printed word as well as
manuscripts, and even printed manuscripts too. These two
techniques together mirror the way the ship itself combined
the old and the new, sail and steam.
 New genres of writing, printing and publishing emerged,
and the worlds of literature and law now communicate more
than before. Translation of texts has become wider and faster,
as the pace quickens for steam ships, printing machines,
typewriters, telegrams and railway tracks. It builds itself on
the past, but also on the commentarial tradition.
On the deck of the ship, the moment of the world
becomes a night of the iguana. Captures and seizures, of
colonialism and Anthropocene. Man trying to plow God. God
plying man. More intensity with or against divinity and
insanity. In the extended regime of circulations African, Asian
and European mingle on the ship. Before the triumph of
European forms of law, Afrasian legal systems and texts
offered fodder for European quests, while distant languages
and legal texts became domesticated on a global scale
through Afro-Eurasian translation projects.
 8
The Translations
◈

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in

the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to twentieth centuries,
translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to
vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a
tool to understand the laws of the people their states had
subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among
these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two,
while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter
identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual
longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. I demonstrate their
nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated
perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahāʾ estates
appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their
specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and
law. Compared to the four previous chapters, this chapter does not
take any specific text. Rather, it takes all the major texts we have
discussed so far to analyse the contemporaneous processes of
translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.
The early stage in Afrasian translation history is marked by
commentarial translations where authors-cum-translators intermixed
commentaries and translations synchronically or diachronically
through intermittent, interlinear and hybrid formulae. In the ages of
both manuscript and print, the praxis remained stronger among
Shāfiʿī Muslims and such texts witnessed centuries of commentarial
sedimentations through innovative modes of linguistic, technological
and interpretative interactions across generations. The commentarial
translations complemented and coexisted with the literal translations
in which the texts were translated without any commentaries. It was
the most common method in the littoral whereby translators
produced word-for-word translations trying to be as accurate as they
could. It became popular after many Indian Ocean languages such
as Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Kiswahili, Malayalam and Tamil
abandoned Arabic script and chose vernacular or Roman script in
order to bring their long literary tradition into the mainstream. In this
process, the tarjamas stood as a bridge between commentarial and
literal translations with high glosses, Arabic vocabularies, script and
vernacularisation.
Parallel to the Afrasian translations, two other stages of
translation appeared in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries,
when European colonial regimes began to dominate Muslims in the
Indian Ocean littoral. To serve the urgent tenacities of colonial
administration, the Dutch, British, German and French colonial–
scholarly nexus thought that the legal texts provided the best
apparatus to control their Muslim subjects. Through scholarly and
political interests, the “European fuqahāʾ estate” therefore studied
several Islamic legal texts and published their outcomes as
translations, critical editions, reviews and essays. As a result, we
have translations of Shāfiʿī texts in four European languages (Dutch,
English, French and German) representing the major western
colonial empires. In this historical course, we see the internal
conflicts of the European fuqahāʾ estate and its complicity with the
imperial infrastructures in order for its members and their works to
facilitate colonial subjugation. The European fuqahāʾ in and on the
Islamic lands also differed from their Afrasian counterparts on
several levels, as they were very keen on enforcing what they had
translated on the colonised subjects. The difference was not only in
terms of linguistic and structural choices but also in the very
intentions and the power imbalance engendered by their
endeavours.
The chapter starts with the Afrasian commentarial translations,
before I take the literal translations and focus on the European
translation projects. Taken individually or collectively, this chapter
argues that these Afrasian and European translators advanced the
Islamic legal textual longue durée through their works, and the
outcomes of their textual pursuits were catalysts for
vernacularisation as much as colonisation. While some of them
familiarised the texts in many African and Asian contexts, often
conversing for first time on the conundrums of Islamic law with a
larger audience in their own languages, others extended the longue
durée beyond Afrasia to European legal structures, academic
discourses and broader imperial projects. The boom in the
translation from Afro-Eurasia was also connected to and benefited
from the large-scale increase in global interactions through new
industrial infrastructures such as steam shipping, printing, postal and
railway services. It extended the world of Shāfiʿīsm to many
unprecedented areas within and beyond the Indian Ocean such as
the Pacific and Atlantic, and undergirded the transition from
manuscript culture to print, with high demand from the community of
teachers/students or administrators well versed in this textual
tradition.
 Commentarial Translations
Writing commentarial translations on Shāfiʿī legal texts became
common among Afrasian oceanic Muslims in the eighteenth to
twentieth centuries. The praxis consisted of two major forms,
interlinear and intermittent translations, which had existed since the
sixteenth century, if not earlier, in such regions as Southeast Asia
where writers translated different Islamic texts into Malay and other
vernaculars. Specifically, Shāfiʿī texts were translated intermittently
and interlinearly from the seventeenth century onward.
Intermittent translation connotes occasional renderings in target
languages of a passage in the start language. This practice was
common in the early Malay legal texts of the Shāfiʿī school, as we
see in the Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm by Ranīrī, its commentary Sabīl al-
muhtadīn by Arshad al-Banjarī, and Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb by ʿAbd al-Raʾūf
Sinkilī. In all these texts, we find long opening passages in Arabic
followed by even longer commentarial translations in Malay. The
translations were only loosely based on the Arabic original, and the
authors communicated with their audience more in the target
language. The sentences in Arabic stood as base text and
consequent passages as autocommentaries, though in a different
language. As the text progressed, Arabic passages became fewer.
Overall, Arabic stood in these texts as supporting or ornamenting
excerpts by which authors demonstrated their authority, authenticity
and familiarity with the broader Islamic and Shāfiʿī textual corpus.
 Even though most of the Arabic passages were written by the
authors themselves, they did cite directly from the Minhaj, Tuḥfa and
Fatḥ along with other texts of the school. On such occasions, the
commentarial translations appear with or without Arabic original and
citations. There is no common pattern among authors, it depended
on the text and the author. For example, in the Ṣirāṭ, Ranīrī cites
authors when he provides commentarial translations without the
original passage. If he does provide the original passage, it is mostly
in citing the Qurʾān or ḥadīth.1 This is probably because he assumes
that those who are familiar with the Arabic legal corpus will be
familiar with the source of such passages. Also, his erudition in the
textual corpus is explicated and stated more clearly in Malay, while
the very citation of Arabic would have served the same purpose for
his readers who may not have known Arabic and therefore the
original sources may not have been important. A different approach
can be seen in other texts from the region too, where authors
provide selective translations of direct quotes from the Shāfiʿī texts
and let the translated passages form their own independent
existence. A good example is the Kitāb al-nikāḥ (“Book of Marriage”),
written in Malay by one Shaykh Faqīh ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. He compiled
the text on the basis of direct and indirect quotes from the Minhaj
and its supercommentary Fatḥ al-wahhāb along with a few other
works of the legal school and Prophetic tradition.2 Some works
provided start texts (in bold letters or parentheses), but the whole
work could be read smoothly and coherently, skipping the start text.
We find similar texts from the region, also discussing specific legal
issues such as marriage and obligatory charity, quoting and
translating several works, including the Minhāj and its reputed
commentaries such as the Tuḥfa.3
In the interlinear translations, teachers, students and readers
wrote meanings of Arabic texts in local languages between the lines.
The manuscripts themselves were copied with extra space between
lines to facilitate such translations, commentaries and/or
commentarial translations. The practice was a matter of an old
Ḥanafī–Shāfiʿī debate with regard to translating the Qurʾān from
Arabic into Persian. The Ḥanafī jurists allowed it as long as the word-
for-word translation (Ar. tarjama musāwiya, equivalent translation) in
Persian was accompanied by the Arabic original, but al-Shāfiʿī and
his followers, who often upheld an Arab supremacist approach,
asserted the untranslatability of the scripture.4 The debate did not
spill over to non-Qurʾānic texts. On the contrary, al-Shāfiʿī asserted
the necessity of translating books from other languages, especially if
they belonged to enemies during a war.5 Interlinear translations
therefore were common in Shāfiʿī circles and the readers, authors,
students and teachers provided word-for-word translations, along
with occasional glosses, marginalia and even detailed
commentaries. Although the latter two are comparatively fewer,
glosses were very common in interlinear translations.
One of the Shāfiʿī texts most widely translated in this manner on
the Indian Ocean rim is a short treatise, Safīnat al-najāt by Sālim bin
Samīr al-Ḥaḍramī (d. 1854), on the fundamental ritual laws. By the
mid-twentieth century it had attracted four editions, one only in
Arabic, while the other three have interlinear translations in Malay,
Javanese or Sundanese.6 Similarly other major texts of the school
also attracted several interlinear translations. For example, two
complete manuscripts of the Minhāj, possibly from eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Minangkabau, encompass interlinear Malay
translations along with the names of some local places and people.7
We have Javanese translations/glosses in a collection of extracts
from the Fatḥ and Manhaj of Anṣārī in a nineteenth-century
manuscript.8 In another incomplete manuscript of the Muḥarrar and
a complete manuscript of the Minhāj, the interlinear translation in
Javanese expands into glosses along with occasional detailed
commentaries in Arabic.9 Similarly, the Fatḥ al-qarīb, the text
competing with the Fatḥ, has Malay interlinear translations coupled
with marginal supercommentaries, mostly taken from an Egyptian
supercommentary.10 In an insightful essay on the practice in
Southeast Asia, Ronit Ricci says that the works in this sub-genre
“help us understand and map also the broader phenomenon of how
the world of Islamic Arabic was transmitted and taught as a building
block for cultural change”. She argues that, despite the set and rigid
rules and limited room for imagination and flexibility in interlinear
translations compared to other forms of translation and adaptation,
“the initial rigidity and consistency somewhat paradoxically then
allowed for change which was also consistent and thus widespread,
opening the door to much creativity and variation as the language
inflected by translation was used for a range of purposes”.11
A hybrid form of interlinear and intermittent translations was also
very common in the oceanic littoral. The authors and compilers
collected passages on a specific theme from all sorts of different
Islamic texts in which many Shāfiʿī texts under focus were also
selected. The texts were quoted at length when pertinent to a related
discussion and Arabic passages were given with interlinear
translations or without any direct translation, but discussions in the
larger context made the passage meaningful as a way of
commentary in the target language. We can see this in several
manuscripts from the region. For example, some passages from the
Muḥarrar and Ghāya were translated into Javanese in a multi-text
manuscript on Islamic law.12 In another similar manuscript, sections
of the Tuḥfa on apostasy (ridda) are given along with an interlinear
translation in Javanese. This manuscript excerpts this section in
order to legitimise its overall focus on contentious theological and
mystical debates that would lead to apostasy.13 In a different
manuscript, extracts from the Minhāj on compulsory almsgiving
(zakāt) are given in Arabic along with Javanese interlinear
translations.14
While the intermittent translations were meant and done by the
original authors who produced commentarial translations on their
own passages or from other texts, the interlinear translations came
from readers, who wrote translations on the basis of what they
understood as the meanings, in order to help themselves and others
in future readings. These practices were common during the
manuscript culture. When the textual tradition switched to printed
texts, the praxis did not cease to exist. Rather, it combined interlinear
and intermittent commentarial translations in creative ways, utilising
technological innovations to produce the “lithographed manuscripts”
or “printed manuscripts” in which readers wrote interlinear
translations and marginalia. Some authors published this highly
hybridised manuscript on printed manuscripts, producing further
commentarial translational and technological intermixtures.
In both intermittent and interlinear commentarial translations,
authors mixed translation and commentaries. Although the praxis
was widely used for the Qurʾān and ḥadīth texts, a few jurists also
used it for legal texts. The commentarial translations were innovative
ways for the authors to interpret difficult legal texts into a vernacular
terrain, where they familiarised readers with the technical and alien
worlds of the law. They illustrate early forms of localisation
processes of the texts, Islam and its law. Despite the fact these
commentarial translations were strongly loaded with Arabic words
and jargons that an ordinary reader might struggle to understand (it
was often called “kitab Malay” in Southeast Asia),15 still they
vernacularised the distant worlds into a recognisable world. Utilising
prospects of translation, commentary, gloss and citations, they
brought the unfamiliar legal world of Shāfiʿī texts into a conversant
cultural mental scape of the readers through familiar languages,
idioms, examples, etc.
On the Swahili coast, the practice became very common in the
early twentieth century, thanks to the continuous efforts of Shāfiʿī
jurists like ‘Abdallah Salih al-Farsy and his student Saidi Musa, who
argued for translating Islamic texts from Arabic into the vernacular in
order to popularise Islam’s teachings among ordinary Muslims who
were not fluent in or familiar with Arabic. The region was already
exposed to translation projects for centuries as many early literary
works in Kiswahili were translations from classical Arabic poems or
panegyric works.16 This must have influenced the legal translations
too. Farsy and his disciples had a rather revival project in mind as
they translated and commented upon several Shāfiʿī works into
Kiswahili. One most important commentarial translation from the
region in this period is the Wasīlat al-rajāʾ by Ḥasan bin Amīr based
on the Safīnat al-najāt, a text mentioned above in the context of
Southeast Asian interlinear commentarial translations. The Wasīla
was used by teachers of the Shāfiʿī school in Zanzibar and it was
one of the three widely circulated Kiswahili texts there in the
twentieth century.17 Under the colonial tutelage, the Minhāj itself was
translated into Kiswahili in the 1920s in several booklets, each
containing a section or chapter on specific law, such as purity,
pilgrimage, alms-giving, marriage and divorce. The booklets were
printed with the Arabic original, followed by a Kiswahili translation
and commentary. In the 1940s and 1950s, more scholars produced
similar works. “In most cases, ‘official’ ʿulamāʾ were behind these
translations and the purpose was clearly educational, for government
schools and later for the Muslim Academy.”18
A related form of commentarial translation is notes inserted in
the manuscript.19 An elaborate form of such insertions can be found
in a manuscript of the Muḥarrar’s commentary. But in terms of
translational notes, we have a Southeast Asian manuscript of the
Minhāj in which numerous commentarial and translational notes in
Arabic and Malay have been inserted into its fragile folios causing
ink corrosion. The inserted notes appear in the text in addition to
several interlinear and marginal notes. The inserted Malay notes
(and an unrelated letter) occur mostly in the second half of the
volume, the point where the student/teacher must have read the text
intensely.20 The notes were made by someone who may not have
read the first part, or did not own or use this manuscript for the first
parts.
The intermittent, interlinear, inserted and hybridised forms
enriched the commentarial translations in the Indian Ocean littoral
during and after the age of manuscript culture. The popularity of
printing in the littoral brought new ways to translate and comment on
lithographed manuscripts, in the margins, blank spaces and between
lines. Some publishers found profit in printing such new interlinear
and marginalia translations, producing multi-layered lithographed–
commented–lithographed texts. Accordingly, we can see in a single
text of commentarial translations in both manuscript and print
centuries commentarial sedimentations as well as innovative models
of linguistic, technological and interpretative intersections across
generations.
 Literal Translations
Literal translations were attempts to provide direct translations
without necessarily commenting on the base text. Such literal
translation of the Shāfiʿī texts happened in Afrasian coasts along
with the switch from Arabic script to regional or Roman script. There
was an initiative of colonialists and spokespersons of “reformism”
and colonialism either to force people to abandon the script through
strict regulations (as happened in German East Africa in 1902) or to
encourage people to abandon the age-old practice of writing
vernacular languages in Arabic script and to adapt to the local
mainstream scribal praxis. This attempt to bring the literary tradition
of Jāwī, Kiswahili, Malabārī (Arabi-Malayalam) and Arwī (Arabu-
Tamil) in line with the new mainstream script cultures reflected the
changing patterns of reading, writing and printing as well as broader
translations.
Just before the complete transition to the new scripts, the
Arabic-script-based literary cultures themselves produced prototypes
of literal translations. I identify them as tarjamas, an Arabic term
meant for translation and biography but used widely in the Indian
Ocean littoral to refer to different textual projects, including literal
translations. The Arabic verbal noun tarjama thus became a
substantive in the oceanic literatures meaning texts illustrating
various genres, themes, sources or commentaries, religious or non-
religious, biographical, legal, ethical or even medical. That is why I
mentioned it as a distinctive textual praxis in the littoral of the thirteen
commentarial genres mentioned in Chapter 3. The tarjamas were
self-contained texts, independent of the original. Although the major
difference was the language, they were also highly influenced by
Arabic vocabulary. They left untranslated too many technical and
legal terms that someone uninitiated might not comprehend,
especially in comparison to the literal translations that would follow.
The tarjamas stand as a bridge between commentarial
translations and literal translations. In their self-contained outlook,
they directly connect to the commentarial tradition, with extra-
linguistic, legalistic and historical elaborations as glosses and
marginalia, but they also developed by finding equivalent words in
target languages. They satisfied a “hunger” for books in the
nineteenth century as Islamic printing boomed. The expansion of
primary and secondary educational institutions and books becoming
available more cheaply than the earlier expensive manuscripts
introduced a reading revolution across the Indian Ocean rim, where
people required more and more texts. The printing presses
addressed this demand with new genres and innovations while also
instigating further exigency through advertisements, endorsements,
etc. In this context, translations of legal texts such as the Fatḥ and
Minhāj were in high demand.
One of the early tarjamas of the Fatḥ was produced in Arwī by
one Aḥmad Muḥy al-Dīn bin Muḥy al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Qādir and entitled
Tuḥfat al-ṭāmiʿīn fī tarjamat Fatḥ al-muʿīn.21 He writes a
comparatively detailed introduction on the importance of the Fatḥ as
a textbook on Shāfiʿī laws widely taught across the Islamic world,
particularly in Mecca, and that its author was a student of Ibn
Ḥajar.22 He emphasises that it had been a source of fatwās for
jurists and teachers and it had been commented upon by many
eminent scholars. Expressing his humility, he says that he does not
have the mastery of those scholars to write such a
supercommentary, but he understands the need for it to be
translated, as many people in his land do not understand Arabic. I
was able to trace two editions, one printed in 1929 and the other
very recently, pointing to its continuing circulation and relevance
among Tamil Shāfiʿī Muslims in India, Sri Lanka and beyond.
Similarly, the Fatḥ and the Minhāj were also translated as
tarjamas into Malabārī, Jāwī and Kiswahili. In Kiswahili, Shāfiʿī texts
in particular and Islamic scriptures at large had been translated at
least since the mid-nineteenth century. The ruler Bwana Shee
Mataka bin Mbaraka of Siyu in the Lamu Archipelago of present-day
Kenya is said to have commissioned translations of the Qurʾān, the
Minhāj and Irshādi. James de Vere Allen says that the translation of
Irshādi survived, whereas the Minhāj translation “had to be thrown
down a well because the younger generation did not treat it with the
respect that it deserved”.23 The justification for this alleged act
seems outlandish, especially as he tries to support it by saying
further that “it is permissible to wonder if it is was [sic] not for some
other reason, perhaps because its [Minhāj’s] implications were too
disconcerting for the traditionalists”. This explanation does not make
sense, as we know that Siyu was known for its adherence to
Shāfiʿīsm in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and texts like
the Minhāj were widely circulated in the region. Nevertheless,
furthering this tradition, Abdullah Saleh Farsy and his disciples, such
as Saidi Musa and Ali Muhsin Barwani, produced more
commentarial and literal translations in the early twentieth century.
The latter scholar Barwani translated the famous ḥadīth canon Ṣaḥīḥ
of Muḥammad bin Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (d. 870) into Kiswahili, while
Farsy published an endless stream of partial translations of various
genres of Islamic writings, including the ones on Shāfiʿī law.
Similarly, the literal translations of Shāfiʿī texts spread across
the oceanic rim in the twentieth century. In Malabārī there is a
detailed tarjama of the Fatḥ written by an anonymous author in the
early decades of the century.24 A scholar from Aceh produced a
similar work in the middle of the century.25 L. W. C. van den Berg
talks about a Jāwī rendering of the Fatḥ as “Fathul Monegin”.26 After
listing several Shāfiʿī texts (Minhāj, Fatḥ and Tuḥfa and others) used
in Java at the beginning of the century, another Dutch orientalist, G.
A. J. Hazeu, noted these translations and their functions in
Southeast Asian educational and legal circles. He writes that most
students studied the commentaries, booklets such as Safīnat al-najāt
and “a few Malay translations of the commentaries”, but they could
not become competent scholars unless they studied the Arabic texts
“under the guidance of an accomplished teacher”. Such Malay
translations and works were “admirable for what they are, and a few
of them were compiled with the aim of providing ignorant
Panghoeloes and members of the Priesterraad with guidance. But
none of this changes the fact that one should give preference to the
study of one of the aforementioned standard works”.27 It is clear from
this statement that the Malay translations were aimed at the wider
public as well as those who have some basic knowledge in Islamic
law.
In the twentieth century, however, standardised literal translation
emerged in the Shāfiʿī realm as the most common method whereby
translators brought out word-for-word translations in an effort to be
as accurate as possible. This happened after many of these
languages abandoned Arabic script for a vernacular or the Roman
script, when new reformist movements or colonial initiatives
emphasised the importance of adapting a local or Roman script in
order to bring their long literary tradition into the mainstream. Swahili,
Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil followed
in this transition. In some of these languages, scholars did write new
works using Arabic script, as in Southeast Asia and East Africa, but
this was marginal compared to the increasing prominence of newly
adapted script. They did not necessarily provide commentarial
elucidations, as their predecessors had done, yet they reflected the
changing patterns in reading, scribal and printing cultures.
The text subjected to most literal translation in this manner is the
Fatḥ, with four works in Malayalam, three in Malay/Bahasa
Indonesia, two in Tamil, one in Kannada and one in Javanese. It was
translated into Malayalam first by certain P. K. Kuññubāva Musliyār
Paṭūr, and it became the most popular and successful translation
with many reprints. Thousands of copies were reprinted more or less
every two years between 1967 and 1998.28 The translator was
honoured by the government of Kerala State for the quality of the
translation, bringing it further into the mainstream. The second
translation was by Ibrāhīm al-Fayḍī Puttūr, which provoked the
publisher of the first translation to claim that it had defamed Paṭūr’s
work by accusing him of mistranslations and mistakes. The issue
ended up in the Kerala High Court and district courts in which a few
eminent Shāfiʿī scholars gave testimonials and expert opinions on
matters including copyright and translatability.29 It was a legal
process which is of interest in the longer tradition of textual
production in the school and claims for and against the notions of
originality. The third and fourth translations were done in the last two
decades and attracted another set of readers with multiple
editions.30 The text was also translated into Kannada by Muḥammad
Ḥanīf Dārimī, who studied at a Shāfiʿī institute in Calicut called Dār
al-Salām Arabic College.31 In my attempt to interview him, he
showed hesitation because he believed that “translation is not a
scholarly activity”.32 He said that the translation was made in order to
address Shāfiʿī Muslims in numerous localities of coastal South
Canara, Uduppi and in the hinterland of Coorg, which all have a
predominantly Shāfiʿī population, in contrast to the dominance of
Ḥanafīs in the rest of Karnataka State.
Translations of the Fatḥ are more widespread than those of the
Minhāj and the Tuḥfa in Southeast Asia. It has been translated
multiple times into Bahasa Indonesia and Malay. The earliest known
translation was published in 1979 by Aliy As’ad and it has been in
circulation in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore; I first came across
it in an Indian mosque in Singapore.33 In Bahasa Indonesia, there
are at least two translations, both of which are still widely printed in
multiple volumes and sold across the country.34 Similarly, its
Javanese and Sundanese translations are also frequently printed
and circulated.35 Furthering this trend, a scholar has recently
published a dictionary of the Fatḥ by arranging its discussions in
alphabetical order and utilising earlier commentaries.36
The Minhāj and the Tuḥfa have been translated at least partially
into Javanese and Acehnese. The Tuḥfa was translated into
Javanese for colonial purposes: a Semarang chief, Adimanggolo,
translated its sections on marriage, divorce and ritual as Serat Kitab
Tupah at the request of John Crawfurd in the early nineteenth
century (see Figure 8.1).37 One manuscript available in Leiden is
written in cursive Central Pasisir script, covering 97 pages and 179
paragraphs, which is different from Crawfurd’s copy available in
London covering 116 pages and 359 sections.38 The text identifies
its author as Ibnu Kajar who wrote the text in 955 AH, i.e. 1548.39 It
was further translated into Dutch, as I shall discuss below. This
commissioning of indigenous translators was part of larger colonial
hunt for texts in which European bibliophiles not only collected,
looted and purchased manuscripts but also created, copied and
patronised manuscripts and their systems of knowledge.

Figure 8.1 Cover pages of the Javanese translation of the Kitab

Toehpah, British Library, MS. Add.12290.
 In East Africa, the Minhāj was translated into Kiswahili in a
series of pamphlets under colonial tutelage, as mentioned earlier
with regard to commentarial translations. Although the booklets
combined commentaries and translations on each page, the
translations as such were literal and stood independent of
commentaries. These literal translations were not published or
circulated separately, but their presence as an independent form
demonstrate the transition between commentarial and literal
translations, the growing inclusion of Kiswahili as a commensurable
language for Islamic legal texts, and the popularity and authenticity
of the translations vindicated through Arabic originals (and clarified
through commentaries). Thanks to the long translation efforts and
persistent calls of people such as Bwana Shee Mataka, Saleh Farsy,
Saidi Musa and Ali Barwani, translation of Islamic texts in Kiswahili
exploded by the late twentieth century, especially with the help of
Indian Muslim organisations operating in the region.40 About two
decades ago Gerard van de Bruinhorst made an inventory of thirty
Islamic bookshops in ten urban centres in Tanzania and came up
with a list of 1,200 titles, of which 50 per cent were texts in Kiswahili
with translations playing a prominent role.
Broadly speaking, the literal translations across the Indian
Ocean reflected attempts to develop and advance the target
languages to include a new or expanded vocabulary to meet specific
technical terminologies left untranslated in the tarjamas. They had an
urge to convey the meanings of fundamental Islamic rituals and laws
to a wider audience as independent texts. These efforts were directly
linked to the transition from Arabic script to the local or Roman script,
which encouraged new translators to develop the meanings of
Arabic vocabulary which had previously been taken for granted. The
translated texts helped the wider Muslim community to read and
understand the Islamic legal nuances without the help of
intermediary jurists, scholars and interpreters, whose authority on
textual knowledge directed the historical circulation of Islamic law
across the Muslim world, and especially in the non-Arabic-speaking
littorals of the Indian Ocean.
 European Translations
Together with the development of commentarial and literary
translations in Indian Ocean Shāfiʿīsm, European colonial powers
and scholars began to undertake several translation projects from
the mid-eighteenth century onwards. In order to administer imperial
order and justice among the newly colonised lands, the colonisers
came up with various strategies and techniques rooted in law. Law
was “constitutive of colonialism, tout court” and the colonies were
laboratories for legal experiments where complex relations among
colonisers were negotiated in the realm of law, as Johh Comaroff
has argued.41 The analytic, semantic and discursive frames of law
were entangled with significant questions, such as what sort of texts
and individuals were cast as authentic sources of law. In Muslim
contexts, the consequence of this was making the prevalent Islamic
legal texts agents of colonial administration through translations,
widening their circulation within and beyond the Indian Ocean, and
adding to their textual longue durée.
The earliest colonial translation attempt of an Islamic text was
directed to the Muḥarrar by Rāfiʿī, the intellectual predecessor of the
Minhāj. The officials of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde
Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) in the eighteenth century claimed to
have utilised this text as their source to formulate an “indigenous”
legal code to govern Javanese subjects. This dubious translation
was done at least two decades before the well-studied British
attempts in India to set up Anglo-Muhammadan law by translating
the Ḥanafī text Hidāya by Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī (d. 1197).
The VOC officials had encountered the local legal cultures of
Southeast Asia since the seventeenth century, but they preferred to
forgo those in favour of European laws whenever possible. In the
eighteenth century, however, they had to address the issue more
directly when the VOC sought a means of direct rule. This led to the
production of many codes for Muslim or Chinese subjects, for which
some officers identified and codified customary laws or collected
Javanese written variants, while others endeavoured to bring out
compendia of Islamic law by consulting local jurists.
The turning point was in the early 1740s when the Dutch
acquired more power and territories in north-east Java, leading them
to reorganise their political and legal administrations in and around
Semarang. In addition to the Council of Justice, a regional court
(Dutch: landraad) was established there on 30 November 1747. The
former dealt with cases between Europeans and Javanese or
between Javanese and foreigners, whereas the latter was
exclusively aimed at the Javanese who were not subjects of
Mataram rulers. The landraad was to be presided over by the
governor with seven bupatis (regents) as constituent members.
Three bupatis were permanent members, and the other four were to
be appointed by the governor for two to three years. The court also
had both a European and a Javanese secretary. Criminal cases
were its prime concern and it followed Javanese laws in legal
procedures as long as they were “tolerable to us” – a requirement
that led the Dutch officials to formally address the Javanese-Islamic
laws and prepare a compendium for the court.42
On 22 December 1747, the government instructed the
Semarang administration to consult Muslim “priests” and other
experts. A week later, on 31 December, the then governor general at
Batavia, Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff (1705–1750), explained to the
directors of the VOC in Amsterdam his intentions in preparing a
small corpus of Javanese laws and customs.43 He wrote that he
wanted to avoid injustice and inconvenience if the Javanese were
ruled by different laws than their own. He did not refer to its Islamic
context or the ongoing efforts to consult Muslim scholars. He only
noted that it would be a short text on criminal legal issues.44 Taking
more than two years, the compendium was prepared and submitted
by the provincial governor of north-east Java to the government on
10 April 1750. The government approved it on 31 December 1750
after removing “some absurdities and obscurities” (eenige
absurditeiten en duijsterheden) in the draft, and sent 150 printed
copies to the landraad of Semarang on 31 July 1751.45
The compendium, widely known as the Mogharaer Code or
Semarang Compendium, had a long title.46 The full title, preserved in
a few eighteenth-century manuscripts and three nineteenth-century
reprints, state that the code is “drawn accurately from the
Muhammadan law-book Mogharaer” (nauwkeurig getrokken uit het
Mohammedaansche wetboek Mogharaer). Later Dutch colonial
officers also agreed to this but with a twist. They asserted that it was
taken from the “‘Javanese’ legal texts called Mogharaar and
Moghalie, which were themselves taken from the Quran with the
addition of provisions enacted by the Javanese monarchs and High
Priests [sic] in accordance with the local conditions in Java”.47 Some
contemporary scholars as well as colonial officers identified it with
the Shāfiʿī law book Muḥarrar by Rāfiʿī and attributed it as “well
known in Java”.48 If we delineate the less clear notions on its title
and prime source as expressed in later colonial writings as well as in
recent studies, we find four basic arguments. It is based on (1) the
Arabic-Islamic legal text Muḥarrar by Rāfiʿī; (2) a certain Islamic law
book titled Muḥarrar whose author is not mentioned; (3) a Javanese-
Islamic law book called Mogharaer; or (4) the Javanese-Islamic legal
corpus in which Mogharaer and Moghalie are included.49 I shall
discuss the last two possibilities later, and start with the first two.
To take the second possibility first, there are three renowned
texts entitled Muḥarrar in the Islamic legal tradition: one is written by
Rāfiʿī and the other is by Majd al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya.50 Both these
texts we mentioned earlier are directly related to Islamic law,
whereas the third text is a collection of ḥadīths from a legal
perspective by Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (d. 1343), a student of Taqiyy al-Dīn
Ibn Taymiyya.51 These last two Muḥarrar texts deal with the Ḥanbalī
school of Islamic law, and it is a very distant possibility that the
Muslims in Southeast Asia followed these two texts in their primary
juridical engagements in the eighteenth century, because the
Javanese Muslims, and Southeast Asian Muslims at large,
predominantly followed Shāfiʿīsm from the late sixteenth century.
The most likely source then is the text by Rāfiʿī, as it is a Shāfiʿī text
known widely in Shāfiʿī circles as the textual predecessor of the
Minhāj. If so, Javanese scholars most likely would have helped the
Semarang administration compile a new code by referring to the
prominent text of their legal school. Although the Muḥarrar was used
less in Shāfiʿī legal circles after the end of the thirteenth century,
after the appearance of its successor Minhāj (see Chapter 4), its
manuscripts were circulated among Shāfiʿī jurists everywhere,
including Southeast Asia.52 Yet it was never an exclusive source for
legalist extractions, references or curricula. We have some patchy
references for its possible use as a source of law. For example, we
see it in a manuscript from Java dated 1844 CE, a multidisciplinary
compendium on Islamic law, mysticism and eschatology that gives
many Arabic texts as its references.53 One of those is called
Mukarar, which could be the Muḥarrar. Even so, we do not have any
strong evidence for the Muḥarrar being used as the only source of
law in the Shāfiʿī world after the thirteenth century. Hence, it would
be too injudicious to think that the Javanese Shāfiʿīs did actually use
it as their exclusive source to compile a new compendium.
Even more importantly, if we take the form and content of the
Mogharaer Code into account along with the Muḥarrars of Rāfiʿī, Ibn
Taymiyya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, that also give us further problems.
With regard to its form, its “architectonic style” does not relate to any
known Islamic law books, rather only to a Western legal code. If we
compare its rulings with their Muḥarrars, it is clear that it stays far
from these three texts. The major portions of the code relating to
criminal laws not only contradict the rulings provided by the
Muḥarrars, but also pose serious methodological issues in the way
rulings are extracted from, founded on, or ruled out of it. For
example, in the first article, the code says to cut off the tongue of a
blasphemer if he or she does not refrain from the blasphemy after
three requests, whereas the Muḥarrars do not provide tongue-
chopping as a punishment at all.54 Regarding rebellions against the
authorities, the Muḥarrars of Rāfiʿī and Ibn Taymiyya provide a whole
list of procedures that the ruler/state should undertake as a means of
negotiation and to avoid war.55 They also put forward preconditions
that the ruler be a mature, male, independent, investigative, brave,
commanding Muslim, and only rebellions against such a qualified
ruler would be bound by judicial consequences. The code avoids all
such prerequisites and procedures of negotiation. Instead, it comes
up with the rulings of death, amputation, confiscation and exile as
punishments for rebels, depending on the depth of the disobedience
and agitation, which again are not found in the Muḥarrars.56 These
are only a few examples from the beginning of the Mogharaer Code,
and similar clear contradictions can be found throughout the text. It is
therefore likely that the Dutch Mogharaer is not based on the
Muḥarrars of Rāfiʿī, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, and
probably not even on any known legal text of Islam.
The Mogharaer Code could then have been drawn from
Javanese legal corpuses or unwritten customary laws.57 This leads
to the other two possibilities mentioned: it is based either on a
Javanese-Islamic law book called Mogharaer or on a Javanese-
Islamic legal corpus in which Mogharaer and Moghalie are utilised.
Neither possibility holds true for a number of reasons. In the first
case, a Dutch official’s report to the British Lieutenant-Governor
Thomas Stamford Raffles names a few “Javanese legal” texts which
the local people supposedly referred to, and we do not see a text
called Mogharaer among those. Secondly, none of the many
catalogues of Javanese and Malay manuscripts preserved in the
Indonesian, Malaysian and European collections mention a
Javanese law book titled Mogharaer.58 Perhaps the manuscript(s)
failed to survive, but this seems unlikely since the catalogues of
private and public libraries established in eighteenth-century
Indonesia also do not mention such a text, even though they name
many other legal texts from Java.59
The second possibility, that it is drawn from an anonymous
Javanese-Islamic legal text that utilised the Mogharaer and
Moghalie, is hard to substantiate or to reject. There were law books
in Javanese which utilised a number of Arabic texts such as the
Muḥarrar and its indirect supercommentary, the Maḥallī, as we see in
the case of Leiden Or. 1815.60 It is quite possible that Muslim
scholars might have consulted them while preparing the code. The
foundational problem with this option, however, is that it does not
hold to the code’s claim that it is “drawn accurately from the
Muhammadan law book Mogharaer”. The same issue arises with
another potential assumption: that the code is based on some
unwritten customary laws of the Javanese on the advice of local
informants, possibly penghulus, jaksas and/or bupatis. Writing in the
early twentieth century, F. de Haan rejected such a possibility,
however, saying that this “bloody code” sounds more Islamic than
Javanese, once it is compared with other local customary laws of
Priangan and Cirebon.61 His identification of the code as more
Islamic than Javanese is not sustainable either, on the basis of my
previous explanations.
 If the Mogharaer Code is based on neither Islamic nor Javanese
texts, what is it? De Haan provides an illuminating suggestion
towards an answer: that the code was compiled by certain Dutch
officials who were “unfamiliar” (onbekend) with the Javanese people
and their laws, and who considered the Javanese more Islamic than
they actually were. They created the text of the code in consultation
with local informants, yet did not take everything that must have
been suggested as law. They took only what they thought to be
“tolerable” to them (voor so verre by ons tollerabel zyn).62 From early
correspondence dated 31 December 1750 we learn that the higher
authorities approved the code after removing some absurdities and
obscurities. One might wonder about those incomprehensibilities in
the draft: whether they were only language corrections or if they had
to do with the judgements themselves. These questions are
somehow related to the colonial logic behind the very construction of
such a code.
An obvious answer lies in the political and economic motivations
behind and within the code, as it was essentially a colonial tool in the
name of Islamic and Javanese laws. In the particular context of its
production, it simultaneously addressed three purposes in its
pronouncement of judgements: governmentality, dispossession and
decimation. All three contributed to the larger colonial project. The
first and final parts of the code, for example, shed light on the
political intentions of those who devised it. The articles related to
such matters as administration, disobedience and instructions to
officers, inserted into an assumed “indigenous” criminal legal tract,
explicate a double-layered search for legitimacy from an institution
that sought its fortunes in an unfamiliar terrain. The severe
punishments prescribed for those who disobeyed the superior
officials as well as the state definitely present the code as an
instrument of colonial subjugation and governmentality.
The region came under VOC control immediately after the Java
War of 1741–1743 that led to the fall of the Mataram Sultanate and
the rise of two different kingdoms in Surakarta and Yogyakarta.
Throughout the 1740s and 1750s, the VOC administration in Batavia
and Semarang encountered a series of political and economic
threats from several groups (most importantly Mangkubumi and his
supporters) in Java, as M. C. Ricklefs demonstrated in great detail
on the basis of several Dutch and Javanese sources.63 Its serious
troubles began with its “defence of a dynasty which it did not trust, in
pursuit of stability which it could not achieve, in the hope of profit
which failed to materialise”.64 The increasing wars, rebellions and
massacres in these decades, with enormous costs in funds and lives
for both the VOC and the local kingdoms and communities, must
have motivated the colonial administration to utilise all possible
provisions of the “indigenous” customs and regulations to maintain
law and order, to assert their supremacy, to avoid insurgencies within
their main domain in Semarang, and to maintain a powerful
governmental mechanism.
The VOC’s experiments with Indonesian legal cultures in the
eighteenth century also demonstrate an imperial attempt to construct
a robust colonial law while claiming an indigenous and religious
authenticity, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns of
colonial legal politics that translated known indigenous or religious
legal texts into the colonisers’ languages or imported European legal
codes into the colonies. The Mogharaer Code drafted in Dutch does
not echo the well-known Shāfiʿī legal text Muḥarrar of Rāfiʿī nor the
Ḥanbalī texts of the same title by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī,
nor does it resonate with the Javanese law texts, and it is unlikely
that a Javanese law book entitled Mogharaer actually existed. The
VOC’s attempts to claim authenticity for the legal code it constructed
is therefore an endeavour to place itself in the local legal tradition
and heritage without further resistance from the Javanese people
following the fall of the Mataram sultanate and a series of wars led
by the Javanese and Chinese communities against the Dutch; any
obvious rupture in traditional customs and laws would have incited
further protests. VOC officials tried their best to show that they were
only following the existing legal texts, yet they could not get away
from their economic and political motivations. Through this political
economy of legalistic discovery, they utilised any possible provisions
to assert the imperial inevitabilities of government, dispossession
and decimation, as is evident when the Mogharaer Code
emphasises property confiscation, financial penalties and gruesome
punishments. Whether the Javanese could and did defy or obey this
“new” legal code or modify existing traditions through their own
agency in such legal venues as the landraad is something that
requires further research, looking particularly at the Javanese source
materials. In the long run, however, the code did not succeed and did
not have a long life, while new projects such as the Freijer Code
achieved a wider life in the civil legal realm as far as Sri Lanka. After
the dismissal of the VOC and the British colonial interregnum in
Southeast Asia, the Dutch colonial apparatus became more involved
in legal mechanisms through various measures and institutional
instruments. This jurisprudential drive nurtured a huge interest
among both the political administrators and legal scholars, leading to
more “discoveries” of legal texts and consequent translations.
 Wave of Translations
Almost a century later, in the nineteenth century, there was a flood of
European translations of Islamic legal texts, particularly of the Shāfiʿī
school. By this time, the Dutch and British East India companies had
been dissolved and the respective crowns had taken over the
colonial lands with direct control over their new subjects. Both
colonial apparatuses became aggressively involved in the legal
mechanisms through various measures. Once the cultivation system
was introduced in Java in 1830, such institutional instruments as
courts became a matter of more serious concern for the Dutch
officials than before. Similarly, Britain had been seeking ways of
strengthening its power over its subjects following a series of revolts
culminating in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. These attempts were
coupled with the interests as much of colonial officials as of scholars
to consider the potential of indigenous legal traditions for a better
administration of law and order. The European scholarly
investigations into Islamic law thus intensified from the mid-
nineteenth century for diverse political, scholarly, economic and
cultural motivations. Accordingly, many European fuqahāʾ began to
translate a number of Shāfiʿī texts into colonisers’ languages, and
they engaged with these translations and their implications through
constant debates and discussions.
The process started for the Dutch in the middle of the century at
the Colonial Institute in Delft, when the Arabist Albert Meursinge
(1812–1850) paid attention to the third Malay Shāfiʿī book, ʿAbd al-
Raʾūf Sinkilī’s Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb, which was composed at the request of
Acehnese female ruler Tāj al-ʿĀlam.65 In order to better understand
the Muslim legal cultures in the Dutch colonies, Meursinge edited
and published it, especially the sections related to commercial law. It
became a textbook in Delft for aspiring colonial civil servants.66 His
successor at Delft, S. Keyzer (1823–1868), continued this
scholarship by reading more Islamic legal texts closely, and
publishing direct translations and critical editions of Arabic, Javanese
or Malay texts of the Shāfiʿī school. Throughout his career, he
sought to find a “pure Islam” as explained in the legal texts. As he
understood that Muslims in the archipelago follow Shāfiʿīsm, he
selected the prominent texts of the school and translated them into
Dutch and French. In 1853, he produced his Kitab Toehpah:
Javaansch-Mohammedaansch wetboek, a critical edition of an
“assumed” Javanese-Islamic law book.67 In the same year, he also
published an introduction to Islamic law, based on the Tanbīh of
Shīrāzī.68 In the following years, he published material on Islamic
criminal law based on Arabic, Javanese and Malay sources, another
work on Islamic administrative and public laws on the basis of
Māwardī’s renowned “mirror for princes”, and prepared an edition
and translation of the Ghāya of Abū Shujāʿ in French.69 The latter
was his most comprehensive translation of a Shāfiʿī text; his other
works dealt only with certain aspects of Islamic law.
From Keyzer’s long engagement with Shāfiʿī texts, his selection
and translation of Kitab Toehpah stands out for its title, which is so
similar to the Tuḥfa of Ibn Ḥajar. Toehpah had appeared in the Dutch
and English discussions of Islamic or Javanese law for almost three-
quarters of a century, ever since a Leiden professor, Taco Roorda,
asked the colonial government in the early 1850s to recognise this
“Javanese” book in the administration. Keyzer brought out his critical
edition with a similar conviction. It had already been translated into
Dutch by an anonymous author and was made available in “some
loose folios”.70 It is intriguing how and why this text was recognised
as a major source of “Javanese” law in Dutch academia and why two
leading professors of the time believed that this was the right text for
Javanese legal administration.
There were two streams of Dutch scholarship on the Toehpah in
the nineteenth century, one led by Keyzer and the other by Taco
Roorda (1801–1874). Keyzer represented legal scholarship with a
specialisation on Islam, while Roorda focused on literary studies of
special interest to Javanese. Both of them were teachers at one of
the two colonial academies established to produce Dutch colonial
civil servants, at Delft and Leiden respectively. For Keyzer, the
Toehpah presented the pure form of Islamic law, specifically Shāfiʿī
law, “written” in Javanese. Although he accessed it in Javanese
alone, he did not mistake it for a Javanese law book – a fact that he
states clearly in the introduction as well as in his addendum a
decade later.71 He wrote that he could not get any biographical
details of the author:

The name of the Arabic author can be found not only in the
Javanese law book, but also in the Malay legal texts. However, I
do not know anything about him more than his name, neither
 about his lifetime nor about his life and works. Also, nothing can
be said with absolute certainty about the person who rendered
the Arabic text into Javanese.72

The biographical details of the author Ibn Ḥajar were known in the
Islamic world and it is interesting to note that he may not have had
access to such materials despite his repeated attempts to locate
them. Nevertheless, Keyzer’s investigations into Islamic law as
revealed in the Toehpah led him to criticise Javanese “deviations”
from Islamic norms. In his Introduction, he expressed his hope for
the text to be a medium to understand the people of the Dutch East
Indies and nurture further interest in studying their laws in order for
the colonialists to deal with them better.73 He edited the text on the
basis of four manuscripts: two in old Javanese script, one incomplete
Dutch translation of the first 160 articles, and a Jāwī manuscript in
the possession of Roorda.
Roorda was more interested in the literary aspect of the
Toehpah. Though he was educated as a theologian and a specialist
of Semitic languages at Groningen and Leiden, he trained himself in
Javanese thanks to his association with the Dutch Bible Society that
motivated him to study Indonesian languages. He thus wrote
extensively on Javanese, and much of his oeuvre concerns its
language or consists of annotated translations and editions of
Javanese literary works, not forgetting his noted works on
metaphysics and philosophy.74 He took up the first professorship of
Javanese at Leiden from 1864 until his death. Throughout his career,
he stressed the importance of teaching indigenous languages for
prospective civil servants. Through these interests he concentrated
on the Toehpah, specifically on a manuscript from Banten in his
possession. He found it an exceptional work (eenig in zijn soort)
compiled in Javanese based on Arabic sources. He wrote that the
text was read in Javanese classes because of its unique language
and style, but most importantly “to give students a clear
understanding of the way in which Islamic law has been dealt and
formulated by the Muslim jurists”.75
After Keyzer passed away, Roorda republished the Toehpah in
1874, on the basis of an additional manuscript from a former
governor on the north-east coast of Java.76 Regarding the necessity
of its revision and its potential audience, he wrote that it can be
included in the curricula of gymnasiums in Batavia and the
Netherlands and it can be sold to the indigenous chiefs who will be
very interested in its contents.77 In the revised version, he elaborated
on its literary aspects as well as the legal content on the basis of
additional Javanese texts. He believed that it would stand as a prime
source for the legal administration of the colonies as much as for the
study of Javanese literature and linguistics.78 Despite being an
expert on Javanese literary culture, he did not have any doubts
about the Toehpah being a distant text in terms of its legal content or
practices. He found it complemented rather than contradicted
Javanese laws, customs and traditions. He did not engage with its
Islamic legalistic dimensions, even though he referred to other legal
texts from the region. This lack of a critical approach is probably due
to his unfamiliarity with nuances of Javanese laws and his primary
orientation towards its literary aspects.
 Were Keyzer and Roorda, or the Dutch in general, the first
Westerners to engage with this Toehpah? Certainly not. Dutch
scholars, from Keyzer to P. J. Veth, have assumed that this
“Javanese text” was compiled at the instruction of Governor General
Herman Willem Daendels. Roorda specifically wrote that it was
written under the supervision of Daendels as a handbook of
indigenous laws for judges. During the French and British
interregnum in Java between 1806 and 1816, the English
administrators and scholars briefly dealt with the text. Keyzer himself
talks about a manuscript copy he found at the British Museum with
the title Tufah, A Treatise on Mahomedan Law Translated for Me by
the Chief of Samarang Adimangolo.79 The very production of this
proves the interactive band between colonial officers and their elite
subjects, especially as the British managed to produce and procure
several manuscripts through intermediaries from the socio-religious
elites in their short interregnum in Java.80 For both Dutch and British
colonial administrations the Toehpah offered a promising terrain of
legal exchanges with identifications of indigenous law. It was a
continuum of Western exploration into the norms and laws of colonial
subjects who “deviated” from “true” Islam and its laws and knew
nothing about their own religion – a notion that began to prevail in
the European fuqahāʾ estate. The scholarly-cum-colonialist project
was thus justified not only in colonial terms but in Islamic terms too,
and the standard Toehpah promised to be a treasure of “true” Islamic
law written and produced in the indigenous language itself.
But this approach faced much criticism, especially from the civil
servants and ethnographers who had been working in the region for
a long time. They questioned this approach towards the Javanese
legal cultures with its overemphasis on the value of Islam. W. R. van
Hoevell, a contemporary colonial officer, wrote that the actual law
should be found in the everyday lives and practices of the natives,
their customs and traditions, which are different from the norms of
Islam.81 The critic asked Keyzer that the education of aspirant
colonial civil servants should lay stress on “the local customs and
native languages rather than on ‘pure’ and ‘universal’ Islamic law
and classical Arabic”.82 The critics of Roorda said that the Toehpah
was nothing but a marginal text to the Javanese legal traditions, and
even to its literary and linguistic cultures.83 In a eulogy, the famous
ethnographer Veth wrote that Roorda gave a high importance to the
Kitab Toehpah, even leading one of his students to identify it as
“Corpus Juris Javanum”, whereas it never became a point of
reference in court procedures and it was read only by the Javanese
santri (religious scholars) as a diversion. He said Roorda had very
little knowledge of the ground, for Javanese people are far less
Islamic than they are presented in their literature.84 The text may
have originally been produced as a book of Islamic law in Javanese,
but it “has never been used as a judicial guide in Java, and its
reputation [of usefulness] for officials is therefore of very limited
practical appeal”.85
To what extent was the Toehpah an indigenous law book, as
Keyzer and Roorda emphasised and their critics denied? In the
1920s, Levie De Vries tried to answer this question by comparing the
Javanese Toehpah with Ibn Ḥajar’s Tuḥfa. He considered that the
former depended significantly on the latter but included additions and
deletions.86 By his time, the colonial scenario and related legal
practices had fully tilted towards “the discovery of customary laws”
(ontdekking van adatrecht), and therefore a conclusion on the
Islamic nature of Javanese legal traditions was no more relevant in
the larger colonial law project. De Vries was fully aware of this shift
and he himself was affiliated to a project led by the Dutch jurist-
scholars Van Vollenhoven and Hurgronje to recognise and compile
customary laws. Even if his work of text-centric Shāfiʿī law was far
away from the contemporary trend, he translated the articles of the
Toehpah and identified each article in relation to the sections of the
Arabic Tuḥfa. Most of the articles he compared were the sections
related to marriage, contracts and inheritance. He also recognised
that fifteen articles of the Toehpah are not taken from the Tuḥfa, and
argued that those might be from different sources.87
 Translating the Minhaj
All the contributions of Keyzer and Roorda related to Shāfiʿīsm and
Dutch translations of similar works were continued by another Dutch
scholar, L. W. C. van den Berg, who returned to the base text of the
Tuḥfa. He continued the quest to uncover legal traditions of the
colonies and stressed that the focus should be on the texts used by
Muslims. He argued that the Ghāya that Keyzer had translated was
less influential in the Dutch East Indies, while the Minhāj was the
most important text among Shāfiʿīs. Accordingly, he translated it into
French in the 1880s in three volumes as Minhâdj at-talibîn; Le guide
des zélés croyants: Manuel de jurisprudence Musulmane selon le
rite de Chafi’i. At the time, he was working in Indonesia as an advisor
to the colonial government and the translation project directly
emerged from his role as counsellor in the administration.
Van den Berg was born and brought up in Haarlem and was
educated in Leiden, where he submitted a dissertation in 1868 on
the contract of sale in Islamic law.88 He was well versed in Malay,
Arabic, Javanese and many European languages. After graduation,
he voyaged to the Dutch East Indies and served the colonial
government in several administrative posts, including a newly
created distinguished position of advisor on “Indische” and
“Oostersche” languages and Muslim law, a post he held from 1878
until 1887 when he translated the Minhāj.89 Eventually he returned to
the Netherlands and taught at Delft for several years.
 Throughout his administrative and academic career, van den
Berg contributed to the scholarship on Islamic law in general and
Shāfiʿīsm in particular. His translation of the Minhāj was a
continuation of his many deep engagements with Islamic law. After
publishing his dissertation on Islamic sales contract within a year of
graduation, he also wrote De Beginselen van het
Mohammedaansche Recht on Islamic legal doctrines according to
Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī schools.90 It garnered much appreciation as well
as much criticism.91 He also wrote on several other aspects of
Indonesian culture, such as the customary laws and the prominent
Ḥaḍramī migrant communities.92 He did not hesitate to spell out the
colonial motivation behind his interest in Islamic legal texts:

From year to year European control over Muslim peoples is

extending, so that it is unnecessary to insist upon the
importance of rendering the two works that form the basis of the
legal literature of the Shāfiʿī school accessible, not only to a
small number of Arabic scholars, but also to magistrates and
political agents to whom that language continue for the most
part to be unfamiliar.93

Most of his translations were funded by the colonial government: “In

the Netherlands there is a special interest as the great majority of
Muslims among its subjects follow the Shāfiʿī school. That is why the
Government has decided to appoint me” to undertake the
translation.94
On the basis of his knowledge of Islamic law and practical
experiences in the region, he realised the potential of the Minhāj in
the Shāfiʿī realm. In the preface to his translation he discusses two
prominent Shāfiʿī textual families, one belonging to the Ghāya of Abū
Shujāʿ and the other to the Muḥarrar of Rāfiʿī. The Ghāya family was
known through such commentaries as the Fatḥ al-qarīb (aka Taqrīb)
by Ghazzī and supercommentaries such as the one by Ibrāhīm al-
Bājūrī. The Muḥarrar family was known through the Minhāj and its
commentaries. He rules out the Ghāya group, used only marginally
(d’utilité minime) in the Dutch Indies, and gives prominence to the
Muḥarrar family, for there is no other appropriate and useful text than
the Minhāj for judicial administrators and aspirants of Islamic law.95 It
“occupies the first rank for deciding legal cases”.96
For the translation, he used four different manuscripts of the
text: two from Société des Arts des Sciences in Batavia, one from H.
N. van der Tuuk (originally written in Sumatra) and another from
Leiden University Library. He also referred to the source and
successor texts of the Minhāj such as the Muḥarrar, Maḥallī, Tuḥfa
and Ramlī’s Nihāya. He consulted manuscripts of these texts from
the archipelago, most of them containing Javanese or Malay
interlinear translations, which also helped him in the translation
process.97 He says that he took some liberties in the translation, as
he did not venture to translate literally, for it would have been
incomprehensible. In this liberal translation, these texts and their
Malay and Javanese interlinear translations became very useful. The
translation is systematic and organised with enumeration and
categorisation. The organisation of chapter divisions, sub-divisions
and side headings make it easy to follow.
 The work provides a comprehensive picture of Shāfiʿī law as it
appears in the Minhāj and beyond, from criminal and civil laws to
ritual and procedural laws, in contrast to previous European
translations such as Mogharaer Code, Freijer Code or Kitab
Toehpah, all of which had only partial discussions of specific
sections. He had reservations about Islamic criminal laws and
expressed that on the very first page of the introduction, but he did
not omit them in the translation or discuss them in the relevant
section. His disapproval of Islamic criminal laws was rooted in
contemporary European discourses and colonial administration. In
Europe, there were serious calls for revising penal procedures and
banishing much penal torture.98 In the colonies, European
governments paid attention to criminal laws as early as the
seventeenth century while they tended to leave civil laws to the
attention of the colonised. Van den Berg was influenced by such
discursive trends, as he calls the “oriental” punishments in the text
barbaric and archaic (barbares, anciennemet).99
The selection of French as the target language for a translation
to be published in Batavia by this Dutchman needs comment. Dutch
was van den Berg’s mother-tongue and the official language of the
colony; Latin was the contemporary European academic language.
He must have chosen French, though he does not state this
explicitly, because it was the language of law in the homeland. The
contemporary Dutch civil legal system was greatly influenced by and
formulated from the French Code Civil, after a new Dutch law code
had come into force in 1838 breaking away from the older diverse
local customary laws. Writing, translating or introducing a law book in
French therefore had the appeal of legitimacy in legal circles. Also,
Islamic law as an area of study had already developed in French
academia by the mid-nineteenth century. Many French Arabists and
administrators had undertaken projects for identifying and analysing
native laws of French colonies in such parts of Muslim Africa as
Algeria.100 He must have realised the promise of this burgeoning
field, to which he wanted to relate his work. His predecessor Keyzer
had done the same when he translated the Ghāya into French.
The translation of Minhāj became a matter of heated debate
between the translator and his ardent critic, Snouck Hurgronje. Their
debate shows the internal dynamics of the “Dutch fuqahāʾ estate”
and more broadly the European fuqahāʾ estate in the late nineteenth
century. Hurgronje had been haunting van den Berg over several
years, questioning the legitimacy and validity of many of his
decisions and arguments. Hurgronje was a young man who had just
submitted his doctoral dissertation at Leiden at the age of twenty-
three, while van den Berg was an established author and colonial
advisor. After the first volume of the translation appeared, Hurgronje
questioned the very integrity of the translator. He appreciated the
translator’s selection of the text for its relevance not only among
Muslims of the East Indies but also for Islamic jurisprudence. Indeed,
it is a “guide for the zealous believers” and the French translation is
smooth to read. However, he criticised it on several other grounds.
He wrote that its inclusion of the Arabic original was superfluous. It
would cater for the needs of neither civil servants, most of whom do
not read Arabic, nor of Muslims, as they have access to better edited
and printed versions. He also carped about mistranslations of
several critical Islamic legal terms, and pointed out some errata in
the printed Arabic original, mostly rectified by M. J. de Goeje.101
Van den Berg replied by saying that such criticisms from a
“young practitioner of Muhammadan law” would not affect him as the
work had already been received well both inside and outside the
country and his satisfaction rested in their acknowledgement.102
Hurgronje retaliated by saying that as far as he knew only one
review (aankonding) had been published thus far, by a German
emeritus clergyman, who had himself remarked that the title of the
Minhāj had been left untranslated. Therefore, the translator’s claim
for a national and international reception was nothing but pure
naivety.103 Van den Berg counterattacked by questioning Hurgronje’s
knowledge of law and language.104 He admitted the difficulties he
had faced when translating a legal text, but then proceeded to
humiliate Hurgronje about his “broken knowledge of French” and
“obsession and enchantment with the results of his own research”,
and asserted that no one in the East Indies had found his review
impressive.
This motivated Hurgronje to write a devastating 162-page
review of van den Berg’s De Beginselen the following year, in which
again the Minhāj came to the forefront. He responded to each point
made by van den Berg, and took each section of the De Beginselen
to point out its numerous weaknesses. He accused the author of an
“indolence-nurtured foolishness”.105 Van den Berg responded with a
comparatively lengthy “self-defence”. Only in this response did he
address many criticisms which he had ignored earlier. However, he
did not forget to ridicule Hurgronje again about his youth,
unfamiliarity with law and lack of legal knowledge to comprehend the
arguments.106 In the following decades, both of them attacked each
other, or mostly Hurgronje attacked van den Berg, and their
respective associates. Many colonial subjects or intermediaries
gained or lost from this academic rivalry. Sayyid ʿUthmān, a Ḥaḍramī
scholar in Batavia, sided with Hurgronje in order to strengthen his
influence among Muslims and the colonial authorities by positioning
himself as an authority on Islamic law, especially in inheritance and
family laws, while he also tried to grant Hurgronje credibility in the
eyes of his co-religionists as well as Dutch colonial elites.107
Hurgronje attacked Muḥammad bin Ḥasan Bābahīr, another
Ḥaḍramī scholar based in the region, who had helped van den Berg
in translating the Minhāj. Bābahīr was a member of chambre des
tutelles et successions in Batavia, and a “native informant” of van
den Berg through coloniser–colonised contacts within the
Orientalists’ framework. He had helped him in preparing his magnum
opus Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l’archipel Indien,
one of the first academic works on Ḥaḍramī migrants in Southeast
Asia. This long-standing relationship motivated Hurgronje to criticise
Bābahīr and to accuse him of lacking sufficient knowledge of Islamic
law compared to Sayyid ʿUthmān, his own native informant.108
Three decades after the heated disputes between Hurgronje
and van den Berg on this translation and its reception outside the
Netherlands, a major marker of its acceptance came in 1914 in the
form of an English translation. Based entirely on van den Berg’s
work, this translation was done by a British judge in Singapore, E. C.
Howard, and was printed in London, Calcutta and Shimla. This
English rendering of a Shāfiʿī text by a British judge was an
interesting development for several reasons. The British Empire and
its “fuqahāʾ” were mainly Ḥanafī (in comparison to the Dutch empire
and its fuqahāʾ who were Shāfiʿī, the French were Mālikī and the
Germans partly Ibāḍī and partly Shāfiʿī), in the sense that they
engaged in the main with schools that the majority of their colonial
Muslim subjects followed. Therefore, the British Empire and its
Anglophone scholarly and legal circles had been interested in the
Ḥanafī school since the eighteenth century thanks to the prominence
of that school in South Asia. Except for a misguided translation of a
Shāfiʿī text on inheritance law for the use of British colonial officials
in the 1780s, the British had rarely ventured beyond Ḥanafī law.109
But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the empire had
also amassed a significant Shāfiʿī population under its tutelage in the
Indian Ocean littoral from East Africa to East Asia. In the colonial
legal administration, an Islamic text of the Shāfiʿī school was
therefore necessary, and Howard addressed this need by translating
the Minhāj from French.
Howard worked mainly in Singapore, which had already seen
the arrival of many Shāfiʿīs from Malay and Coromandel regions. He
does not elaborate on his intentions behind the translation. In a very
short prefatory note, he appreciates van den Berg’s contributions to
Islamic law and quotes his statement cited earlier on the importance
of translating Shāfiʿī legal literature to address the increasing
European control over Muslims and to help magistrates and political
agents. Howard only adds that “this being as true now as it was
twenty years ago it is thought advisable to publish an English
translation of … the Minhaj et Talibin”.110 The translation seems to
have been well received in Singapore and English circles at large, as
a reviewer wrote at that time that it “has been exceedingly well done
… we can say that in reading through this translation the clearness
of the diction has struck us as a distinguished feature, so that there
is no passage really obscure and few that require a second perusal
to grasp the full purport”.111
The French translation of the Minhāj by a Dutch scholar and its
English rendering reflect the ways in which the Shāfiʿī textual longue
durée extended globally and was made to stand in the service of
colonial legal aspirations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. They show the urge of colonial machinery and its
supportive intelligentsia to familiarise themselves with Islamic legal
systems which they wanted to be implemented in their colonies, as
the imperial governments themselves financed the translation
projects, and the translator-jurist-scholars were on the colonial
governments’ payrolls. The critical discourses on the production of
these texts also demonstrate the intellectual dynamics and rival
competitions evolved in its fuqahāʾ estate, in many ways similar to
those we discussed in the case of Ibn Ḥajar at the beginning of his
career in Cairo (Chapter 5). This history also reflects scholarly
persuasions exerted by colonial mechanisms for Islamic legal texts,
and their attempts to reform indigenous legal systems in accordance
with their ideas and objectives.
 A German Wave
Similar to the Dutch and British entanglements with Shāfiʿī texts,
German colonial aspirations in East Africa also resulted in another
wave of translation. The German administrators and scholars also
considered mastery of Islamic legal texts to be one of the best ways
to handle law-and-order issues among their Muslim subjects,
especially as the German East African Company sought different
ways to subjugate its population when its protectorates expanded
from Tanganyika to Bagamoyo, Dar es-Salam and Kilwa. They had
met serious resistance in the 1880s and 1890s, such as the Abushiri
Revolt in 1888–1889 by their Arab and Swahili subjects, and the
Hehe tribal insurrection under the leadership of Chief Mkwawa
between 1891 and 1898. Along with many other resolutions, the
company’s administrators realised the importance of indigenous
legal traditions and endeavoured to codify them by translating and
annotating related texts. This was done with the help of several
German scholars, the most prominent among them being the
Orientalist Eduard Sachau, who in 1897 translated Ibrāhīm Bājūrī’s
supercommentary (known only as the Ḥāshiya) on Ghazzī’s
commentary Fatḥ al-qarīb on the Ghāya as Muhammedanisches
Recht nach schafiitischer Lehre. (As mentioned earlier, both Ghāya
and Fatḥ al-qarīb were translated into French by Keyzer and van den
Berg respectively). In the preface, Sachau clearly states the
relevance of the source text and the aim of his translation in
alleviating the German administration’s tasks in East African Muslim
areas.112

Figure 8.2 Title pages of some European translations or editions

of Shāfiʿī texts

Sachau had published occasionally on Islamic law for three decades

before this, as part of his larger explorations into the “Oriental” legal
traditions of such diverse groups as Syrian Nestorian Christians and
Sassanids. In the 1860s he wrote on the early history of Islamic law,
presenting a general picture of the foundations and formative
differences of legal schools.113 Although his source analyses and
arguments were analogous to the traditional Muslim narratives, this
study followed German academic contributions to Islamic legal
historiography initiated by such scholars as Ferdinand Wüstenfeld,
who, among other works, had written a biography of Nawawī back in
1849.114 Before he published his translation, Sachau had conducted
field research in East Africa to understand the binding legal systems
there.115 During this ethnographic research, he had employed
methods of questionnaires (to which only one Ibāḍī scholar
responded) and interviews (in which many Shāfiʿī jurists responded)
among the fuqahāʾ of Zanzibar and on the Ibāḍī school and its
inheritance laws.116
Against the backdrop of his own engagements with Islamic law,
Sachau undertook the project of translating the Ḥāshiya and he did
so in a way that perfectly fits two trends of his time: the general trend
in Western Europe of translating Islamic legal texts as a means to
facilitate colonial administrations, and the particular trend initiated by
Keyzer of translating the works from the Ghāya family of Shāfiʿīsm.
With regard to the former, the preface of Muhammedanisches Recht
opens by articulating both how the colonial expansions have brought
so many Muslim lands under the aegis of Christian empires and
rulers – as can be seen in British India, Dutch Indies, Algeria and
Russia, not to mention in German East Africa – and just how
important law has become for controlling the new subjects. He also
enlists the earlier attempts by the Europeans to deal with Islamic
law, such as those of Warren Hastings, Charles Hamilton and
William Jones in eighteenth-century British India, to translate Islamic
legal texts and to formulate new codes that merge colonial projects
with Islamic traditions.117 Through these descriptions, he asserts his
own position in that longer genealogy of scholarship that aimed at
taming Muslim subjects. He also tells us his trajectory in dealing with
Islamic law over the course of the three decades, from his first article
on this subject to the present work. He says that while Germany
hardly possessed any Muslim lands then, the situation has changed
entirely and a better grasp of Islamic law now has a broader
appeal.118
On the Ḥāshiya of Bājūrī itself Sachau wrote: “It is among the
great and latest commentaries of Shāfiʿī Islam. It enjoys the largest
authority not only in the University in Cairo and in Egypt, but also in
other parts such as in East Africa.”119 He firmly believed in its
internal strength as an outstanding text of Shāfiʿī law, especially
when compared to overly precise texts such as the Minhāj or the
complicated commentaries. He also commented on Bājūrī’s legal
approach: “[H]e corrects many a mistake, gives a sharper form to
many a rule, and adds a lot of facts worth knowing, be it from his
own or from other sources.” Sachau does not translate Ḥāshiya word
for word. Rather he utilises it to produce a codified form of Islamic
law, as van den Berg did in the Minhāj translation. He also makes
use of other known commentaries and supercommentaries within
and beyond the Ghāya family in supplementing his process of
cultural translation, going outside the text of the Ḥāshiya yet
informing the readers on the parameters of the school to which it had
belonged. Whereas Bājūrī followed a traditional method of writing a
supercommentary (i.e. by breaking up each sentence or phrase into
its components to analyse the linguistic, theological, scriptural and/or
historical values embedded in the legalistic articulations), Sachau
pays more attention to the content and rulings. To this end, he
subdivides each chapter into numbered articles that follow the form
and language of codes, yet without altering the start content. He
skips over parts of the Ḥāshiya related to criminal laws or public
laws, for he considered them too cruel or too controversial for the
likes of the German administration.120
Once the translation appeared, it was well received in the
German and English clusters. The Dutch scholar Hurgronje criticised
Sachau’s selection of the Ḥāshiya, suggesting that he should have
instead translated Sharwānī’s supercommentary on the Tuḥfa as it
was well known and most relied among Shāfiʿīs of the time.121 This
suggestion seems to stem from an improper generalisation on the
basis of Hurgronje’s experience in Mecca and Southeast Asia. Given
that Sharwānī was a teacher of Shāfiʿī law in the city for a long time,
it comes as no surprise that he was certainly known in Mecca and in
the regions associated with it. In contrast, Bājūrī’s career was
centred in Cairo, which is closer to the Swahili educational and
cultural realms than Mecca. Thus, his Ḥāshiya circulated widely
among Swahili Shāfiʿīs (as Sachau himself attests in the preface)
than Sharwānī’s work on the Tuḥfa. Hurgronje overlooks this
regional difference. Notwithstanding this criticism, the work was used
by German jurists and administrators in the region when they were
involved in legal issues pertaining to Muslims. The English in East
Africa also must have made use of the work, as one reviewer
anticipated: “It will even prove very useful to English jurisconsults in
Eastern Africa, because the Shafiite rite is there the ruling one.”122
The same reviewer also thought that the book offered excellent
arguments for those who had been campaigning for the
establishment of an Oriental School in London (which eventually
materialised as the School of Oriental and African Studies).
How about the reception of the Fatḥ and its commentaries
among the European fuqahāʾ? We do not see such intensive
engagements from European Islamicists with it as we see with the
Minhāj, Tuḥfa, or Ghāya and Fatḥ al-qarīb. The text and its
commentaries seem to have attracted only some fleeting references
by Europeans. Among them are Hurgronje’s comment on its use in
Mecca, and on its commentator Sayyid Bakrī in the late nineteenth
century, Hazeu’s reference to it in the early twentieth century, and
van den Berg’s remark on its readership in Java.123 It might have
been marginal in the European fuqahāʾ estate, while it thrived
among Afrasian Shāfiʿī fuqahāʾ in the same period. This is not to
forget the direct administrative use of the text in the colonial courts of
British India. The British engaged with the Fatḥ at the end of the
eighteenth century when they dealt with Hindu and Muslim laws in
the subcontinent.124 Despite the prominence of the Ḥanafī school in
the region, Shāfiʿīsm made its way into the British colonial courts
through Malabar, which they had taken over from Tipu sultan of
Mysore in 1792. The Shāfiʿī Māppiḷa Muslims of Malabar made their
differences known to the colonial jurists. While administering civil
laws pertaining to Muslims, the existing translation of Islamic legal
texts such as the Hidāya were futile there as they only led to
numerous confusions even among judges when they sought the
opinions of Muslim jurists (mawlavis). At this point, Muslim jurists
from Malabar suggested the relevance of the Fatḥ in understanding
the legal practices of Māppiḷa Muslims during the legal proceedings
in the colonial district court as early as 1794.125 In that decade, the
British officer John William Wye also translated the traditional
literature of Malabar. He was a medical officer by training and
profession, but had immense interest in the indigenous literature and
made corresponding English translations, funded by the government,
one of which included Zayn al-Dīn’s own Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn.126 We
do not know whether he endeavoured to translate Zayn al-Dīn’s Fatḥ
itself in the course of his translation projects, although the English
officials in the region were aware of its importance as a major source
of law among the Malabar Muslims.
 Newer Circulations
The translations of Shāfiʿī texts in Afro-Eurasia burgeoned along with
and benefited from the contemporary developments and
popularisation of industrial technologies such as the printing press,
steam shipping, and postal and railway services. Utilising these
facilities, the translations as well as the original texts circulated
across and beyond the Indian Ocean. In Chapter 7 we saw how
Shāfiʿī authors wrote their works in direct conversation with print
technology, and that was a remarkable shift from the manuscript
cultures with which the Shāfiʿī textual tradition had been most
familiar. Similarly, postal, railway and shipping communications also
became crucial to the wider production and distribution of these
texts. In the age of manuscripts, too, the textual flows could and did
become transregional, utilising for example the Mamlūk and Ottoman
official postal structures, but the quantity and pace increased along
with the mass production through printing and the increase in
accessible services across many imperial infrastructures.127
Each Arwī and Malabārī catalogue from the early twentieth
century provides insights into how the Shāfiʿī Muslims utilised new
industrial infrastructures to circulate books across the Indian Ocean
from the Coromandel and Malabar coasts to Sri Lanka, Vietnam,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, among others. The twenty-page
Arwī catalogue attached to a mid-nineteenth-century compilation of
ḥadīths published in 1912 provides a list of available trade books
together with a “manifesto of book distribution”.128 After the title
(fihrist kutub 1331/1913 “Catalogue of Books 1331/1913”), the cover
page tells us that “in stock we have now different Qurʾāns, Arabu-
Tamil kitabs, Tamil books (puttakaṅṅaḷ), perfumes, kohl and other
fragrance materials”. On the next page, there are detailed guidelines
including on buying the available books, their quality, prices and
profits, justifications for taking profits, methods of mailing such as
Railway Mail Service and Value Payable Post, difficulties with the
railway postal service and some irresponsible buyers who order
books but never bother to collect them. It also says that since there
is no railway in Saigon and Cochin China, it is not possible to send
books there. In total, there are about twenty-five such articles in this
detailed manifesto in which we get to see how an Islamic publisher
and distributor utilised, controlled and guided the technologies of
postage and railway to sell the printed books imported from all over
the world. It also invokes Islamic scriptures against irresponsible
customers who provide wrong or incomplete postal addresses or do
not collect books upon their arrival at the railway station or post
office so that these packages are returned, causing financial damage
to the distributor and physical damage to the books. It cites the
Prophet Muḥammad: “Two things above which there is nothing more
meritorious: faith in God and helping Muslims. Two things above
which there is nothing more evil: deify anyone besides Allah and
making life difficult for Muslims.”129 It is interesting to see how the
catalogue invokes such a Prophetic saying in order to admonish its
clientele over irresponsible behaviour towards the postal
infrastructure, and thus to its commercial network.
 Once we come to the actual list of books, there is a wide variety
of genres, topics, subjects, languages, and so on, all of which point
to the kind of works widely used by ordinary Muslims in the oceanic
littoral. The sections vary from multiple editions of Qurʾāns (from
locally produced ones to “Istanbul Qurʾāns”), litanies and chants,
stories and songs, books on mysticism, theology and ḥadīths, advice
manuals and law books. Many books are available with a leather or
calico binding, with corresponding variations in price. In the section
on law, it has separate headings for Ḥanafī and Shāfiʿī works (Mālikī
and Ḥanbalī schools are not mentioned, pointing to their
insignificance among the immediate Indian Ocean clientele). For the
Shāfiʿī school, the works are mostly textbooks for students,
translated directly or indirectly from Arabic into Tamil, but it also lists
other commentarial translations. The catalogue says that if anyone
wants to order other books not mentioned in the catalogue,
commissions would be taken for externally ordering such books.
The wide range of books and their international distribution
promised in this Arwī catalogue from early twentieth-century Madras
represents a broader pattern of book circulations in the oceanic
littoral in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A comparable
catalogue has survived from the Malabar coast from the same time –
in fact from four years earlier – with similar content and
advertisements given simultaneously in Malayalam, Tamil, Urdu and
Arabic, addressing a larger audience.130 Among the books available
with them for sale, it is remarkable that one of the largest category is
tarjamas (with 152 titles), many of which are Shāfiʿī translations,
while the Fatḥ itself features prominent in the section on law books.
Although not for legal texts per se, Nile Green has analysed this
large network of books in the oceanic rim centred around Bombay
but stretching as far as Central Asia and South Africa. These
catalogues and their direct engagement in Arwī and Malabārī to an
audience in the larger oceanic world excluding Cochin China and
Saigon indicate the South Indian Muslim communities that were
travelling extensively in the period. It was indeed an age of increased
mobility for Shāfiʿī Muslims too. Many of them travelled voluntarily or
involuntarily, as migrants, indentured labourers, convicts or prisoners
to all corners of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Indentured labourers, political prisoners, convicts and exiles
were forced to travel long distances to unknown destinations and
some carried a handful of their books wherever they went. Some
who did not have their own texts wrote new ones for the new
audience they happen to meet en route or at their destination. A
telling example is Shaykh Yūsuf al-Maqāssarī (1627–1699), a
Sulawesi scholar educated in Aceh and Mecca, who was deported in
the seventeenth century to Sri Lanka and then to South Africa by the
Dutch East India Company for his involvement in the Banten War
against the Dutch. He authored texts such as Nafḥat al-saylāniyya
(Breeze of Ceylon) and Barakat al-saylāniyya (Blessing of Ceylon)
during his exile in Sri Lanka, addressing several itinerants from his
homeland who met him on their way to or from Arabia.131 He must
have continued this habit of writing mystical, ethical and advisory
texts for his new audience during his further deportation to Cape
Town, where he spent the final years of his life. Shaykh Yūsuf and
his successors, such as Tuan Guru (d. 1807) and Achmat van
Bengalen (1750–1843), wrote Islamic scriptures and texts entirely
from memory, catering for an increasing Muslim (Shāfiʿī) population
in the region. While they were convicts and prisoners in South Africa
making use of their limited resources in constricted spaces in that
age of manuscripts, the traditions they created were advanced in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century through Arabic-Afrikaans
(Afrikaans written in Arabic script). For Shāfiʿī texts, the most
important contributions came from scholars such as Ismāʿīl bin
Muhammad Hanīf, who translated several authoritative Shāfiʿī texts
into Afrikaans.
As with the Dutch expulsions of Indonesian Muslims, the British
and French deported several Shāfiʿī Muslims as convicts and
indentured labourers. Muslim communities, now known as
Malabaris, began to arrive in distant places such as Mauritius and
Madagascar. They were not all from the Malabar coast, but from the
whole of south India, especially from the present-day regions of
Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Some asserted their Shāfiʿī identity, carried
related texts, or ordered translations from their homeland, as some
Malabārī texts in private collections in Fiji in the South Pacific
indicate. One such group was the Māppiḷa Muslims, who were
deported from Malabar to many newly acquired British territories and
settlements as far away as Botany Bay in Australia. The Māppiḷas
had rebelled against the new regime as soon as the British had
taken over Malabar in the late eighteenth century, and the British
suppressed them through bloody massacres, life-long imprisonment,
collective punishments of whole villages, and massive deportations.
The early rebel leaders were deported to Botany Bay or Saint
Helena in the South Atlantic until the mid-nineteenth century, but the
later rebels in the early twentieth century were mostly deported to
the Andaman Islands.132 In the early twentieth century, many
Māppiḷas were also transported as indentured labourers (girmitayas)
as far as Fiji in the Pacific.133 Their texts of litanies, literatures, laws
and lore travelled with them in these large-scale movements. From
both Fiji and the Andamans we find traces of early circulated texts,
especially as the Shāfiʿī communities there continue to maintain the
legal school and its texts as their distinctive identity from co-
religionists in the islands, such as the more numerous Ḥanafī
Muslims, who had also been deported there as convicts or
indentured labourers.134
The textual trail laid by these labourers and convicts across the
Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans are a fascinating area for study
for themselves as well as for Islamic law. To illustrate the extended
circulation of Islamic texts and praxis through the new industrial
infrastructures of steam engines and printing presses, the textual
possessions of Malabar Muslims in Fiji who arrived in the island
between 1903 and 1916 are telling examples. Their nominal
collections were enlivened after the establishment of the India
Maunatul Islam Association of Fiji in 1942, in opposition to the
predominant Ḥanafī organisation, the Fiji Muslim League. The
organisation itself replicates, even in its name, a prominent
association established in Ponnāni, where the Fatḥ was written.
Similarly, texts, translations and editions printed in Tamil Nadu
circulated beyond the Coromandel coast among the Tamil Shāfiʿīs in
Sri Lanka and elsewhere through the “circulatory regime” of the
Tamil language and literature.135 In fact, I traced the 1929 translation
edition (Tuḥfat al-ṭāmiʿīn) to a Sri Lankan university library, where it
had been catalogued and digitalised under its “Islamic Heritage
Collection”. It also circulated widely among Tamil Muslims of India,
Sri Lanka and possibly Singapore and Malaysia. New editions
printed in and around Kayalpatnam further explain the continuing
popularity of such translations.
Similar to the circulation of Islamic legal texts and their
translations by the Muslim publishers, distributors and authors, were
European colonial translations which also circulated across the same
oceanic littoral as if in multiple spheres. Thanks to the large-scale
imperial and colonial networks of information and scholarship across
Afro-Eurasia, the European texts circulated through wider regions
and enjoyed global production and distribution.
The earliest translation project, the Mogharaer Code, was
distributed in the landraad courts at Semarang, or the sub-courts in
its north-eastern coastal regencies. Although we do not know how
strictly the judges followed it in the proceedings, it certainly was a
reference point for the presiding judges, according to the mid-
eighteenth-century government orders for officials and members of
the landraad. It was also a legal framework for the fiscals to rely on
when investigating crimes and executing judgements. Because it
was written in Dutch, its copies were printed only on one side of the
page, giving space to provide translations on facing pages. We have
a handwritten translation in old Javanese, which indicates its use
and its intended audience.136 Another VOC legal text related to
Islam, the Freijer Code was printed both in Dutch and in Jāwī in two
separate columns on a single page.137 By the end of the century, the
Mogharaer Code seems to have become irrelevant and the judges
disregarded it in their verdicts. During the transition of power from
the Dutch to the English in the early nineteenth century, the head of
Eastern Javanese Districts, van Middelkoop, informed Raffles that
very few people had a copy of the compendium and that there had
been deviations from it. Instead, van Middelkoop suggests that the
Javanese followed different legal texts, such as Kitab Tophaar or
Hoena Hadjar [possibly Kitab Tuḥfa of Ibn Ḥajar].138 Some other
texts he mentions (Tatjoe Salatin, Bostan Salatin and Galela
Domina) are neither legal texts nor strictly “Javanese”, but are
chronicles and stories from South Asian, Persian, Arabic or
Acehnese contexts.139 Nevertheless, this correspondence suggests
that the code had become less appealing to the legal administration
in north eastern Java. The Freijer Code, on the other hand, was
circulated in Sri Lanka in the late eighteenth century, and it was
translated into English when the British took over the island nation.
The most elaborate translation project of the Minhāj, originally
by van den Berg into French and then retranslated into English,
gained success among contemporary lawyers, Islamicists, Arabists,
academic institutions and their curricula. Its transregional and global
characteristics were evident in its pre-production, with a Dutch
scholar translating an Arabic text into French, and in its production
(edited in the Netherlands and printed in Batavia), and then its post-
production trans-oceanic circulation. It was circulated in the colonial
academies of the Netherlands as well as among colonial courts and
jurists. It was used by judges across the Indian Ocean, in Bengal,
Zanzibar and the Malay world. A colonial Indian judge managed to
procure copies from Batavia to Calcutta with the help of the governor
general.140 It also occurs as a recurrent reference in the British
colonial judgements in Zanzibar.141 The Minhāj translation was not
an exceptional case, but many Islamic legal texts were used by
colonial judges across the Indian Ocean courts for several decades.
However, specific usages need to be explored.142
The Afrasian circulation of Islamic texts and translations did not
function entirely separately from the European circulation. The
former aimed to satisfy the pious act of teaching and preaching
Islamic law in local languages, while the other facilitated the colonial
administration of law and order. Many original texts for translation,
their commentaries, manuscripts and printed versions, were
collected and dispersed by Muslim authors to their European
counterparts. Such “native collectors” catered for the demands of
their European colonists by hunting down Islamic collections,
markets, booksellers and copyists. One telling example for our
purposes is Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat, a Javanese collaborator of
Hurgronje, who bought twenty-eight books in the mid-1880s in
Mecca and shipped them to his mentor in the Netherlands. In this list
of books we find several Shāfiʿī legal texts, including the Fatḥ.143
Such exchanges capture the zeitgeist of collaborations between
European and Afrasian fuqahāʾ estates through resources and ideas
in order to enhance each other’s understandings of Islam and the
law. It is even clearer in the partnerships between Hurgronje and
Sayyid ʿUthmān, and between van den Berg and Bābahīr.
 Taken together, the European, Asian and African jurists
advanced the textual longue durée of Shāfiʿīsm through their
translation projects. The entanglement of colonial expansion and
translation of Islamic legal texts is what is reflected in this Afro-
Eurasian textual hybrid, and that is what makes the translators and
their translations part of a longer and broader project within Islamic
legal history. All these translations testify to the longue durée of
Islamic legal texts, to which European scholarship also contributed
as a consequence of the colonial enterprises in South|East Asia and
Africa. Through the paradoxical, yet complementary cases of cultural
translation, it becomes evident that translation is not merely an act of
mediation between two different legal systems, nor is it an innocent
act of mutual exchange. Rather it is an act of vernacularisation,
resistance, reformulation, appropriation, domination and
colonisation, as much as a tool for economic exploitation, political
subjugation and cultural appropriation. Translation thus is not an
innocuous act of cultural mediation and production, but rather an
ideological, political and oppressive event.
 Conclusions
Translations of Islamic legal texts in the eighteenth to twentieth
centuries advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée through
vernacularisation and colonisation entangled with contemporaneous
technological developments. In the Indian Ocean littoral, translations
functioned as an extended arm of commentarial tradition, either with
or without actual commentaries. Multiple shades of translations, such
as commentarial, intermittent, interlinear, literal and tarjama
renderings, catalysed the vernacularisation of Islamic legal ideas as
expressed in the Shāfiʿī tradition. In this way, the Afrasian jurists
brought the unfamiliar and distant terrains of Islamic law to familiar
literary, social and cultural environs. They utilised the texts to
introduce and popularise Shāfiʿī laws among their audience as
authentic laws and teachings of Islam. They could insert their own
contextual inclinations and preferences through the translations
while conversing in the languages of their immediate audience yet
maintaining and subscribing to the broader legal and literary
traditions of the school.
The European counterparts utilised the same texts and similar
strategies to advance the colonial projects that their respective
governments had been undertaking. The imperial and academic
nexus worked together on the legal textual corpus as they thought
that law was the most appropriate resource to understand and
subjugate communities in the new lands under their control. The
European fuqahāʾ in and on the Islamic lands differed from the
Afrasian jurist-translators on several levels, primarily as they were
very keen to enforce what they had translated on their colonised
subjects through the imperial apparatus. They maintained, benefited
from and contributed to the unequal power structure inherent in their
colonial states, in contrast to the Afrasian jurists who rarely forced
their opinions on their audience and did not police them with state
backing. On the basis of this power imbalance, we see such a
colonial scholar as Snouck Hurgronje venturing to discredit the
scholarship of the Javanese Muslim jurists, and conducting exams to
test their knowledge in Islam and its laws.144 In such instances we
can clearly see how the European scholarly tradition forcefully
positioned itself above the existing knowledge traditions and
practitioners, and it entered and dominated the Indian Ocean legal
tradition by utilising the inherently oppressive mechanisms of
colonial administration of law, order and justice.
Not only in translations, but also in the larger text-based legal
ventures, the European colonial empires and their supporting
academic assemblages can be broadly divided into four on the basis
of the schools they had mostly dealt with. The largest colonial empire
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British Raj and its
jurists, mainly dealt with Ḥanafī school, which had the largest
following in South Asia. The French colonisers dealt mainly with the
Mālikī school since a majority of their colonial investments were in
North and West Africa where that school was followed. The
Germans mixed Ibāḍī and Shāfiʿī schools for their colonial ventures
in East Africa that had a prominent Ibāḍī population vis-à-vis the
majority Shāfiʿīs. The colonial empire that dealt most with the Shāfiʿī
school was that of the Dutch, in their possessions in Southeast Asia.
These divisions had implications for the ways in which the jurists
from these countries translated, debated and focused on the texts
and traditions of these respective schools. Although rare, the
clusters of these European fuqahāʾ estates did intersect as their
empires expanded. The best examples are the British colonisation of
the Malay world leading to the translation of Shāfiʿī texts into English
and the Francophone colonial legal projects entangled with the
French colonisation in the Indian Ocean hubs, such as the Comoros,
Coromandel and Cambodia, where Shāfiʿīsm also historically
strived.
The Asian, African and European fuqahāʾ also conversed with
one another, notwithstanding the inherent power imbalance. Many
European jurists translated the works with immense help from their
“native informants”, as we see in Bābahīr helping van den Berg to
translate the Minhāj, in several penghulus who allegedly helped the
VOC officials to translate the Muḥarrar, and in many Swahili-Arab
jurists who responded to Sachau’s queries. Given the hierarchies
and racial structures of imperialism and colonialism, it should not be
surprising that the whole credit for erudition accompanying the
translations went to European translators, who in turn blamed
mistakes partially on the native scholars.145
Individually and collectively, the Asian, African and European
translations of Islamic texts into vernacular and colonial languages
was greatly assisted by technological developments such as printing,
steamboats, and postal and railway services. These new
technologies facilitated, advanced and intensified the circulation of
the translated and original texts through mass production and
distribution. The technologies helped or forced an unprecedented
number of people to travel to diverse destinations, and the
consequent circulations of Shāfiʿī ideas and texts extended from the
Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean to the islands and mainlands of
the Pacific and the Atlantic. The indentured labourers, exiles,
convicts, migrants and diasporas carried the texts as one of the few
material possessions that they could cling to in their arduous
journeys across the globe. Legal texts and their translations may
have lost their function in courts and institutional judicial proceedings
on such voyages, but they still represented basic sources of religious
knowledge, tangible spirituality and sacred palimpsests of one’s
homeland, its memories and morals. For those who did continue to
be interested in the religion, its laws and frameworks, especially in
subsequent generations, as well as for some colonial judges and
jurists, steamships, postal services and long railways provided entry
points into extensive networks for printed books. A Tamil distributor
from Madras could, and did, send books to his co-religionists in the
Caribbean. In that process, books, authors, translators, publishers
and distributors extended the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis and its textual
longue durée far and wide. This had significant implications for the
prevailing legal, literary, cultural and social communities of Asia,
Africa, Europe, Australia and the Americas, sending out waves of
legalistic interactions across time and space.
1For example, compare the citations of ḥadīths and chants in
Ranīrī, Ṣirāṭ, BL Or. 15979, fols. 11b, 13a, 16a.

2 Shaykh Faqīh ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Kitāb al-nikāḥ, Leiden University

Library Special Collections (henceforth Leiden) MS. Or. 6702.

3 Kitāb pada menyatakan ḥukum nikāḥ, Leiden MS. Or. 12155

(formerly Oph. 33), and another copy: Leiden MS. Or. 12177. This
manuscript uses the Minhāj and its commentaries by Anṣārī and
Maḥallī, while another short text translates and comments on
portions of the Tuḥfa in Malay: Leiden MS. Or. 17903, fols. 160a–
167b.

4A. L. Tibawi, “Is the Qurʾān Translatable?”, The Muslim World 52,
no. 1 (1962): 4–16.

5Muḥammad bin Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd al-
Muṭṭalib (Mansura: Dār al-Wafāʾ, 2001), 5: 647.

6P. A. Hussain Djajadiningrat, “Islam in Indonesia”, in Islam: The

Straight Path: Islam Interpreted by Muslims, ed. Kenneth W.
Morgan (Delhi: Motlilal Banarsidass Publishers, [1958] 1993), 383.

7Nawawi, Minhāj, Leiden MS. Or. 6893, fols. 393b–394b; Leiden

MS. Or. 18273, passim. Also see Leiden MS. Or. 26331 with
Malay/Javanese interlinear translations.

8 Leiden MS. Or. 2287. This is a multi-text manuscript, see later on

this genre.

9Nawawi, Minhāj, Or. 26331; Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, Leiden MS. Or.

3051. The Muḥarrar is also subject to a similar treatment in a
multi-text manuscript in which disconnected passages from it are
given along with Javanese texts: Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, Leiden MS. Or.
5720, fols. 62a–80a and 81b–185a.

10 Ibn Qāsim al-Ghazzī, Fatḥ al-qarīb, School of Oriental and

African Studies London, MS. 174234. The Egyptian
supercommentary is by Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī, on which the German
scholar Eduard Sachau depended for his translation.

11Ronit Ricci, “Reading between the Lines: A World of Interlinear

Translation”, Journal of World Literature 1, no. 1 (2016): 68–80.

12 The multi-text manuscripts (henceforth MTM) brought together

selected portions from various texts, genres, periods, etc. They
are the subject of an interdisciplinary area of study, see Michael
Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke, eds. One-Volume Libraries:
Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2016). I cite such manuscripts without titles and authors’ names.
MTM, Leiden MS. Or. 2126, fols. 53–145.

13 MTM, Leiden MS. Or. 6481 (Hazeu No. 218), fols. 164–173. For
another copy, see MTM, Leiden MS. Or. 6586 (Hazeu No. 175),
fols. 381–394.

14 MTM, Leiden MS. Or. 6534, fols. 195–197.

15Henri Chambert-Loir, “Islamic Law in 17th Century Aceh”,

Archipel 94 (2017): 51–96.

16 The best examples are the oldest Swahili poem, the Hamziya, a
translation of Būṣīrī’s poem of the same title, as well as his Burda,
the Bānat Suʿād and the Kitabu Mauludi from Barzanjī’s Maulid
Nazam, Jan Knappert, Swahili Islamic Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 1971),
19–24.

17 Carl Heinrich Becker, “Materials for the Understanding of Islam

in German East Africa, 1876–1933”, Tanzania Notes and Records:
The Journal of The Tanzania Society 68 (1968): 31–61; Roman
Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics
of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

18 Anne K. Bang, Personal communication, 7 April 2020.

19 On this practice at large, see Andreas Görke and Konrad

Hirschler, eds. Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources
(Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2011).

20Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, Leiden MSS. Or. 3051 and Or. 11962; Nawawi,
Minhāj, Leiden MS. Or. 18.273, fols. 132–133, 263–264.

21Tayka Shuʿayb ʿĀlim, Arabic, Arwi, and Persian in Sarandib and

Tamil Nadu: A Study of the Contributions of Sri Lanka and Tamil
Nadu to Arabic, Arwi, Persian, and Urdu Languages, Literature,
and Education (Madras: Imāmul ʿArūs Trust for the Ministry of
State for Muslim Religious and Cultural Affairs, 1993), 284. He
says that it was printed in Madras in 1964 and he could not find its
copies. I have now located its two editions.

22Aḥmad Muḥy al-Dīn, Tuḥfat al-ṭāmiʿīn fī tarjamat Fatḥ al-muʿīn

(Madras: City Press, 1929), 2–3.

23James de Vere Allen, “Siyu in the 18th and 19th Centuries”,

Transafrican Journal of History 8, nos. 1–2 (1979): 28–29.
24Anonymous, Fatḥ al-muʿīn vyākhyānam tarjama, Mappila
Heritage Library MS. 203.

25 C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Le guide des zélés croyants”, De

Indische Gids 5, no. 1 (1883): 531–544; Abdussalam Meuraxa,
trans. Tarjama Minhāj al-Ṭālibīn (Jakarta: Keluarga Alm.
Penterjemah, [1953] 1997).

26L. W. C. van den Berg, “Het Mohammedaansche

godsdienstonderwijs op Java en Madoera en de daarbij gebruikte
Arabische boeken”, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 31 (1886): 533.

27 As cited by Michael Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam:

Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011), 202, on the basis of G. A. J.
Hazeu to Gouveneur Generaal, Weltevreden, 19 February 1909,
in Collectie G. A. J. Hazeu (8), KITLV H.1083, fols. 20–24.

28P. K. Kuññubāva Musliyār Paṭūr, trans. Fatḥ al-muʿīn paribhāṣa

(Thrissur: Amina Book Stall, 1998).

29Publisher’s Statement in Paṭūr, trans. Fatḥ al-muʿīn paribhāṣa,

28–31.

30 A third translation was done by K. V. M. Pantāvūr (d. 2008), who

is said to have translated more than 100 works from Arabic into
Malayalam and authored another 100 himself. The fourth one
entitled Islam niyama samhita is a free translation jointly done by
Sadiq Anwari, K. C. Ali Madani, Siddiq Irfani and Ayyār Mammuṭṭi
(Calicut: Poomkavanan Publications, 2012). The first edition was
printed in 2008, the second in 2009 and the third in 2012.

31Muḥammad Ḥanīf Dārimī, trans. Fatḥ al-muʿīn (Mangalore:

Marsin Bookstall, 2015).

32Muḥammad Ḥanīf Dārimī, Personal conversation, 3 March

2016.

33Aliy As’ad, trans. Terjamahan Fat-hul Mu’in, 2 vols. (Yogyakarta:

Menara Kudus, 1979; Selangor: Klang Book Centre, 1988).

34For example, see Abul Hiyadh, trans. Terjamah Fat-hul mu’in, 3

vols. (Surabaya: al-Hidāya, 1993); Bahrun Abu Bakar, trans.
Terjemahan Fathul mu’in, 2 vols. (Bandung: Sinar Baru
Algensindo, 2016). Recently, many more translations have been
coming out with titles such as “fiqh classic” and “fiqh viral”. A
comparative study and scrutiny of these translations should be
rewarding.

35 For Javanese translations, Achmad Najieh, trans. Terjemah

Fathul Mu’in Makna Jawa Pegon dan Indonesia, 4 vols.
(Surabaya: al-Miftah, n.d.); Kiyāhī Hāj Misbāḥ bin Zayn al-Mustafā,
trans. Fatḥ al-muʿīn, 2 vols. (Surabaya: Maktabat al-Hidāya, n.d.).
In Sudanese, Enjang Sirāj al-Munīr, trans. Penjelasan Kitab Fatḥ
al-muʿīn, 6 vols. (Tasikmalaya: Jemanis, 1995); Aḥmad Makkī bin
Abdullah Maḥfuz, trans. Fatḥ al-muʿīn (Sukabumi: Maʿhad
Salafiyya, n.d.); and Kāmil al-Dīn, trans. Fatḥ al-muʿīn: Tarjamah
Sunda, 4 vols. (Jakarta: Rawḍa Farīs, n.d.).

36Abdullah Kafabihi Mahrus, Kamus Fathal Mu’in: Memahami Isi

dan Kandungan Fiqh Klasik (Kediri: Lirboyo Press, 2015).
37Ibn Ḥajar, Serat Kitab Tupah, British Library, MS. Add.12290.
For a similar manuscript in 210 pages, see Kitab Takhopah,
Oxford University, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology,
Skeat Collection MS. 1.

38 Ibn Ḥajar, Tuhfah, Leiden Or. 1841.

39In the Tuḥfa, Ibn Ḥajar himself says that he wrote it in 958 AH,
that is 1551.

40 Becker, “Materials”, 31–61; Loimeier, Between Social Skills.

41John Comaroff, “Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A

Foreword”, Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2001): 305–314.

42 J. A. van der Chijs, ed. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek,

1602–1811 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1885–1901), 5: 525–526; F.
W. Stapel, “Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis der rechtspraak bij de
Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-,
Land- en Volkenkunde 89, no. 1 (1932): 307; R. A. Kern,
“Javaansche rechtsbedeeling: Een Bijdrage tot de kennis der
geschiedenis van Java”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 83, no. 1 (1927): 410; J. Ball, Indonesian Legal
History, 1602–1848 (Sydney: Oughtershaw Press, 1982), 68; M.
Hisyam, Caught between Three Fires: The Javanese Pangulu
under the Dutch Colonial Administration, 1882–1942 (Jakarta:
INIS, 2001), 50–51.

43National Archives, The Hague (hereafter NA), Origineele

missive door den gouverneur generaal en raden van India te
Batavia aan de vergadering van 17, 31 December 1747, VOC
2684: 494a–495b.

44NA VOC 2684: 494a–495b; cf. Stapel, “Bijdragen”, 307–308;

Kern, “Javaansche rechtsbedeeling”, 410.

45F. de. Haan, Priangan: De Preanger-Regentschappen onder het

Nederlandsch Bestuur tot 1811 (Batavia: Bataviaasch
Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1910–1912), 4:
684.

46 Compendium der voornaamste Javasche Wetten, naeuwkeurig

getrocken uyt het Mametaansche Wet-boek Mogharraer, en, so
veel mogelyk met het Goddelyk- Natuurlyk- en Burger- Regt
sodanig samengebracht, dat daarna, ongekrenkt de Javasche
Gewoontens en Gebruykelykheden, den Semarangsen Landraad
over de Onderdaanen van’s Comps: Landen en Districten Regt en
Justitie soude kunnen oeffenen, en de Crimineele Zaken, so wel
als de Civile behandelen. For the full original text and translation of
the code, see Mahmood Kooria, “Early Dutch Encounters with
Islamic Law: The Text and Translation of Mogharaer Code or
Semarang Compendium”, Indonesia 106 (2018): 53–87.

47 De Haan, Priangan, 4: 685.

48C. O. Blagden, Catalogue of Manuscripts in European

Languages Belonging to the Library of the India Office, vol. 1:
Mackenzie Collections, part. 1: The 1822 Collection & the Private
Collection (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), 52, 55, 58–59;
Hisyam, Three Fires, 50, fn.
49De Haan, Priangan, 4: 685; Hisyam, Three Fires, 50; Ball,
Indonesian Legal History, 70.

50Majd al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn Taymiyya, al-Muḥarrar, ed.

ʿAbdullāh bin ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-
Risāla, 2007). Another edition: Majd al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn
Taymiyya, Muḥarrar fī al-fiqh ʿalā maḏhab al-Imām Aḥmad bin
Ḥanbal (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat as-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya, 1950).

51 Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, al-Muḥarrar fī al-ḥadīth, ed. ʿĀdil al-Hadbā and

Muḥammad ʿAllūsh (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿAṭāʾ, 2001). The text is known
in the Islamic tradition by various full names, such as Muḥarrar fī
al-ḥadīth, Muḥarrar fī al-aḥkām and Muḥarrar fī aḥādīth al-aḥkām.
This text has recently been translated into Bahasa Indonesia.

52 For example, a few manuscript copies from different parts of

Indonesia are now kept in Leiden. As discussed earlier, there is
only one complete manuscript (Or. 2290, copy from Yogyakarta).
All other copies are either incomplete (such as Or. 3051, with
some marginal notes in Javanese) or partial, disconnected
excerpts (as in Or. 5720, fols. 62a–80a and 81b–185a) or
quotations (as in Or. 2126, which also quotes from Ghāya of Abu
Shujāʿ).

53Anonymous, Bustam, Leiden MS. Or. 1815 (dated to 1772 AJ

that corresponds to 1844).

54Instead those say to kill the blasphemer – see Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar,

426; Ibn Taymiyya, Muḥarrar, vol. 2, 401; Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī,
Muḥarrar, 401–402. This “loosening” of punishment could be
understood as an influence of European interventions against
capital punishment, but in the following article on treason and
disobedience, it does prescribe death as punishment.

55Rāfiʿī, Muḥarrar, 422–423; Ibn Taymiyya, Muḥarrar, 2: 399–400.

The ḥadīths Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī brought on this are rather meagre
and inexplicit, see his Muḥarrar, 401.

56NA, Compendium der voornaamste Javaansche wetten,

getrokken uit het Mohammedaansche wetboek Mogharaer…
Collectie 058 J. C. Baud, 993: Appendix, unpaginated, Article II.

57 The Dutch legal scholar Van Vollenhoven, although he identified

it elsewhere as an extract “from a tract on Muslim law”, called it a
mixture of Javanese and Islamic provisions, with “more native”
components than Islamic ones. C. van Vollenhoven, De
ontdekking van het adatrecht (Leiden: Brill, 1928), 9; C. van
Vollenhoven, Het adatrecht van Nederlandsch-Indië (Leiden: Brill,
1918–1933), I: 16, 125.

58 For example, see M. C. Ricklefs, Petrus Voorhoeve and

Annabel Teh Gallop, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain
(Jakarta: Ecole francaise d’Extreme-Orient, 2014); T. Pigeaud,
Literature of Java: Catalogue raisonné of Javanese Manuscripts in
the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Public Collections
in the Netherlands (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1970); N. Girardet,
Suzan Piper and R. M. Soetanto, Descriptive Catalogue of the
Javanese Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Main Libraries of
Surakarta and Yogyakarta (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983).

59The ones I have consulted are J. A. van der Chijs, Catalogus

der Bibliotheek van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van kunsten en
wetenschappen (Batavia: Lange & Co.; The Hague: M. Nijhoff,
1864), and A. B. Cohen Stuart, Eerste vervolg catalogus der
bibliotheek en catalogus der Maleische, Javaansche en Kawi
handschriften van het Bataviaasch Genootschap (The Hague: M.
Nijhoff, 1872). In addition to these, a detailed list of legal texts in
Batavia under the VOC prepared by Joseph Van Kan also does
not mention Mogharaer – see his De rechtsgeleerde boekenschat
van Batavia ten tijde der Compagnie (Bandoeng: A. C. Nix & Co.,
1935).

60The original title of the Maḥallī, a commentary on the Minhāj, is

Kanz al-rāghibīn, but it was widely known among Shāfiʿī scholars
by its author’s name as mentioned in Chapter 4.

61 De Haan, Priangan, 4: 684–685; cf. G. A. J. Hazeu,

“Tjeribonsch Wetboek (Papakem Tjerbon) van het jaar 1768, in
tekst en vertaling uitgeven”, Verhandelingen van het (Koninklijk)
Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen LV,
no. 2 (1905): i–x, 1–187.

62 Van der Chijs, Plakaatboek, 5: 525.

63M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200

(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 105–139; M. C. Ricklefs, “The
Crisis of 1740–1 in Java: The Javanese, Chinese, Madurese and
Dutch, and the Fall of the Court of Kartasura”, Bijdragen tot de
Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 139, no. 2 (1983): 268–290.

64 Ricklefs, “The Crisis of 1740–1”.

65 Albert Muersinge, Handboek van het Mohammedaansche regt,

in de Maleische taal: naar oorspronkelijke, Maleische en
Arabische werken van Mohammedaansche regtsgeleerden
bewerkt (Amsterdam: Johannes Muller, 1844).

66Leon Buskens and Baudouin Dupret, “The Invention of Islamic

Law: A History of Western Studies of Islamic Normativity and Their
Spread in the Orient”, in After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on
Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations, ed. François
Pouillion and Jean-Claude Vatin (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 33–34.

67S. Keyzer, Kitab Toehpah: Javaansch-Mohammedaansch

wetboek (‘s-Gravenhage: K. Fuhri, 1853).

68 S. Keyzer, Handboek voor het Mohammedaansch regt (‘s-

Gravenhage: Gebroeders Belinfante, 1853). A couple of decades
later the Tanbīh was edited by A. W. T. Juynboll as Jus shafiiticum:
At-Tanbîh auctore Abu Ishâk as-Shîrâzî quem e codice Leidensi et
codice Oxoniensi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1879).

69 S. Keyzer, Het Mohammedaansche strafregt naar Arabische,

Javaansche, en Maleische bronnen (‘s Gravenhage: H. C. Susan
Chzoon, 1857); S. Keyzer, Précis de jurisprudence Musulmane
selon le rite Châfeite (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1859); S. Keyzer,
Mawerdi’s publiek en administratief regt van den Islam (‘s
Gravenhage: H. C. Susan Chzoon, 1862). The name Keyzer is
also spelled with long “ij” for “y”; I standardised it to “Keyzer” to
avoid confusion.

70 Keyzer, Kitab Toehpah, v.

71S. K. [Keyzer], “Kitab Toehpah: Javaansch-Mohammedaansch

wetboek uitgeven van wege het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-,
Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië”, Bijdragen tot de
Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 8, no. 1
(1862): 343–413.

72 Keyzer, Kitab Toehpah, 174; Keyzer, “Kitab Toehpah”, 343.

73 Keyzer, Kitab Toehpah, vi.

74For more details on Roorda, see E. M. Uhlenbeck, A Critical

Survey of Studies on the Languages of Java and Madura (‘s
Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 45–54.

75Ministerie van Kolonien, Openbaar Verbaal, 2.10.02 24

September no. 7/1713.

76The governor was Nicolause Engelhard, and the manuscript

was kept at Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië.

77 Ministerie van Kolonien, Openbaar Verbaal, 2.10.02 24.

78 T. Roorda, Kitab Toehpah: Een Javansch Handboek voor het

Mohammedaansche Recht, 3rd rev. ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1895),
vii–ix.

79 S. K. “Kitab Toehpah”, 343.

80 Ibn Ḥajar, Serat Kitab Tupah, BL, MS. Add. 12290.

81 W. R. van Hoevell, “Vaira: [brief] aan den heer S. Keijzer”,

Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indie 15, no. 1 (1853): 452–454; W.
R. van Hoevell, “Varia [antwoord]”, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch
Indie 24, no. 1 (1862): 260–261; W. R. van Hoevell, “Varia [brief
aan de redacteur W. R. van Hoevell]”, Tijdschrift voor
Nederlandsch Indie 24, no. (1862): 258–260, also see 54–57 and
195–197.

82Laffan, Makings of Indonesian Islam, 95–96; Buskens and

Dupret, “The Invention of Islamic Law”, 34.

83On the personal and academic rivalry between Roorda and Van
den Tuuk, see A. Teeuw, “Foreword”, in H. N. Van der Tuuk, A
Grammar of Toba Batak (The Hague: Martins Nijhoff, 1971), xxiii–
xxviii.

84This sort of remark on the religiosity of Javanese Muslims is an

exceptional trope coming from this particular Dutch colonial officer,
but similar comments had also been made by Arab visitors before
Europeans came and American anthropologists after the
Europeans left.

85P. J. Veth, “Levensbericht van Taco Roorda”, Jaarboek van de

Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen voor 1874
(Amsterdam: C. G. Van der Post, 1875), 54–56.

86Levie de Vries, “Kitab Toehpah” en Tuḥfat al Muḥtādj li sjarkh al

Minhādj: Resultaten van een voorloopig onderzoek, met vertaling
van den “Kitab toehpah” (Batavia: Albrecht, 1929).

87 De Vries, “Kitab Toehpah”.

88 P. A. M. Boele Van Hensbroek, De Beofening der oostersche

talen in Nederland en zijne overzeesche bezittingen 1800–1874,
bibliographisch overzicht (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1875), 6; Paul W. van
der Veur, “Van den Berg’s Essay on Muslim Clergy and the
Ecclesiastical Goods in Java and Madura: A Translation”,
Indonesia, 84 (2007): 127.

89S. J. van den Berg, “Levensbericht van Mr. L. W. C. van den

Berg”, Handelingen van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche
Letterkunde te Leiden en Levensberichten Harer Afgestorven
Medeleden 1927–1928 (Leiden: Brill, 1928), 12–20.

90L. W. C. van den Berg, De Beginselen van het

Mohammedaansche Recht, volgens de Imam’s Aboe Hanifat en
Sjafi’i (Batavia: Bruining & Wijt; Leiden: Van den Heuvel & Van
Santen, 1874).

91Scholars such as A. W. T. Juynboll criticised him but changed

their opinions once revised editions came out.

92His critical edition of Jambi’s customary laws, Oendang-

Oendang Djambi is an example. Also, see L. W. C. van den Berg,
Oendang-oendang Simboer Tjahaja: Landrecht in zwang in de
Palembangsche bovenlanden (Batavia: Albrecht, 1897); C. A. Van
Ophuijsen, “Eenige opmerkingen naar aanleiding van de door prof.
Mr. L. W. C. Van Den Berg bezorgde uitgave van de Oendang-
Oendang Djambi”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
van Nederlandsch-Indië 46 (1896): 153–213.

93 L. W. C. van den Berg, Fatḥ al-Qarîb: la révélation de

l’omniprésent: commentaire sur le précis de jurisprudence
musulmane d’Abou Chodjâʾ (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1894), viii; with
minor changes, this translation is taken from E. C. Howard, trans.
Minhaj et ṭālibīn: A Manual of Mohammadan Law according to the
School of Shafii, Translation into English from the French Edition
by L. W. C. Van den Berg (Calcutta: W. Thacker & Co., 1914), v.
94 Van den Berg, Fatḥ al-Qarîb, viii.

95 L. W. C. van den Berg, Minhâdj aṭ-ṭâlibîn, Le guide des zélés

croyants: Manuel de jurisprudence musulmane selon de vite de
Châfi’î (Batavia: Impr. du Gouvernement, 1882), vii–viii. However,
a decade later he translated Ghazzī’s commentary Fatḥ al-qarīb
on the Ghāya into French in 1894 (Ghāya itself was translated into
Dutch by Keyzer, as mentioned). As in the Minhāj, here, too, he
provides the original Arabic with indications to the differences in
manuscripts and the translation is divided into sections and
articles for better comprehension, in contrast to the source texts.

96 Van den Berg, Minhâdj, viii.

97 Van den Berg, Minhâdj, x–xi.

98 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,

trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

99 Van den Berg, Minhâdj, v.

100 Jean-Robert Henry and Francois Balique, La doctrine colonial

du droit Musulman Algerien: Biblogirophic systematique et
introduction critique (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, 1979); Claude Bontems, Le Droit
musulman algérien à l’époque coloniale: De l’invention à la
codification (Geneva: Slatkin Érudition, 2014), 39–51.

101 Hurgronje, “Le guide”, 531–544.

102L. W. C. van den Berg, “Brief van den Heer Mr. L. W. C. van
den Berg naar aanleiding der critiek van zijn werk ‘Minhaj at-talibin
door Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje’”, De Indische Gids 6, no. 1 (1884):
223.

103C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Mr. L. W. C. van den Berg’s Beoefening

van het Mohammedaansche Recht”, De Indische Gids 6, no. 1
(1884): 367.

104 Van den Berg, “Brief”, 222–223.

105Hurgronje, “Mr. L. W. C. van den Berg’s Beoefening”, 363–434,

737–816.

106L. W. C. van den Berg, “Zelfverdediging”, De Indische Gids 6,

no. 2 (1884): 524–537.

107Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and

Arabs in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2020), 114–115.

108Nico Kaptein, Islam, Colonialism and the Modern Age in the

Netherlands East Indies: A Biography of Sayyid ʻUthman (1822–
1914) (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 103–140; Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions,
115–116.

109 Judge William Jones translated and published Ibn al-

Mulaqqin’s Bhughyat al-bāḥith ‘an jumal al-mawārith as he seems
to have been unaware of the sectarian and juridical differences
among Muslims and the prominence of Ḥanafīsm in South Asia.
William Jones, The Mohammedan Law of Succession to the
Property of Intestates (London: John Nichols for Charles Dilly,
1782).

110 Howard, Minhaj et ṭālibīn, v.

111Anonymous, “Minhaj et Talibin”, The Straits Times, Monday 18

January 1915.

112Eduard Sachau, Muhammedanisches Recht nach

schafiitischer Lehre (Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1897).

113Eduard Sachau, Zur ältesten Geschichte des

muhammedanischen Rechts (Wien: K. K. Hof & Staatsdruckerei,
1870).

114Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Ueber das Leben und die Schriften des

Scheich Abu Zakarija Jahja el-Nawawi (Göttingen: Im Verlage der
Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1849).

115 Eduard Sachau, “Muhammedanisches Erbrecht nach der

Lehre der Ibaditischen Araber von Zanzibar und Ostafrika”,
Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin, no. 1 (1894): 159–212.

116 Eduard Sachau, “Das Gutachten eines muhammedanischen

Juristen über die muhammedanischen Rechtsverhältnisse in
Ostafrika”, Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen
3 (1898): 1–8.

117 Sachau, Muhammedanisches Recht, vii–ix.

118 Sachau, Muhammedanisches Recht, xvi.

119 Sachau, Muhammedanisches Recht, xxv.

120Among the Islamicists of the time, there was a general

consensus that Islamic criminal law was too cruel and
inapplicable, as we saw in Van den Berg’s translation of the
Minhāj.

121C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Muhammedanisches Recht nach

schafiitischer Lehre von Eduard Sachau”, Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 53 (1899): 125–167.

122H. Hirschfeld, “Mohammedanisches Recht nach schafiitischer

Lehre, von Eduard Sachau”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
30 (1898): 432–433.

123C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th

Century: Daily Life, Customs and Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2007),
204–205; Hazeu to Gouveneur Generaal, 19 February 1909, fols.
20–24; Martin van Bruinessen, “Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic
Script Used in the Pesantren Milieu; Comments on a New
Collection in the KITLV Library”, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 146, nos. 2–3 (1990): 244, 247, 257–258.

124 For the latest overview of British experiments with Islamic law
in India, see Syed Adnan Hussain, “Anglo-Muhammadan Law”, in
The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, ed. Anver M. Emon and
Rumee Ahmed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 537–550.
For South Indian case of Malabari Shāfiʿī Muslims, see Santhosh
Abraham, “Constructing the ‘Extraordinary Criminals’: Mappila
Muslims and Legal Encounters in Early British Colonial Malabar”,
Journal of World History 25, nos. 2–3 (2014): 373–395; for the
larger picture, see Bernard Cohen, Colonialism and Its Forms of
Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 16–75.

125 “Proceedings of the Malabar Commissioners”, Malabar

Collectorate Records, Regional Archives, Kozhikode. I am thankful
to Abhilash Malayil for this reference.

126 Mahmood Kooria, “Does the Pagan King Reply? Malayalam

Documents on the Portuguese Arrival in India”, Itinerario 43, no. 3
(2019): 423–442; Sebastian Prange, “The Pagan King Replies: An
Indian Perspective on the Portuguese Arrival in India”, Itinerario
41, no. 1 (2017): 151–173.

127On the postal systems in the Islamic world, particularly during

the Mamlūk period, see a detailed account by the Shāfiʿī jurist
Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī kitābat al-inshāʾ (Cairo:
Dār al-Kutub al-Sulṭāniyya & Maṭbaʿat al-Amīriyya, 1919), 14:
366–394.

128Muḥy al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAraf Shot bin Muḥammad Naynā

Maraykār, Jawāhir al-Hadīth al-maʿruf bi Zawājir Sharīf (Madras:
Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Quddus,
Maṭbaʿat Karīmī, 1912). British Library (earlier in British Museum)
Tam. C. 2758 (Tam. D. 2176).

129 Maraykār, Jawāhir al-Hadīth: fihrist, 4.

130P. K. Zayn al-Dīnkuṭṭi Musliyār, Fihrist al-kutub wa al-malābis

wa ghayrihimā (Ponnāni: P. K. M. Maoonathul Islam & Co., 1908),
Mappila Heritage Library MHLD 1083.
131 Shaykh Yūsuf al-Maqassarī, Nafḥat al-saylāniyya fī al-minḥat
al-Raḥmāniyya, Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, MS.
A 101.

132 William Logan, Malabar Manual (Madras: Government Press,

1887), 1: 504 mentions the deportation of one Haidros to Botany
Bay; cf. Albrecht Frenz, “Report Regarding the Uprisings of the
Mappilas in Gundert’s Letters”, in 500 Varṣatte Kēraḷam Cila
Aṟivaṭayāḷaṅṅaḷ, ed. V. J. Varghese (Kottayam: Current Books,
2011), 414. On the colonial policies related to deportation from
Malabar, see Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar for
the Years 1849–53 (Madras: United Scottish Press, 1863), 455–
460, 479–482.

133 Lance Brennan, John McDonald and Ralph Shlomowitz, “The

Origins of South Indian Muslim Indentured Migration to Fiji”,
Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 13 (1992): 402–
409. For the larger picture of Indian migration to Fiji, see Brij V.
Lal, Girmitayas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Canberra: Journal
of Pacific History, 1983).

134 For similar circulation of Bengali Islamic books, printed in

Dhaka between 1861 and 1895, into Australia, see Samia Khatun,
Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2018), especially the chapter “the Book of
Books”, where she discusses the story of the Kasasol Ambia
(Stories of the Prophet), translated into Bengali from Persian and
Hindi sources that arrived in Australia along with many other texts
in Bengali, Urdu, Persian and Arabic. Not only incarceration, exile
and indentured labour brought the South Asians into Australia,
many “industries in which non-white labour was central” such as
steam-shipping industries, sugar farming, railway construction,
pastoral industries and camel transportation also brought
thousands of Asians and Africans to the continent. With them
circulated books of various genres and provenances varying from
hagiographies to seafarers’ travel accounts, dream texts and
ethical guides.

135 Torsten Tschacher, “Circulating Islam: Understanding

Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar
and Nusantara”, in Islamic Connections: Studies of South and
Southeast Asia, ed. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea
(Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 48–67.

136 NA, Compendium: Appendix, unpaginated.

137Compendium der voornaamste civile Wetten, in NA, Een

exemplaar der Mahometaanse wetten, 268–279.

138 Ball, Indonesian Legal History, 70; de Haan, Priangan, 4: 685.

139 Tatjoe Salatin mentioned here is the Tāj al-salāṭīn by Bukhārī

Jawharī (d. seventeenth century); Bostan Salatin refers to Bustān
al-salāṭīn by Ranīrī. Both these Malay works were written in the
early seventeenth century in Aceh. The third text, Galela Domina,
refers to a text of Indian origin known in the Arabic and Persian
literature as Kalīla wa Dimna. All these texts belong to the genre of
Mirror for Princes.

140 Nandini Chatterjee, “Law, Culture and History: Amir Ali’s

Interpretation of Islamic Law”, in Legal Histories of the British
Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies, ed. Shaunnagh
Dorsett and John McLaren (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014),
54.

141 For example, see Law Reports Containing Cases Determined

by the High Court for Zanzibar: And on Appeal Therefrom by the
Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa and by the Privy Council
(Government Printer, South Africa, 1924–1939): vol. 2 (1924): 3–4;
vol. 3 (1928): 8–10; vol. 7 (1939): 117–118, 154, 195.

142 Sanne Ravensbergen, “Courtrooms of Conflict: Criminal Law,

Local Elites and Legal Pluralities in Colonial Java” (PhD diss.,
Leiden University, 2018), 139–141, for example, mentions some
Islamic legal texts used by the Dutch colonial courts in nineteenth-
century Java.

143The Fatḥ’s price was fifteen piastres. All the books were
received in Leiden on 5 April 1886. Leiden MS. Or. 7111.

144 Ravensbergen, “Courtrooms of Conflict”, 171.

145As we saw in Snouck Hurgronje’s attack on Bābahīr for the

poor translation of the Minhāj.
 Conclusion
◈

This study has explored the circulation of Islamic legal ideas across
the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world in the
second millennium, with a focus on the Shāfiʿī school of law. In the
course of the analysis I have been contributing to five major
historiographical streams with varying spatial and temporal
concerns: global history of premodern law outside Europe,
intellectual (dis)continuity in the postclassical phase of Islamic law;
the history of Shāfiʿīsm; trajectories of Islam beyond the Middle East;
and Shāfiʿīsm’s historical reception along the Indian Ocean littoral.
In the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of law, stretching from Damascus to
Maguindanao and beyond, particular legal ideas and texts provided
the followers with shared vocabularies and common grounds for
scholarly and legalistic interactions. They utilised these resources
meaningfully in their movements as traders, pilgrims, scholars,
refugees or sailors. The threads of this unified historical canvas
come from the increasing mobility of persons and a process of
globalisation over centuries. Every century in its turn escalated the
quantity and quality of mobility, but three centuries in particular are
remarkable in human history for the very clear leaps towards
reducing the distance between global extremities: the thirteenth,
sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. All three centuries had a
significant impact on global law, Islam and particularly Shāfiʿīsm. The
most intensive interactions in these centuries through trade, culture,
polity and religion created an attractive canvas for jurists to outline
compromises and conflicts with the existing tradition. Unprecedented
encounters with new communities, economic developments, socio-
political setbacks and uprisings were some of the major markers of
these centuries from which the Shāfiʿī jurists could not exclude
themselves. They addressed the new historical contexts in their
articulations. It would be wrong to say that one particular region
(such as the Middle East) or one specific period (such as the
formative era) was the centre for Shāfiʿī ideas and for Islam more
widely. All five texts on which I have focused belong to one of the
three centuries and demonstrate the wide stretch and complexity of
Islamic legal history across a broad spectrum.
The thirteenth century is a period of “larger attitudinal
normalisation of the principle of agreeing to disagree” in which
several long-existing theological and legal conflicts were settled
among the Muslims.1 They mutually recognised one another’s legal
methods and corpora of legal positions, even if the one contradicted
the other. This also meant that each school comprehended its
internal conflicts and made it relevant for students, scholars and
practitioners of the law. This was further necessitated by the official
recognition of four Sunnī schools by the Mamlūks and the
appointment of equally important chief judges for each school in their
sultanate. Along the lines of the wider codification processes initiated
by the jurists of each school, the Minhāj, written in the thirteenth
century, systematised the complementary and contradictory views of
earlier jurists through an extensive exploration into its textual
genealogy and by accommodating multiple dissipating techniques,
such as hierarchisation and prioritisation. Its formulations, with slight
deviations from earlier views or assertions of an author’s own views,
were driven by the regional and transregional settings where it
encountered the maritime world of the Eastern Mediterranean and
the increasing presence of new entrants from overseas and
overland, such as the Mongols from East Asia.
In the sixteenth century, the production and dissemination of at
least four famous texts of the school, all of which were commentaries
on the Minhāj, mediated its circulation to the South|East Asian and
African parts of the Shāfiʿī world. Of those commentaries the Tuḥfa
is the most distinctive in its arguments and approaches. It was
written in Mecca, and spurred on new legalistic conflicts within the
school. Its production and reception coincided with many other
developments in political, social, economic and cultural realms, such
as the decline of the Mamlūks, the prominence of the Ottomans and
their conquest of the Middle East, the arrival of the Portuguese in the
Red Sea, and increased travel towards Mecca and the Hijaz. The
text presented a Mecca-centred view of Shāfiʿīsm, which determined
the later engagements of numerous Shāfiʿī scholars from South
Arabia, the Hijaz, South|East Asia and Africa. Its complicated and
incomprehensible methodology was hard to follow for primary and
intermediate students of Islamic law, which could have had a
negative impact on its receptivity outside Arab lands. But the
increased movements of particular Middle Eastern communities and
the arrival of many new students from those distant lands at
educational centres in Islamic heartlands such as Mecca were
positive external forces in promoting its ideas. It conversed with the
cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city, which had emerged from the
arrival of a pilgrim–student–refugee nexus from South|East Asia and
Africa. The increasing role of the non-Arab communities in the
heartland of Islam may well have persuaded the author of the Tuḥfa
to take very Arab-centric, Hijaz-focused and Mecca-centred attitudes
towards Shāfiʿī law and Islam in general. In other words, the more
cosmopolitan a city becomes, the more conservative its residents
become. Its version of Shāfiʿīsm was not entirely acceptable in the
regions of the Indian Ocean, but some potential encounters of
students with the author himself and the increased migration and
existing presence of Arabs facilitated its circulation along the oceanic
littoral.
In the same century, one jurist from an Indian Ocean port town,
whom we assume to have been a student of the author of the Tuḥfa,
responded to many arguments of his teacher by writing an indirect
summary the Qurra followed by an autocommentary, the Fatḥ. The
latter text clearly reflects a response from oceanic Shāfiʿīs arising
from their academic travels. In the text, the author addresses several
problems and priorities of Muslims living outside the central Islamic
lands by critically engaging with his predecessors. Its production and
receptivity in the sixteenth century and afterwards reflect the
decentralisation of Islamic knowledge by what had been hitherto
distant Muslim communities. The Fatḥ (and many other similar works
from South|East Asia and Africa) instigated a revived and revised
version of Islamic law with clear echoes of the voices of their own
geographical, linguistic or cultural identities. The central roles that
the heartland of Islam in general and the nucleus of Shāfiʿī legal
thought in particular had been playing in the intellectual and socio-
cultural lives of the Indian Ocean Muslims now began to be
redirected. The reception of the Fatḥ in the larger Shāfiʿī cosmopolis
indicates this development.
In the nineteenth century, the Fatḥ’s commentaries, the Nihāya
and Iʿāna, explicate multiple features in the school’s survival through
intensive intellectual and discursive endeavours of its jurists at a time
of increased globalisation and modernisation. Opposing the attacks
on the textual and scholarly tradition of Islam from the “Muslim
modernists” and political “legal codifiers” of the Ottoman and
European empires, the whole traditional community united as a
single body. They healed many divisions that had existed in their
long discursive tradition through an unprecedented production of
commentaries and summaries while utilising the technological
advances of the century, such as the printing press, steamships and
communications technology for their textual production and
dissemination. In this furtherance of globalisation towards the
possible formation of a global village, Mecca stood as a temporal
cosmopolis – in the literal sense of the word – that brought together
diverse people from all over the world, and also effected a
reconciliation of several conflicts existing in traditional realms of
Islam and its laws. The Nihāya and the Iʿāna epitomise these
processes, along with their synthesis of geographical and juridical
splits in the Shāfiʿī school. The syntheses they promulgated in the
school were part of a wider trend that had started back in the
eighteenth century, but the new industrial infrastructures allowed
their voice reach out to a larger audience.
In the same century several Asian, African and European
fuqahāʾ endeavoured to produce translations of all these principal
texts into several Afroeurasian languages, again utilising
technological advances in publication, transportation and
communication. What had commenced in the previous century
continued into the next. In the nineteenth century, translations
reached their peak with simultaneous inputs from individual and
institutional spheres and expanded the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée
through vernacularisation and colonisation. Translations had
functioned in the Indian Ocean littoral as an extended arm of
commentarial tradition through intermittent, interlinear, literal, hybrid
and tarjama recensions. Such renderings vernacularised Shāfiʿī
ideas and texts in the familiar linguistic, cultural and social spheres
of oceanic Muslims. The European fuqahāʾ and their translations
differed from the Afrasian jurist-translators on several levels,
primarily as they were very keen on implementing and enforcing
what they had translated among the colonised subjects. They were
directly connected to the ongoing colonial projects, and the imperial
and academic nexus worked together on these legal textual corpora.
The colonisers thought that these legal texts were the most
appropriate tools to understand and subjugate the communities they
had conquered or over which they retained control. While the
translation drive thrived in Afrasia in the twentieth century, it had
declined in Europe by the middle of the century for Shāfiʿī texts.
The trajectories of these texts as codes, commentaries,
autocommentaries, supercommentaries, summaries and translations
demonstrate a constant participation of the Muslim communities from
the Indian Ocean rim in the history of Islamic law, and more
particularly in Shāfiʿī law, the school widely followed in its coastal
belts. In this study, this becomes clear only from the sixteenth
century due to the particular approach I followed on the textual
longue durée. But we could also propose that scholars from the
oceanic littoral participated in the dissemination of Shāfiʿī ideas
much earlier. The production of Shāfiʿī texts as such is remarkably
evident on the South|East Asian coasts from the early fourteenth
century. If we consider jurists, texts and ideas beyond the
frameworks of any school we find clear evidence from as early as
the mid-ninth century, when Islamic law was still organising itself into
doctrinal schools in the central Islamic lands. Legal historians and
Islamicists should take into account these juridical developments
among maritime Muslims who lived outside the Arabian-Persian
lands, and who contributed to the legal and religious hermeneutics of
Islam.
The interconnected texts from the Minhāj to the Nihāya and the
Iʿāna via the Tuḥfa and the Fatḥ also show a postclassical evolution
within Islamic law. A person cannot revise, edit, comment on,
supercomment on, gloss, abridge, poetise, translate, or even simply
transcribe a text written in a distant time or place without great
intellectual effort and mastering its content, language and
discussions. These texts tell us how and why they found innovative
ways of exploring interpretive techniques to analyse and criticise the
earlier traditions of the school in order to cater for the needs and
priorities of their own particular contexts. Whether it is the
codification through systematic hierarchisation and prioritisation,
assertion of geo-cultural specificities, or synthesising conflicts, they
all sought to stand within the framework of the traditional legal
system and yet also to prevent it from ultimate inertia. After the
formative stages of Islam, or more precisely of Shāfiʿī law in the
classical period, progress occurred in interesting steps, and the
school we see today formed only in the postclassical period.
To put it provocatively, the whole Shāfiʿī maḏhab was “born” as
a structured legal school only by the thirteenth century, thanks to the
canonisation and codification attempts of its ardent adherents. The
Minhāj is the text that actually codified the school’s views. Until then
its ideas were scattered across textual hoards in diverse places,
especially due to a split that had happened between the
Iraqi/Baghdadi and Persian/Khurasani followers. The Minhāj stood at
the forefront of this “moment of birth” and its authority among the
Shāfiʿīs reflects “the authority of code”. The Tuḥfa built its legitimacy
on the shoulders of the Minhāj, like many of the contemporary
commentaries. Its sensitivity to and engagement with most of the
literatures produced with, before and after the Minhāj made it a
complex text, difficult to understand, yet it stood as the authoritative
word for the highly educated scholars of the school. Its reception
among them represents “the authority of a commentary”. The Fatḥ
made the formulations of the Tuḥfa simpler and more accessible to
intermediate students of Islamic law, whether they studied in an
institution or were members of the general public. Compared to its
base text, this autocommentary had comprehensiveness and
simplicity, and its critical notes on earlier texts and its awareness of
particular socio-cultural and geographical contexts contributed to the
popularisation of Shāfiʿī law in the oceanic littoral as well as in the
heartlands of Islam, as much as the Shāfiʿīs own popularisation of
the text. The question of which came first or what caused what is a
perennial one, as insoluble as the dilemma of prioritising the chicken
or the egg. The text embodies the promulgation of Shāfiʿī law across
the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. Its reception
produced supercommentaries such as the Nihāya and the Iʿāna,
which also addressed the growing tensions of their times, especially
those posed by the modernists and political entities. Despite the
criticisms of the Islamic legal corpus, several Afro-Eurasian jurists
and authors translated these texts into their respective languages,
furthering their popularity and making them tools of individual and
collective agendas of vernacularisation or imperial projects of
colonisation.
All these constant engagements with specific times and places
as much as with the longer tradition of Shāfiʿīsm are what make its
postclassical textual genealogy interesting. Minhāj’s genealogy can
be traced back about five centuries to the Umm and forward six
centuries to the Nihāya, although its ancestry and progeny go even
further backwards and forwards. This longue durée of a Shāfiʿī text
connects a diverse array of lands, people, cultures, texts and periods
through a shared set of legal ideas and vocabularies. Its direct and
indirect commentaries, such as the Tuḥfa, Fatḥ, Nihāya and Iʿāna,
together with many others, present us with a fascinating nexus of
historical continuities and ruptures in the textual, intellectual and
scholarly traditions of Islam. The formation of any discourse says
nothing until the transformation it implies is analysed. The
Orientalists of olden days and contemporary Islamicists produced
volumes of literature on the first three or four centuries of Islamic law,
but they did not investigate how that law found its way into the lives
of believers, scholars, judges or students for more than a millennium.
Their scholarship reflects what Foucault criticised in those who show
their adherence to Marxism by limiting its history to the history of Karl
Marx’s own statements.2 He suggested that it is essential to see
Marx as the originator of the discourse, not just the creator of a
social theory, and that suggestion is very applicable also to Islamic
legal historiography after the classical period.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, scholars in the last a couple
of decades have begun to remedy the situation, especially by looking
into the fatwā collections and judicial registers related to Ḥanafīsm
and Mālikīsm. One of the major contributions of this study is to show
the implications in Shāfiʿī contexts, not by looking into the fatwā
collections or registers of judges but rather in the substantive legal
texts themselves, which have been discarded as lacking any
historical content for the society, culture or region of their time. The
continuities and discontinuities and regional historical elements
explained in relation to each text open a new vista for further
research by taking the substantive legal texts as sources of history.
 The regions influenced the fuqahāʾ, their estate and their textual
productions, despite their repeated claims of universality and
detachment from local influences in legal articulations. The
influences were multifaceted, with regional customs and practices
being regarded as mandatory. Although Islamic law is understood as
synonymous with the “Middle Eastern” law of Arab-Persian Muslims,
customary legal elements are easily identifiable in the legal texts.
This also helps me argue that Islamic law should be understood only
on the basis of its regionality. That is to say, the precise place and
time of its production and circulation are vital for a faithful historical
understanding. Islamic law as portrayed in existing perceptions
should be provincialised. This in turn will help us understand the
ways in which the long textual tradition found creative ways to
sustain its receptivity over wide spaces of time and place despite the
disparaging comments made by the likes of Ibn Khaldūn on the
absence of law and order in the climatic zones of the littoral outside
Arabia.
The regional socio-political strata influence the making of a
distinctive identity for the fuqahāʾ estate and the form of what
became “Islamic law”. With intentional or unintentional interruptions,
the polity and community of believers circulated around the
individuals and institutions of a local estate in their personal and
public religious, legal and cultural lives. Depending on an
“uncontrollable” textual tradition, the fuqahāʾ advocated orthodoxy
around the divine law, which was circulated for centuries through the
local and broader intellectual spectra of Islam. This regionality is a
part of the historical contextualisation pertinent to any school of
thought, but my prime concern here was with the Shāfiʿī texts.
Although existing literature enlightens us on the “provinciality” or
“regionality” of Islamic law, it has never attempted to relate questions
or arguments to the wider Muslim world, which has always been so
marginal to the Islamicist vision of the premodern legal realm.3 There
is one set of influences in Islamic juridical formulations, particularly in
Shāfiʿī laws, which was agreed by some Muslim scholars long ago.
The very emergence of “new” opinions (jadīd) against the “old” ones
(qadīm) after al-Shāfiʿī’s relocation to Egypt is related in the
traditional legal historiography to his encounters with a different
socio-cultural sphere of the new land.4 However, we admit that the
predominant doctrinal narrative has been to claim that the divine law
is devoid of any regional influences and, being directly descended
from God, that it is equally applicable to all places and times. A brief
elucidation of a middle ground between the “untraditional”
approaches in Islamic and Western historiography seems to be
appropriate here in order to understand the historical dynamics
between the timeless divine Sharīʿa and its timebound human
interpretations as fiqh.
There are two regional influences in Islamic law, one on the form
and the other on the content. By form I mean the impact of socio-
cultural contexts in the production and circulation of Islamic legal
knowledge. This is mainly linked to the temporary political, economic
and institutional settings impelling the legalistic undertakings of a
jurist. To give a simple example, a jurist engaged in maritime trade,
living in or travelling across the coastal townships, would write a
legal treatise on the laws of ocean or sea trade, as did the twelfth-
century Shāfiʿī jurist Abū Saʿd ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Samʿānī (d. 1167) in
his Akhṭār fī rukūb al-biḥār (Dangers of Voyages) and Rukūb al-baḥr
(Voyages),5 and the seventeenth-century Meccan Ḥanafī jurist
Aḥmad bin Muḥammad al-Ḥamawī (d. 1687) in his al-Durar al-
thamīna fī ḥukm al-ṣalāt fī al-safīna (Precious Pearls on the Rules of
Prayer on a Ship).6 It goes without saying that what a jurist produced
and disseminated, and how and why, were determined by what had
to be done (or not done) in the circumstances of the moment. Yet it
may not influence the contents of any book produced by that jurist.
The normative orders have a significant role in this regard.
Numerous textual progenies exclusively dedicated to a particular text
– for example, the Minhāj – is a by-product of the legal-educational
normativity of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in which most
fuqahāʾ chose to engage with the instructions of specific texts of the
school more than any other work. Such an educational context
certainly determines the decision of a jurist in writing a commentary
on the Minhāj as a way of contributing to the legal discursive
tradition. The expansion and contraction of different legal schools
are also significantly affected by analogous contextual norms.
How did the regional elements influence and even shape the
“contents” of law? To talk about “region” within Islamic law is also to
“provincialise” Islamic law. Although extra-religious customs and
norms in a jurist’s articulations may be as plausible historically as
regional impressions, scholars have been reluctant to admit the
overall Middle Eastern framework in which all their regionalist
assertions enter the body of Islamic law. We would not see many
legal thoughts and practices which had evolved or existed among
Indian Ocean Muslim communities being accepted as “Islamic”. Most
of them have been categorised as “customary” or “local” practices.
The “pure” Islamic law has always been depicted as the one that
came from the Middle East. In other words, it means the customary
practices of the Middle East. Recognising this dimension in the
substantive and theoretical legal corpus is to evaluate regional
norms in what is generally perceived as Islamic law, and to
appreciate the Islamic legal cultures of the Muslims from distant
regions with a closer attention to their local contexts in which law and
legal texts were produced, circulated and survived.
Several theoretical and substantive legal formulations of Islam
have considered regional norms as essential to the praxis of law,
mainly through the recognition of customs (ʿurf; ʿādāt). Many Shāfiʿī
jurists also considered the ʿurf as a valid source of law and I have
explained the implications of this approach for substantive law with
reference to the five texts under my focus. I have identified the
regional elements, customs and norms in the texts from purely
Middle Eastern contexts, such as the Minhāj, Tuḥfa and Iʿāna. This
leads us to “provincialise Islamic law” to their place of origins, as
much as to identify the value of Islamic law as conceived and
perceived by the oceanic communities of Malabar, Zanzibar or Java.
Examples of this are the Fatḥ and the Nihāya. Their reception and
circulation far and wide show how the jurists cleared the confusion in
identifying certain customs as authentic part of Islamic law in the
wake of an increased intermixture of new races, ethnicities and their
customs in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
 Based on this, the constant attempt to see the “peripheries” of
the Muslim world as exceptional in discussions of Islamic law versus
customary law is flawed and it is a simplistic and dichotomous
impasse, as much as portraying them as less Islamic, less scriptural
and more spiritualistic or syncretic and custom-centric. The Minhāj
and the Tuḥfa demonstrate that variant customs were always
present even in Islamic heartlands and were legitimised. Hence the
juxtaposition of customs of a particular region against Islamic law is
misleading, especially when both legal traditions often complement
more than contradict one another.7 Moreover, this also shows that
there is nothing called Islamic law unless it is contextualised and
provincialised. An overemphasis in the scholarship of the last
century on adat law (as customary law has often been called)
against Islamic law misses this whole point.8 Adat is one among
many sources of laws and it functions with many extra-regional
adats, religious norms, state-introduced laws, etc. The contradictions
between these laws are justified in the legal theory of both legal
systems.9 In Islamic legal theory, as long as adat or ʿurf does not
contradict the foundational structures of Islam, it would be binding
even if it might go against the foundational views of a school. Shāfiʿī
legal theorists such as Suyūṭī and many theorists of other schools
have all validated local customs as sources of law.10
Each text under my focus has made its own contributions to the
longue durée textual system of Islamic law through a number of
unique ways. It has catalysed its progression, preventing it from
reaching an ultimate state of rest, a time when rest was supposed to
have been “sterile” and without “originality” and “independency”.
Standing within the legal culture of Islam, the texts changed in
themselves as much as the legal ideas they discussed. Various
external and internal forces contributed to their fruitful
advancements. If a periodic pressure can lead to a periodic
response in any social and natural system, then that is true also for
the historical progression of texts with longer genealogies. The texts
we discuss prove that non-periodic or random pressure, such as
codification, canonisation, precision and complexity, mobility, division
and cohesion, did indeed produce many non-periodic flows into the
legal complex of Shāfiʿīsm in diverse times and places.
This leads me to the next aspect that I have tried to tackle in this
book, the actual history of Shāfiʿīsm after the postclassical period
and the role of the fuqahāʾ estate in it. If the textual longue durée
referred to earlier is one aspect of its spread across time and space,
that is not the only aspect. The texts and ideas obviously could not
travel by themselves. People with their micro- and macro-networks
and their interests and conflicts enabled and expedited textual
circulation. The chapters have demonstrated that the constant
division and unification inherent in the Shāfiʿī tradition expedited the
flow of ideas and texts. The conflicts kept discussions alive and
dynamic, whether between traditionalists and rationalists,
Khurasanis and Baghdadis or Cairenes and Meccans. In this long
story of collision, coalescence and coalition, the jurists were major
catalysts in circulating the ideas contemporaneously and keeping the
law dynamic. They fashioned their identity themselves and
positioned themselves in the Islamic realm, free from the influence of
political, social and regional influences. Although they did not
manage to materialise many elements and claims, most Shāfiʿīs did
succeed in alienating themselves from the state. From the thirteenth
century Shāfiʿīsm as such lost its exclusivity. It often remained
unpatronised, banned, deprecated or excluded by a number of
entities, such as the Mamlūks, Ṣafawids, Mughals and Ottomans.
Although many individual Shāfiʿīs associated with the state
mechanism at various points, the school itself never came to be
regarded as the “official” school of any state, as Ḥanafīsm was
regarded in the Ottoman Empire. None of the authors of the texts
under my focus associated with any political entities or took up any
state-sponsored positions, and they stand in sharp contrast to the
“post-Mongol phenomenon” of a successful state over the estate.11
They collaborated mostly with non-state actors such as mercantile,
migrant, scholarly or noble itinerants who did not fix their political
affiliations to one ruler or the other.
In the thirteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
predominant mercantile and scholarly peripatetic networks
contributed immensely to the circulation of Shāfiʿī ideas. These
circulators included Kārimīs, Egyptians, Syrians, Abyssinians,
Somalis, Iraqis, Indians and Persians from the thirteenth to the
fifteenth centuries. Their interconnections set the stage for an early
wave of the spread of the Shāfiʿī school to the regions of South
Arabia and South|East Asia and Africa. In the sixteenth century, the
revived intellectual landscape of Mecca brought the socio-
geographic and cultural spheres much closer and generated another
wave for the spread of Shāfiʿī legal thought. The process was
catalysed by some of the earlier groups along with new entrants,
such as Ḥaḍramī and non-Ḥaḍramī Yemenis, refugees from Ṣafawid
Persia such as Khurasanis and Bukhārīs, Hindīs, Jāwīs and
Swahilis. Yemenis were not the only group to spread Shāfiʿī ideas
and texts around the Indian Ocean world. There were several other
scholarly-mercantile connections at nodal points, such as
Damascus, Cairo, Malindi, Zanzibar, Ḥaḍramawt, Malabar, Aceh,
Java or Cape Town, which will have contributed to it. For such a
mobility of scholarly networks and intellectual interactions, the ocean
functioned as a highway. The spread of Shāfiʿīsm across the Indian
Ocean should be understood as exemplifying those hybrid
characteristics.
This facet addresses the dilemma of Indian Ocean historians
with regard to the trajectories of Shāfiʿīsm on the rim. It gives an
explanation for the reasons behind the historical receptivity of the
school. From the Minhāj to the Tuḥfa to the Fatḥ to the Nihāya and
the Iʿāna, the authors were very sensitive to the maritime contexts of
trade and movements, thanks to the locations where they lived and
wrote their works. In a number of cases we saw how each text
articulated more flexible views on oceanic voyages and trade, at
times invalidating the viewpoints of other schools or earlier
scholarship within the school. We think of Nawawī’s position on
khiyār al-majlis in relation to a transaction conducted during a
voyage. Although it is too early to suggest that the school
predominated the Indian Ocean rim because of the liberal
approaches of these authors, and Shāfiʿīs in general, on sea-related
issues, there is ample evidence to think in that direction.12
 Apart from such internal elements in Shāfiʿīsm, the micro- and
macro-communities certainly contributed to making the school a
predominant legal stream for Muslims along the rim. This dominance
of the school happened mainly in the sixteenth century. Before that,
the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean had been an “ocean of
laws” with many intermixed legal systems and traditions within the
Muslim community, not to mention other communities and groups.
The Mālikī, Ḥanbalī, Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī, Ibāḍī, Jaʿfarī, Zaydī and many
other evanescent schools of Islamic law coexisted there because of
their crucial importance for Muslims from Tangier in North Africa to
Quanzhou in China. In the course of time, Mālikīsm was dominant in
North Africa and Ibāḍīsm in Oman and part of Tanzania, while major
parts of the Indian Ocean and parts of the Mediterranean were
dominated by Shāfiʿīsm from the sixteenth century. The increased
mobility of scholars, migrants, warriors, refugees, slaves and
prisoners from Persia, Syria, Yemen, Egypt and the South|East
Asian and African worlds, was a significant factor in this
development.
The consequences of this historical rupture were deeply rooted.
Shāfiʿīsation on the Indian Ocean rim was strengthened after the
sixteenth century, and the rise of multiple Meccas represents this. I
identify this as another wave of Shāfiʿīsm in its global spread.
Historically, it is more explicit in the production of new legal texts that
are directly connected to the textual longue durée of the school. The
Qurra and its autocommentary, the Fatḥ, illustrate this with their
obvious lineages, in which the Meccan voice was echoed and
altered according to certain priorities. This reverberation formed a
new approach within the long discursive tradition of the school.
Whether or not the turn of the sixteenth century brought an age of
commerce along the Indian Ocean rim, certainly the close
association between merchants and scholars, jurists and estates,
and texts and ideas will have contributed to the survival and spread
of the fuqahāʾ estate, which afterwards came to be dominated by
Shāfiʿī clusters. As Mecca disseminated to many meccas, the Minhāj
was disseminated to many more minhājs as its commentaries,
supercommentaries, summaries and translations advanced the
legalistic conflicts and internal dynamics of the school through
resourceful divisions.
The circulation of Shāfiʿī ideas was by no means a one-way
journey through time. Although jurists from the central Islamic lands
introduced the school to the distant regions, those places soon
developed “multiple Meccas”, such as the Little Mecca at Ponnāni,
with much significance given to the advancement of Shāfiʿī ideas,
and these led to “reverse journeys” of the ideas of the school back to
the heartlands. The legacy of the Fatḥ in the nineteenth-century
Middle East attracting at least four commentators in a microcosm of
Mecca alone exemplified this development. The composition of the
Iʿāna represents a successful journey for an oceanic text.
Furthermore, this was not simply a reverse journey, because even
scholars who were born and brought up in other maritime regions
wrote commentaries on such an oceanic text as the Fatḥ in the
nineteenth century, and they wrote them in Arabic. All these were
unprecedented in the longue durée of Shāfiʿī texts. The Nihāya of
Nawawī al-Bantanī epitomises this trend. Hence, the trajectory of the
Fatḥ and of Shāfiʿīsm in general in this cosmopolis of law is
multidirectional, and the oceanic littoral was not the passive receiver
of a legal tradition from a putative centre. Beyond such reverse
journeys, new textual forms such as translations and new networks
of indentured labourers, exiles, colonialists and convicts lengthened
and broadened the Shāfiʿī legal cosmopolis beyond the Indian
Ocean and Mediterranean to the shores and islets of the Pacific and
Atlantic.
In the course of the centuries of Shāfiʿī expansion, through its
texts, discourses and divisions, different places emerged as the
school’s prime centres. In the ninth century, the main centre was
Cairo, which witnessed the final years of al-Shāfiʿī’s teaching and
writing his reputed works, such as the Umm. His many students in
the city took up his teachings and acted as torchbearers for the
formation of a doctrinal school, most significantly through the
Mukhtaṣars of Buwayṭī and Muzanī. Baghdad at this time was a
satellite city to Cairo, and some renowned Shāfiʿīs resided there who
had studied with al-Shāfiʿī before he migrated to Cairo.13 Through
these scholars, many more Shāfiʿīs arose in and around Baghdad.
Mecca was remote from Shāfiʿī teachings at this time, though Abū
al-Walīd Mūsā, who also studied with al-Shāfiʿī before he left for
Baghdad, was there. Jārūd is said to have encouraged Shāfiʿī legal
thought through his lectures in Mecca and his correspondence with
Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī substantiating al-Shāfiʿī’s concept of qiyās.
Cairo’s position of prominence was taken over by Baghdad in
the tenth century. The rise of towering figures of Shāfiʿīsm such as
Ibn Surayj in that city gave a major push to this transition. It was
furthered after the conquest of Egypt by the Fāṭimids, who adopted
the Shīʿī Ismāʿīlī school as the official system of religious law and
appointed the Ismāʿīlī jurists as chief judges and judges throughout
the kingdom for several generations. Through Ibn Surayj himself and
his numerous students the school grew into its “classical phase” in
and around Baghdad. Nishapur, Shiraz, Gurgan, the Caspian and
Transoxiana rose as satellite centres of the school by the middle of
the tenth century. In the eleventh century, however, Greater
Khurasan had grown to become a rival centre to Baghdad, producing
a parallel perspective and a textual tradition within the school. By the
late twelfth century, Cairo had regained its older centrality due to a
number of concomitant economic, political and social factors. This
coincided with the rise of Damascus, which rarely contributed to the
fiqh activity in general and the school in particular, from the mid-ninth
century until the end of the twelfth century.14 But by the time of
Nawawī, Damascus had only one counterpart in the school, and that
was Cairo. Baghdad and Khurasan had reverted to secondary status
following the invasions of the Mongols, against whom only the
Mamlūks could resist. Damascus could not hold onto its shared
eminence with Cairo for long. In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, Cairo and its al-Azhar University became the most
important bastions for disseminating Shāfiʿī teachings.
In the sixteenth century, Shāfiʿīsm nurtured a strong scholarly
tradition centred in and around Mecca, thanks to the intellectual
engagements of Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī through his oeuvre, his
colleagues and his students. The importance of this development of
Mecca as a centre of Shāfiʿīsm is that it leaves a mark on the
perception of Islam itself in the new communities. For them, Mecca
becomes synonymous with Islam, and Islam becomes synonymous
with Shāfiʿīsm. Medina also had similar educational units but it had
shrunk, mostly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries,
either to being simply an abode of the Prophet or a centre of
revivalists within Sunnīsm, some of whom began to question the
fundamentals of Sunnī orthodoxy.15 Simultaneously, a scholarly
tradition had emerged among the fuqahāʾ estate claiming
prominence for Mecca or Medina. The Mālikī scholars usually stood
for Medina as a better city than Mecca, whereas a counternarrative
emerged among the rest of the Sunnī schools which supported
Mecca. Although such Shāfiʿīs as Suyūṭī had sided with the Mālikī
opinion, the majority of Shāfiʿīs argued for Mecca being the better
place. This discursive scholarly tradition was rooted, especially for
the Mālikīs, in the juridical affiliations of their respective schools.
Mālikīs hermeneutically claimed the practices and customs of
Medina as a source for Islamic law, for it Medina was the “true home
of the Prophetic tradition”. In fact, Mecca was not hegemonised by or
attributed to any legal school for centuries, except in the very
formative period of Islamic law. The city thus remained a neutral
place in jurisprudential orientation, and an ideological and doctrinal
association with it by the three schools and subsequent domination
by the Shāfiʿīs significantly contributed to the historical expansion of
Shāfiʿīsm. With this rise of a Meccan fuqahāʾ estate and of Shāfiʿīsm
there, the position of Cairo was lessened, at least in the imaginations
of a wider following along the Indian Ocean rim.
 By the end of the sixteenth century, we witness a
decentralisation of Islamic knowledge led by the oceanic Muslim
communities. The central roles that the heartlands of Islam in
general and the nuclei of Shāfiʿīsm in particular have been playing in
their intellectual traditions began to be more fluid when works such
as the Fatḥ and scholars such as Zayn al-Dīn Jr instigated a revived
version of Islamic law and practice. Many of them were educated in
central Islamic lands. I identify this phenomenon as a process of
reimagining the centre by the Muslims from the distant lands, a
historical process that is reflected in the rise of metaphorical “little
Meccas”, such as Ponnāni and Aceh.
When educational migrants, who had left the South|East Asian
and African coastal belts for prime centres of Islamic learning, such
as Mecca, Medina and Cairo, returned to their homelands, it
stimulated the rise of a network of higher educational institutes along
the Indian Ocean rim. Once these institutes had acquired a
distinguished position in the academic perception of local Muslims,
second and third generations of the indigenous communities
managed to communicate and interact with the wider spectrums of
legal and theological discourses in the same language. But they
emphasised their own geographical and cultural priorities. By their
frequent scholarly engagements through texts, lectures, fatwās,
supportive institutes and constant debates, many centres of learning
(some major, some minor) were raised at various coastal townships
of the Indian Ocean. Through these, another version of Islam came
to the forefront of the socio-religious lives of these Muslims. For
them, the main reference point for different issues in their “discursive
everyday life” was the local centre of Islam. Thus multiple centres
were established on the Indian Ocean rim rather than a single centre
for the whole Muslim community, even though ritualistically such a
centre was still relevant. This historical occurrence in the sixteenth
and later centuries indicates that in fact the image of Mecca was
being redrawn now that multiple Meccas were emerging.
The rise of little Meccas along the Indian Ocean rim is not a
complete separation from the “original” Mecca. In different ways
these centres and the fuqahāʾ estate were asserting their scholarly
genealogy with those in Mecca. Many South|East Asian and African
students and scholars tried to be disciples of Ibn Ḥajar and the like.
While some of them did indeed succeed in becoming students of
such scholars, others did not. They either claimed to be the disciples
of Meccan scholars or that identity was attributed to them. This
course of popular narratives along with the historical course of
Ponnāni’s own rise as a Little Mecca show that the reimagining of a
known centre transported to a local place and the creation of
alternative hubs were strong elements ingrained into the acts and
thoughts of an actual centre.
Thanks to the gradual yet intense processes of globalisations in
the thirteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Shāfiʿī textual
longue durée not only marked its presence in several distant lands
across the world but it also guided, influenced, controlled and even
subverted the social, legal, economic and cultural undercurrents of
the places and communities it encountered along the way in its long
historical stream. In a period stretching over a millennium from the
time of its eponymous founder, the school and its texts thus became
tools of diverse uses in the hands and lands of Asian, African and
European jurists, teachers, students, commentators, glossators,
abridgers and translators. In its long intellectual genealogy from one
Nawawī to another Nawawī, the vast terrain from Nawā to Java, from
Fiji to Holland, from the Mediterranean to Caribbean, the textual
longue durée from the Minhāj (or from the Umm) to the Nihāya, the
Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of law amalgamated a complex web of people,
places, periods and perspectives. The concurrent technological
developments such as paper production, navigation, printing and
other communication and transportation avenues heightened their
circulation and instrumentalisation through mass production,
distribution and consumption, gathering an unprecedented number
of followers for this legal cosmopolis from Asia, Africa, Australia and
the Americas. Nuances of such wide-reaching developments make
postclassical Shāfiʿīsm a fascinating protagonist in the stage of
global history of law.

1 Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 76.

2Michael Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans.

D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1977), 113–138; cf. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Marxism and the
Darkness of History”, Development and Change 23, no. 3 (1992):
79–102.

3 The influence of regional customs and practices in the making of

early Islamic law is an old debate and several scholars have
investigated various non-Islamic, non-Arabic contributions varying
through Hellenistic, Roman Byzantine, Persian Sassanian, Jewish
Talmudic and Christian canon laws. For an interesting critique of
all such long-existing arguments of non-Arab influences and
dominances in Islamic legal thought, see Ulrike Mitter, “Problemen
van het onderzoek naar ontleningen aan niet-Arabische
rechtsstelsels in het ontstaan en de ontwikkeling van het
Islamitisch recht”, Sharqiyya 9, no. 2 (1997): 107–123; Harold
Motzki, “The Role of Non-Arab Converts in the Development of
Early Islamic Law”, Islamic Law and Society 6, no. 3 (1999): 293–
317. They both suggested that indeed the Arabs had an equal or
even a dominant role in the early development of Islamic law,
hence it is baseless to suggest that non-Arab jurists introduced
many foreign elements into early formations of Islamic law. In a
similar vein, Arab Muslims did not monopolise the development of
Islamic law once it started to circulate beyond the Islamic
heartlands.

4 For a few traditional narratives, see Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Salām al-

Indūnīsī, al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī fī maḏhabayhi al-qadīm wa al-jadīd
(Cairo: ʿAbd al-Salām, 1988), 433–605; Limīn Nājī, al-Qadīm wa
al-jadīd fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī (Riyadh: Dār Ibn al-Qayyim, 2007);
Muḥammad bin Radīd Masʿūdī, al-Muʿtamad min qadīm qawl al-
Shāfiʿī ʿalā al-jadīd (Riyadh: Dār ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1996).
Particularly in the case of Minhāj’s prioritisation of old views over
the new ones, see Muḥammad Sumayʿī Sayyid ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
Rastāqī, al-Qadīm wa al-jadīd min aqwāl al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī min
khilāl kitāb Minhāj al-ṭālibīn: dirāsa muqārana bi-ashhar al-
maḏāhib al-fiqhiyya (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2005).

5 The first work is mentioned in Tāj al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb bin ʿAlī
al-Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿīyyat al-kubrā, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad
al-Ṭanāḥī and ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw (Cairo: Maṭbaʿa
ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, n.d.), 7: 183; Muṣṭafā bin ʿAbd Allāh Ḥajī
Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa al-funūn (Beirut:
Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth ʿArabī, 2008), 1: 35, and the second one in
Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ḏahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed.
Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ and Muḥammad Naʿīm al-Arqūsī (Beirut: Al-
Resalah Publishing House, 1996), 20: 461, which also mentions
that Samʿānī wrote other works on trade and travel such as al-
Ribḥ fī al-tijāra (Profit in Trade), Tuḥfat al-musāfir (Gift of
Travellers) and Adab al-ṭalab (Etiquettes of the Search [for
Knowledge]).

6Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh al-Shamrānī, Isʿāf ahl al-ʿaṣr bi-

aḥkām al-baḥr: Awwal mawsūʿat fiqhiyya shāmilat li-aḥkām al-
baḥr: aḥkām al-ʿibādāt (Riyadh: Dār al-Waṭan, 1999): 11.

7 Mohammad Hannan Hassan, “Islamic Legal Thought and

Practices of Seventeenth Century Aceh: Treating the Others” (PhD
diss., McGill University, 2014); Noor Aisha bte Abdul Rahman, “A
Critical Appraisal of Studies on Adat Laws in the Malay Peninsula
during the Colonial Era and Some Continuities” (MA diss., National
University of Singapore, 1989).

8See, for example, Cornelis van Vollenhoven, De ontdekking van

het adatrecht (Leiden: Brill, 1928); Peter J Burns, The Leiden
Legacy: Concepts of law in Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press,
2004).

9 For example, see the adat maxims such as “Adat hinges on

religious law, religious law hinges on the Book of God”, “the source
of religious law is consensus, the source of adat is consensus”
and “adat confirms religious law” in various adat legal texts and
codes. A. Caldecott, “Jelebu Customary Songs and Sayings”,
Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 78
(1918): 3–41; Richard Winstedt and P. E. Josselin de Jong, “A
Digest of the Customary Law of Sungei Ujong”, Journal of the
Malayan Branch Royal Asiatic Society 27, no. 3 (1954): 61–62.

10 On how customs were legitimised and incorporated into Islamic

law, see Gideon Libson, “On the Development of Custom as a
Source of Law in Islamic Law”, Islamic Law and Society 4, no. 2
(1997): 131–155; Ayman Shabana, Custom in Islamic Law and
Legal Theory: The Development of the Concepts of ʿUrf and ʿAdah
in the Islamic Legal Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010).

11 One case that I have not discussed is the sultanates of Aceh

and Banjar (Kalimantan), both of which exclusively supported
Shāfiʿī ideas and texts from the seventeenth century, if not earlier.
The first four Shāfiʿī texts available to us from the Malay world
were commissioned by rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The first, Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm of Ranīrī, was written at the
request of the Sultan Iskandar Thani (r. 1636–1641) or his wife,
who later became ruler, Ṣafiyat al-Dīn Tāj al-ʿĀlam (r. 1641–1675),
and asked ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Sinkilī to write the second, Mirʾāt al-
ṭullāb. The third, Sabīl al-muhtadīn by Arshad al-Banjarī, was
commissioned by the Banjar sultan Taḥmīd Allāh II (r. 1773–1808).
The insignificance of law as a discipline compared to mysticism in
the history of the archipelago might be a reason for this trend, yet
these rulers, jurists and texts stand opposed to my cases, and
they represent a genuine counterpoint. They also suggest what
Ahmed, What Is Islam?, ch. 6, argued convincingly about the
existence of a parallel ruler’s law in “the Balkans-to-Bengal
complex”, in which a ruler often functioned as an independent
investigator (mujtahid) and jurist.

12 Two debates on the permissibility of eating seafood between

Ḥanafīs and Shāfiʿīs quickly spring to mind: (a) in the Mughal court
of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627); (b) in Cape Town between
the local Shāfiʿī inhabitants and newly arrived Ottoman Ḥanafī
qāḍī Abū Bakr Effendi (1814–1880). ʿAbd al-Sattār bin Qāsim
Lāhūrī, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: Majlis hā-yi shabānah-ʾi darbār-i Nūr al-
Dīn Jahāngīr, az 24 Rajab 1017 tā 19 Ramaz̤ān 1020 H.Q., ed.
ʿĀrif Nawshāhī and Muʿīn Niẓāmī (Tehran: Mīrās̲-i Maktūb, 2006),
80–118; Achmat Davids, “The Origins of the Ḥanafī-Shāfiʿī Dispute
and the Impact of Abu Bakr Effendi”, in Pages from Cape Muslim
History, ed. Yusuf da Costa and Achmat Davids (Pietermaritzburg:
Shooter & Shooter, 1994), 81–102.

13Among them Abū Thawr Ibrāhīm bin Khālid, Ḥusayn bin ʿAlī al-
Karābīsī and Ḥasan al-Zaʿfarānī.

14 Monique Bernards and John Nawas, “The Geographical

Distribution of Muslim Jurists during the First Four Centuries AH”,
Islamic Law and Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 181.

15 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Medina produced

such revivalist scholars of various orientations as Shaykh Yūsuf,
ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Siṅkilī, Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī (1615–1690), Shāh Walī
Allāh al-Dihlawī (1703–1762), Muḥammad bin Ḥayāt al-Sindī (d.
1751) and Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792), the
founder of Wahhābīsm.
 Bibliography
Notes to readers: (1) The bibliography contains certain titles not
mentioned in the footnotes. These titles were useful in the initial
research for this book, and they would help researchers to identify
further reading in related fields. (2) I enlist the translated texts under
the names of the original author, even if they are cited in footnotes
under translator’s names (especially in Chapter 8). (3) While
ordering the entries alphabetically I disregard the Arabic articles and
propositions such as “al”, “el” and “ibn”, and the Dutch articles and
propositions such as “de”, “van” “den” and “der”.
 Primary Sources in Manuscript
Principal Texts: Minhāj, Tuḥfa and Fatḥ

Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Shihāb al-Dīn. Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj: Mecca Fiqh

Shāfiʿī 83 (vol. 1), 84 (2), 85 (3), 86 (4); Riyadh King Saud University
7850.1 (1), 4886.1, 4886.2, 4886.3 (vols. 1–3), 1365 (vol. 3), 2148,
566 (vol. 1), 1365 and 7850.4 (vol. 4); British Library IO B367 [Loth
280].

al-Malaybārī Jr, Zayn al-Dīn. Fatḥ al-muʿīn: Ponnāni Makhdūmiyya

Library 145; 113; 138; 141; Tānūr Islāḥ al-ʿUlūm 142; 143; 144; 145;
Museum Aceh 07_488; Leiden Or. 2286; King Saud University
Riyadh 347; Riyadha Mosque Lamu EAP466/1/9:
https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP466-1-9 (last accessed on 6
October 2021).

al-Nawawī, Yaḥyā bin Sharaf. Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa ʿumdat al-muftīn:

Princeton Garret 1388Y; Leiden Or. 1600; Leiden Or. 2227; Leiden
Or. 6893; Leiden Or. 18273; Mecca Fiqh Shāfiʿī 21 and Mecca FS 98
[Paris Arabe 1002; Ẓāhiriyya 1944; Ẓāhiriyya 3647; Ẓāhiriyya 9558;
Tarīm Aḥqāf Bā ʿAlawī 1109; Tarīm Aḥqāf Ribāṭ 126].

British Library, London, United Kingdom

Or. 1738 and Islamic 2807d: Anonymous. Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī

Farmāḍ.

Or. 15979: Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī. Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm.

Add. 12290: Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī. Serat Kitab Tupah.

Islamic 2807e: Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī. “Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn fī

Baʿḍi Akhbār al-Burtughāliyyīn”.

Islamic 2807f: Muḥammad al-Kālikūtī. “al-Fatḥ al-mubīn”.

Juma AI-Majid Center for Culture and Heritage, Dubai, UAE

MS 679405: Faqīh Ḥusayn bin Aḥmad al-Mahfanī. Qayd al-jāmiʿ al-

hādī: mukhtaṣar fī aḥkām al-nikāḥ.

King Saud University Manuscript Collections, Riyadh, Saudi

Arabia

9: ʿAlī bin Aḥmad bin Saʿīd al-Ḥaḍramī. Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn ʿalā Fatḥ
al-muʿīn.

3687: Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ramlī. Nihāyat al-muḥtāj ilā

sharḥ al-Minhāj.

6048: Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad bin al-Khaṭīb al-Sharbīnī. Mughnī

al-muḥtāj sharḥ al-Minhāj li al-Nawawī.

Leiden University Library Special Collections, The Netherlands

Or. 1815: Anonymous. Bustam.

Or. 1841: Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī. Tuhfah: compendium of

Muhammadan law (fiqh), in prose.

Or. 2126 (fols. 53–145): Multi-text manuscript (MTM).

Or. 2287: MTM.

Or. 2290: Rāfiʿī. Muḥarrar.

Or. 3051: Rāfiʿī. Muḥarrar.

Or. 5720 (fols. 62a–80a, 81b–185a): Rāfiʿī. Muḥarrar

Or. 6331: Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī. Tuḥfat aṭ-Ṭullāb bi-Śarḥ Taḥrīr Tanqīḥ

al-Lubāb.

Or. 6481(fols. 164–173): MTM.

Or. 6534 (fols. 195–197): MTM.

Or. 6586 (fols. 381–394): MTM.

Or. 6702: Syaikh Faqih ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Kitāb al-nikāḥ.

Or. 7111: Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat. Tarājim ʿUlamāʾ Jāwa.

Or. 12155 and Or. 12177: Anonymous. Kitāb pada menyatakan

ḥukum nikāḥ.

Or. 17903 (fols. 160a–167b), MTM.

Mappila Heritage Library, Calicut University, Kerala, India

MHLD 203: Anonymous. Fatḥ al-muʿīn vyākhyānam tarjama.

MHLD 284: Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm. Tadkirat al-ikhwān fī iṣtilāḥāt

Tuḥfa li Ibn Ḥajar.
Oxford University, United Kingdom

Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Skeat Collection 1:

Kitab Takhopah.

Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia

A 101: Shaykh Yūsuf al-Maqassarī. Nafḥat al-saylāniyya fī al-minḥat

al-Raḥmāniyya.

A 656: [Genealogy of textual transmission and teachers].

Princeton University Library, USA

Garret no. 2Yq: Ibn Qāsim al-ʿAbbādī (ʿUbbādī). Ḥawāshī ʿalā Sharḥ
al-Minhāj.

Royal Asiatic Society, London, United Kingdom

Arabic 28: Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī. Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn fī baʻḍ

akhbār al-Burtughālīyīn.

School of Oriental and African Studies London, United Kingdom

174234: Muḥammad bin Qāsim al-Ghazzī. Fatḥ al-qarīb al-mujīb fī

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 Index
ʿAbbādī, Ibn Qāsim al-, 215–220
Abbas, K. H. Siradjuddin, 27
ʿAbbāsids, 83, 104, 132, 149, 157
ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd II, the Ottoman ruler, 301
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, ʿUmar, 27
ʿAbd al-Majīd, the Ottoman ruler, 301
ʿAbd al-Qādir, Aḥmad Muḥy al-Dīn, 331
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Raziy al-Dīn bin, 204, 216
ʿAbd al-Shakūr, 287, 312
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Muḥammad bin, 303
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Shaykh Faqīh, 325
ʿAbduh, Muḥammad, 303
abode of Islam. See dār al-Islām
abode of treaty. See dār al-sulḥ
abode of war. See dār al-ḥarb
Abū al-Fidā, Ismāʿīl, 149
Abū al-Haytam, 177
Abū al-Khayr, Abū Bakar, 203–204
Abū al-Ṭayb, al-Qāḍī, 152
Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, 230
Abū Ḥanīfa, 6, 37, 85, 104, 122, 152–153
Abū Khuḍayr, Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm, 288–290, 306
Abū Shujāʿ, 89, 106, 161, 346, 353
Abū ʿUthmān, 104
Abū Yūsuf, 37
Abū Zarʿa, Walī al-Dīn Aḥmad, 81
Abushiri Revolt, 358
Aceh, 229, 271, 332, 366, 385, 390
Acehnese, 271, 309, 335
Acre, 148
Adam Mount, 256
Adam, the Prophet, 251, 256
adat, ʿādāt or ʿāda. See ʿurf
adatrecht, 350
Aden, 48, 95, 225, 244
ʿĀdil Shāhs, 63, 234, 247
Adimanggolo, 335
aḏkiyāʾ, 241
Afghānī, Jamāl al-Dīn, 303
Afrikaans, 366
ahl al-ḥadīth (“guardians of traditions”), 6
ahl al-raʾy. (“guardians of reasoning”), 6
Aḥmad Khān, Sayyid, 303
‘ajam. See non-Arabs
ʿAjmāwī, Ḥammād al-Fayyūmī al-, 314, 316
Ajwibat al-ʿajība by Malaybārī, 26, 40, 236, 255
Akbar, Mughal ruler, 234
Alexandria, 285
ʿĀlī Rajas of Cannanore, 262
ʿAlī, Zayd bin, 37
Allahabad, 202
Allen, James de Vere, 331
al-Wāʿiẓ al-Zamzamī, ʿAbd al-Raʾūf, 186
ʿAmīra, Shaykh al-, 113, 215, 221
amirs, 41
Amsterdam, 338
Anas, Mālik bin, 6, 36–37, 104, 157, 201
Andalusia, 202
Andaman Islands, 367
Anglo-Muhammadan law, 337, 360
Anṣārī, Zakariyyā al-, 82, 107, 111–115, 144, 179, 184, 186, 206,
208, 216, 223, 231, 244, 290, 325–326
Anṣārs, 195
ʿAntabī, Jamāl al-Dīn, 261
ʿAntabī, ʿUmar al-, 261
apostasy, 120, 236, 253, 327
Aqbī, Ḥusayn al-, 85
Aquinas, Thomas, 128
Arab identity, 193, 195–196, 207, 213, 300
Arab supremacism, 193, 222, 325
Arabic, 207–208, 241, 255, 284, 324–328, 330, 346, 350, 365
as a lingua franca, 61
colloquial, 287
script, 284, 323, 330, 333, 336, 366
vowels, 190–191
Arabic cosmopolis, 18, 309
Arabi-Malayalam. See Malabārī
Arabised people, 195
Arabs, 33, 36, 50, 92, 94, 193, 195, 201, 207, 213, 222, 225, 247,
307, 356, 381
“archetypal scholars”, 289
“archetypal text”, 289
architectonic design, 77, 103, 118, 124, 243, 290, 340
Ardabīlī, Ṣafiyy al-Dīn, 59
areca, 252
Arīkalī, Muḥammad Musliyār, 263, 268
Arwī, 330–331, 364–365
As’ad, Aliy, 334
Āsaf Khān, Masnad al-ʿĀlī Abū al-Qāsim, 210–211
Ashrafīya Library, 133
Ashrafiyya College, 132, 134
ʿAsqalānī, Ibn Ḥajar al-, 52, 183–184
ʿAsqalānī, Qāḍī Abū ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Baysānī al-, 53
Atlantic Ocean, 24, 33, 60, 173, 321, 324, 366–367, 373, 388
atonement, 142–143
Australia, 367
authority: “ascribed” and “achieved”, 50, 259
charismatic, 42–43, 47, 86, 201
textual, 16, 42, 47, 103
traditional, 42, 47
autocommentary, tradition of writing, 228
ʿawāmm (public), 39
Awzāʿī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-, 37
ʿAydarūsīs, 257
Ayyūbids, 58, 64, 145, 149, 157, 170
Azhar, al-, 107, 111, 177–179, 215, 219, 231, 258, 289, 389
Azīz. See Fatḥ al-ʿAzīz

Bā ʿAlawīs, 257
Bā Faḍl, ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 114, 303
Bā Faraj Bā ʿAlawī, ʿUmar, 302
Bā ʿIshn, Saʿīd bin Muḥammad, 302–303
Bā Kathīr, ʿAbd Allāh, 161, 272, 291, 318
Bā Ṣabrīn, ʿAlī al-Ḥaḍramī, 115, 302
Bābahīr, Muḥammad bin Ḥasan, 356, 370, 372
Badawī, Sayyid al-, 177
Baghdad, 37–38, 80, 82, 86, 95, 104, 106, 130, 159, 167, 257, 388–
389
Baghdadis, 156–157, 159
Bahadur Shah, Gujarati ruler, 210–211
Bahasa Indonesia, 323, 333–334
Baḥr al-muḥīṭ by Qamūlī, 89
Bājūrī, Ibrāhīm al-, 91, 219, 289, 326, 353, 358, 361–362
Bakhtin, M. M., 100
Bakrī al-Ṣīddīqī, Muḥammad al-, 168–169
Bali, 220
Bālī, Muḥammad al-, 220–221
Banjar, 385
Banjarī, Muḥammad Arshad al-, 26, 275, 309, 324, 385
Bantanī, al. See Nawawī al-Bantanī
Banten, 63, 283, 348, 366
Banten Revolts, 295
baraka (blessings), 44, 135
Barakat al-saylāniyya by Shaykh Yūsuf, 366
Barakāt bin Muḥammad, ruler of Mecca, 180, 182
Barbarī, Farīd al-, 264, 268
Barbosa, Duarte, 258
Barwani, Ali Muhsin, 332, 336
Baṣarī, ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-, 220
Basīṭ by Ghazālī, 86–88, 92, 106, 118, 228
Basra, 64, 69, 82, 89, 106, 220
Batavia, 338, 342–343, 348, 353–354, 356, 369
Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt, 148
Batu Khan, Mongol ruler, 150
Baybars, Mamlūk ruler, 44, 46, 49, 145, 157–158, 170, 182
Bayt al-Manūfī, 205
Bayt al-Zamzamī, 204–205
Bedouins, 197
Beirut, 314
Bengal, 57, 369
Bengalen, Achmat van, 57, 366
Bengali, 367
betel, 252–253
bibliophiles, 95, 335
bidʿa (innovation), 282, 294
Bijapur, 63, 202, 229, 234, 248
Bima, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-, 283
Black Sea, 150
book revolution, 69, 78
book trade, 95
bookbinding, 365
bookshops, 270, 336
Botany Bay, 367
Bousquet, Georges-Henri, 15
Brahmins, 254
Braudel, Fernand, 9
British colonialism, 337, 345, 357, 360, 363
British fuqahāʾ, 356
British interregnum, 345, 349, 369
British Library, 349
British Museum, 349
Bukhara, 258
Bukhārī, Muḥammad bin Ismāʿīl al-, 332
Bukhārī, Sayyid Aḥmad Jalāl al-Dīn al-, 258
Bukhārīs, 258–259
Bulqaynīs, Minhāj specialists, 168
bupatis (regents), 337, 342
Burullusī, Aḥmad al-, 113
Busaidis, 272
Bushrā al-karīm by Ibn Ḥajar, 179, 302
Buwayṭī, Abū Yaʿqūb al-, 76–78, 104, 110, 140, 183, 388
Bwana Mkubwa, 274
Bwana Shee Mataka, 331, 336

Cairo, 38, 45, 95, 107, 168, 176–178, 180, 183–184, 206, 209, 219,
231, 236, 247, 258, 285, 314, 317, 358, 361–362, 388–389
Calcutta, 356, 369
Calder, Norman, 139, 166, 192
Calicut, 225, 231, 237, 246–247, 258–261, 292, 334, 411, 421
caliphate, 41, 149, 157, 160, 180–181, 320
caliphs, 41, 301
Cāliyaṃ, 259
Canon law, 128
canonisation, 136, 158, 170, 384
Cape Town, 57, 366
Caspian Sea, 13, 91, 159
catalogue, 364–365
Caucasus, 219, 276
Cempiṭṭapaḷḷi, 230
Cēriyaṃ, 267
Chaul, 260
Chief Mkwawa, 358
China, 57, 261
Chinsura, 57
Christians, 51, 95, 148, 150, 155, 258, 359–360
chronogram, 232, 301
circles of learning, 33, 35–36, 203
circulation, the concept of, 23–24
circulatory texts (kutub mutadāwala), 71, 79, 87, 89
classical era/period, 12–13, 78, 118, 141, 165, 378, 380
clusters, 43–44, 60, 62, 103, 113, 130, 158, 168, 182–184, 202–203,
205–206, 215, 266, 274
Cochin, 225–226, 229–230, 247, 259
Cochin China, 364–365
coconut, 252, 254
Code Civil, 354
codification, 16, 157–159, 170, 175, 188, 218, 281–282, 305, 311,
375, 378, 384
colleges. See madrasas
colonial courts, 362, 369
Colonial Institute, Delft, 345
colonialism, 295, 321, 330, 337, 352, 373
colonisation, 30, 55, 322–323, 371–372, 377, 379
Comaroff, John, 337
Cōmbāl, 231–233
commentarial intermediation, 175
commentarial sedimentation, 322, 329
commentary writing, 12, 70
characteristics of, 11, 166
Comoros, 272, 372
Confucianism, 128
Constantinople, recovery of, 155
contamination, 191
contract of sale, 351
contrarian substratum, 123
conversion: from Islam, 150
to Islam, 36, 63, 185, 230, 248
to Shāfiʿīsm, 49, 55
to Shīʿīsm, 58–59, 181–182, 258
to Sunnīsm, 63
Coorg, 334
Coromandel, 48, 229–230, 250, 268, 357, 364, 368, 372
“Corpus Juris Javanum”, 350
cosmopolis of law, 17–21. See also legal cosmopolis
cosmopolitanism, 36, 65, 222, 293, 376
Counter-crusades, 130, 148
Counter-Renaissance, 17
Crawfurd, John, 335
criminal laws, 119–120, 168, 180, 338, 340, 343, 346, 353–354, 361
Crusades, 129–130, 145–146, 148–149, 155, 160, 170
curriculum, 43, 203, 214, 236–237, 239, 241, 263, 266, 269, 284,
299, 314–315, 340, 369
customary law, 21, 311, 337, 341–342, 350, 352, 354, 383

Daendels, Herman Willem, 349

Dāghistānīs, 219, 276
Dale, Stephen, 257
Damascus, 45, 110, 127, 130, 132–134, 158, 167, 170, 304, 389
Damietta, 285, 289, 297
Daqāʾiq al-Minhāj by Nawawī, 162
dār al-ḥarb (abode of war), 150
dār al-Islām (abode of Islam), 150, 246, 248
Dār al-Salām Arabic College, 334
dāral-sulḥ (abode of treaty), 150
Dārimī, Muḥammad Ḥanīf, 334
David, Maḍmūn bin, 95
Dawānī, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-, 59
De Beginselen by van den Berg, 352, 355
de Goeje, M. J., 355
de Haan, F., 342
De Vries, Levie, 350
Deccan, 277, 314–315
Delft, 345
Delhi, 314
Delhi Sultanate, 62
Digest, 109
ḏimmī (protected person), 146
Dimyāṭī, Aḥmad al-, 285, 308
Dimyāṭī, Muḥammad Shaṭā Zayn al-Dīn, 285, 287
discursive everyday life, 277
disorder, 17
Diu, 260
divisions among Shāfiʿīs: Buwayṭī and Muzanī, 104
Iraqis and Khurasanis, 80, 83, 86, 104–109, 156–159
Mecca and Cairo, 107–109, 193, 197, 206–210, 221, 223, 245,
300–301, 303, 306, 308, 319, 387, 390
traditionalists and rationalists, 104
Djajadiningrat, Aboe Bakar, 27, 295, 313, 370
dreams, 55, 211, 367
dress codes, 196, 278, 287, 294
Drewes, G. W. J., 270
Duby, Georges, 39
Dūmā, Muḥammad Khaṭīb, 283
Dutch, 335, 346, 354, 357, 368
Dutch Bible Society, 348
Dutch colonialism, 270, 284, 295–296, 337, 339, 343–350, 370
Dutch East India Company, 337–338, 342–344, 366, 369, 372
Dutch East Indies, 347, 351
Dutch Elegant School, 311
Dutch fuqahāʾ estate, 354
dynamic text, 215

Eco, Umberto, 173

Egypt, 4, 13, 38, 46, 49, 90, 95, 115, 145, 177, 180, 195, 207, 209,
215–216, 283, 285, 302, 361, 381, 389
Egyptians, 49–50, 53, 181, 208–209, 259–260, 307
endowments, 40, 45, 62, 120, 134, 177, 180–181, 211, 274
English, 356–357, 369, 372
Enlightenment, 17
Entebbe, 261
“Era of the Confirmers”, 108
espionage, 155
European: collections, 341
colonialism, 14, 21, 24–25, 41, 63
epistemologies, 19–20
legal traditions, 11, 21, 24, 341
officials, 338
scholars, 14, 16, 20
society, 39
travellers, 14
European fuqahāʾ, 322–323, 345, 349, 354, 362, 371–372, 377

Faḍfarī, Abū Suhayl Anwar al-, 268

Fakhr al-Dīn, Abū Bakr, 237, 259
Fakhriyya. See Silsila Fakhriyya
Fākihī, ʿAbd al-Qādiral-, 205
Fākihī, Muḥammad al-, 202
“false innovations”, 294, 298, 306
Fansuri, Hamza, 100
Faqīh Ḥusayn. See Mahfanī
Faqīh Saʿīd, 261
Farsy, Abdallah Salih, 28, 272, 274, 328, 332, 336
Fāsī, Taqiyy al-Dīn Muḥammad al-, 202
Faṭānī, Aḥmad bin Muḥammad Zayn al-, 313, 318
Fatāwā al-fiqhiyyat al-kubrā by Ibn Ḥajar, 185–186
Fatāwā al-ḥadīthiyya by Ibn Ḥajar, 185
Fatḥ (in full Fatḥ al-muʿīn) by Malaybārī, 26–27, 30, 80, 91, 98, 108–
109, 113–118, 227–278, 281–316, 368, 370
architectonic design of, 242
 as a textbook, 264, 276, 331
authorial intention behind, 242
chapters of, 121
citations in, 122, 245
collective discussions on, 267
commentarial methods of, 242
commentaries on, 263–265, 267, 388
competition against Minhāj, 274
contrastive viewpoints in, 245
criticisms of Tuḥfa, 245
dictionary on, 334
endowment of, 275
in Central Asia, 275–276
in East Africa, 272, 274
in Southeast Asia, 270–271
in Sri Lanka, 268
legacy of, 115, 262–265, 267–268, 271–272, 274–276, 388
misreading of, 254
on betel, 252
on religious legitimacy of a non-Muslim ruler, 249–250, 292, 296
on sending donations to Mecca, 250
on trade, 262
poems on, 263, 268
prioritisations in, 245
regionality in, 251–252, 254–255
translations of, 331, 333–334, 362
Fatḥ al-ʿAzīz (aka ʿAzīz) by Rāfiʿī, 89, 92, 133, 187
Fatḥ al-jawād by Ibn Ḥajar, 186, 289
Fatḥ al-qarīb by Ghazzī, 91, 272–273, 326, 353, 358, 362
Fatḥ al-wahhāb by Anṣārī, 112, 144, 216, 290, 325
Fātiḥa, 207, 307
Fāṭimids, 38, 64, 167, 177, 389
fatwā, 26, 40, 43, 46, 68, 71–72, 111, 144, 154, 178–179, 185, 186,
203, 205, 210, 214, 221, 232, 236, 244, 253, 255, 271, 286,
292–293, 300–301, 308, 315, 319, 331
Fawāʾid al-Madaniyya by Kurdī, 117, 210, 221, 303
female pesantren, 284
female ʿulamāʾ, 284
Fiji, 366, 368
Fiji Muslim League, 368
fiqh, 5–6, 15–16, 40, 45, 101, 153, 160, 389
Firozabad, 82
fitna, 254
Fitnat al-Wahhābiya by Zaynī Daḥlān, 298
“Five Scholars” (ʿulamāʾ al-khams), 108
flies, 191
foodstuffs, 120, 208
Freijer Code, 345, 353, 369
French, 346, 351, 354–355
French colonialism, 354, 372
Friday, 61
funeral, 293, 300
fuqahāʾ estate, 19, 37, 39–43, 51, 60, 64, 70–73, 75, 79, 94, 107,
112, 122, 134, 148, 161, 168, 179–181, 184, 186, 188,
201–205, 212–213, 238, 241–246, 249, 266, 294, 305, 312,
349, 354, 362, 380, 384, 387, 390–391
fuqahāʾ-tujjār (jurist-traders), 94, 99
furūʿ al-fiqh (substantive law), 5, 70–71

Gama, Vasco da, 225, 247

genealogy, scholarly. See silsila
Geniza records, 95
geoclimatic division, 20–21
German colonialism, 358, 361
German East Africa, 330, 358, 360
Germans, 357, 372
Germany, 361
Ghāya (in full Ghāyat al-ikhtiṣār) by Abū Shujāʿ, 80, 89–91, 98, 106,
161, 289, 327, 340, 346, 351–354, 358, 360–362
Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid al-, 14, 45, 49, 73, 79, 86–93, 105–106, 110,
118–119, 132–134, 145, 151, 184, 187, 191, 205, 228, 239,
251, 284, 289
Ghazālī, Muḥammad al-, 232–233
Ghaznawids, 55
Ghaznī Maḥmūd, 55
Ghazzī, Muḥammad bin Qāsim al-, 91, 353, 358
Ghūrī, Ghiyāth al-Dīn, 55
Ghūrids, 55
global ijāza, 72
globalisation, 129, 159, 170, 280–281, 374, 376
Goa, 257
Green, Nile, 365
Groningen, 348
Guangzhou, 4, 10, 33
“guardians of reasoning” (ahl al-raʾy), 6
“guardians of traditions” (ahl al-ḥadīth), 6
Gujarat, 48, 56–57, 63, 202, 210, 229, 248, 277

ḥadīths (Prophetic traditions), 3, 5, 9–10, 40, 44, 59, 72, 75, 77, 86,
104, 110, 132–133, 143, 146, 152–153, 164, 179, 182,
191–192, 195, 212, 233, 237, 283, 300, 324, 328, 339, 341,
364–365
Ḥaḍramawt, 5, 57, 115, 161, 211, 218, 302
Ḥaḍramī, Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh al-, 257
Ḥaḍramī, Sālim bin Samīr al-, 326
Ḥaḍramīs, 36, 47, 50–51, 257, 259, 262, 274, 315
Halim, Fachrizal, 105, 192
Hallaq, Wael, 38, 255
Ḥamawī, Aḥmad bin Muḥammad al-, 382
Ḥanafī school (Ḥanafīsm), 6–7, 22, 37, 44, 46, 48–49, 55, 58, 83, 87,
149, 151, 159, 184, 202–203, 245, 257, 294, 305, 314–315,
325, 337, 352, 357, 363, 365, 368, 372, 380, 385
Ḥanafīs, 40, 59, 195, 202, 204, 275, 300, 325, 356, 367, 382, 386
Ḥanbal, Aḥmad bin, 6, 37, 77–78, 140, 304
Ḥanbalī school (Ḥanbalīsm), 37, 44, 46, 77, 202, 304, 340, 344, 365
Ḥanbalīs, 158, 194, 204, 283, 300
Hanīf, Ismāʿīl bin Muhammad, 366
Ḥarām (in Eastern Egypt), 177
ḥarām (prohibition), 147
Ḥaramaynī, al-. See Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī, al-
Ḥarmala, 104, 140
Hasjmy, Ali, 27
Ḥāwī al-kabīr by Māwardī, 90
Ḥāwī al-ṣaghīr by Qazwīnī, 187
Hazeu, G. A. J., 332
Ḥażrat, K. K. Abū Bakr, 267
Herat Episode, 58
Hibshy, Shaykhan bin Muḥammad al-, 219
Hidāya by Marghīnānī, 337, 363
Hidāyat al-aḏkiyāʾ by Zayn al-Dīn Sr, 242, 286
hierarchisation, 139–140, 144, 146, 148, 160, 170, 188–189, 375,
378
Hijaz, 5–6, 20, 49, 64, 92, 116, 155, 180, 193–196, 200–209, 213,
222–223, 237, 243, 269, 285, 305, 375
Hijazi, 109, 193–196, 201, 207, 209, 300, 307
Hind, al-, 234, 251, 256
Hindī al-Bājī, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aḥmad, 54
Hindī al-Urmawī, Ṣafiyy al-Dīn Muḥammad, 54
Hindī, al-, 54–55, 116, 185. See also Indians
Hindu customs, 253
Hindu kingdom, 229, 248–250, 292
Hindus, 221, 240, 246, 250, 254
ḥiyal (legal devices), 149
Holy Mosque (Masjid al-Ḥarām) of Mecca, 285, 287, 291
Holy Mosque (Masjid al-Ḥarām) of Medina, 89
Hormuz, 258
Howard, E. C., 141, 356–357
humanism, 17
Humāyūn, Mughal ruler, 211
humility, 141, 212, 287–288, 331
Hurgronje, Christiaan Snouck, 15, 27, 270, 272, 285–292, 295, 300,
312, 317, 351, 354–356, 361–362, 370–373
Hyderabad, 302, 314–315

Iʿāna (in full Iʿānat al-ṭālibīn) by Sayyid Bakrī, 22, 28, 109, 113, 115,
117–118, 121–122, 270–273, 282, 285, 287, 290–294,
297–302, 307–319, 376–379, 383, 386, 388
authorial intention behind, 291
critique of, 318
disagrees with Fatḥ, 292–293, 300
on political power, 293, 297
on the history of Kaʿba, 301
other titles of, 318
poems on, 318
publication of, 287
reception of, 299, 316, 318
regionality in, 299–301
Iʿānat al-mustaʿīn by Bā Ṣabrīn, 115, 117, 302
ʿIbāḍ, ʿAbd Allāh bin, 37
Ibāḍī school (Ibāḍīsm), 37, 43, 272, 357, 360, 372, 387
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, 339–341, 344
Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, 162
Ibn al-Jawzī, 90
Ibn al-Madāʾinī, 152
Ibn al-Mulqin, 84
Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, ʿAbd Allāh, 157
Ibn al-Nadīm, 10, 78, 94
Ibn al-Qarahdāghī, aka Shaykh ʿUmar, 303
Ibn al-Qayyim, 304, 410
Ibn al-Rifʿa, 89
Ibn ʿAṭṭār, 27
Ibn ʿAwkal, 95
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 55, 57, 60–61, 96, 184, 257, 261
Ibn Ḥajar (al-Haytamī), Shihāb al-Dīn, 26, 29, 50, 59, 93, 107–108,
112–115, 122, 174–228, 233–234, 237, 243–249, 255, 267,
275, 277, 289, 293, 297, 300–308, 315, 331, 346–347, 350,
358, 369, 389, 391
attachment with Anṣārī, 179
biography of, 177, 234
children of, 203–204, 216
education of, 178–179
influenced by the Minhāj, 188
legal writings by, 187–188
miracle of, 211
on his motivation behind the Tuḥfa, 188
on Ibn Taymiyya, 304
patronage for, 210–211
students of, 205, 234, 277
travels to Mecca, 181–182, 184, 186
Ibn Jamāʿa, ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad, 168
Ibn Jamāʿa, Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm, 11
Ibn Khaldūn, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 14, 21, 38, 380
Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah, 27, 169
Ibn Quṭayba, 78, 183
Ibn Ṣalāḥ, 27, 92
Ibn Samura, 48, 169
Ibn Taymiyya, Majd al-Dīn, 158, 304, 339, 341, 344
Ibn Taymiyya, Taqiyy al-Dīn, 14, 54, 158, 304, 339, 341
Ibn Ziyād, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 116, 244
Ibrāhīm, the Prophet, 301
ijāzas (certificates), 71–72, 93–94, 179
ijmāʿ (consensus), 6
ijtihād (independent investigation), 7, 190
Ilkhanate, 160
ʿilla (ratio legis), 189
Imdād by Ibn Ḥajar, 186
indentured labourers, 366, 373, 388
independent investigation. See ijtihād
India Maunatul Islam Association of Fiji, 368
Indian Rebellion of 1857, 345
Indian subcontinent, 52, 54, 95, 202, 214, 245, 256
Indians, 54–56, 116, 210
Indonesia, 4, 118, 284, 334, 341, 344, 356
inertia, 8, 271, 378
inheritance law, 119, 163, 205, 217, 238, 351, 356–357, 360
inscriptions, 27, 56, 232, 241, 261–262
insects, 67, 141, 191–192, 252, 254
intermixed schools, 53
Iqnāʾ by Māwardī, 90
iqrāʾ (reading), 215
Iraq, 4, 6, 13, 35, 38, 45, 49, 59, 78, 104, 106, 123, 158
Iraqis, 80, 83, 85, 105–107, 156–157, 378
Irshād by Ismāʿīl Zabīdī, 186
Isfahan, 57, 89, 106
Isfarāyīnī, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-, 80, 83
Iskandar Thani, Acehnese ruler, 385
“Islamic Sea”, 3, 151
Ismāʿīlīs, 157, 181, 389
Isnawī, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, 84, 135
Istanbul, 174, 180, 219, 237, 294, 305, 365
istidlāl, 6
istiḥsān, 6

jadīd (new opinion), 139–140, 381

Jaʿfarīsm, 6, 37
jamʿ (synthesis, reconciliation), 302
Jammāz, Manṣūr bin, 261
Java, 270, 272, 295, 297, 299, 309, 332, 337–340, 343, 345, 348,
362
Javanese, 118, 219, 270, 284, 287, 290, 295, 299, 309–310, 326–
327, 333–349, 368, 372
Javanese santri, 350
Jawāhir al-Baḥr al-muhīṭ by Ibn al-Rifʿa, 89
Jawāhir al-Jawāhir by Yamanī, 89
Jāwī quarter in Mecca, 287, 295
Jāwī scholars, 60, 116, 283, 287, 295, 313
Jāwī writing, 284, 330–331, 348, 369
Jeddah, 115, 295
Jerusalem, 127, 200
Jesuits, 257
Jewish academies, 95
Jewish tradition, 70
Jews, 51, 95, 150, 253
jihād, 10, 145, 147–148, 249–250
jizya, 145–146, 154
Judaism, 14, 24
Judeo-Arabic, 94
judges. See qāḍīs
Jundī, Khalīl bin Isḥāq al-, 202
Juwaynī al-Ḥaramaynī, al-, 45, 73, 83, 86, 88, 106–107, 151, 184

Kaʿba, 157, 301

kadijustiz, 15–16
Kaimals, 252
kalām. See theology
Kālikutī, Qādī Muḥammad al-, 27, 238
Kalimantan, 26, 309, 385
Kamil, Sultan al-, 56
Kannada, 333
ḳânûn, 294
ḳânûnnâmes, 294
Kanz al-rāghibīn by Maḥallī, 52, 111, 113, 169, 171, 215, 325, 342,
353
Kārimī merchants, 36, 51–53, 57, 65, 260
Karnataka, 334
Karrāmīsm, 55
Kashf al-durar by Sindī, 97, 111, 171
Kashmir, 313
Kashmīrī, al-Ḥāj Fidā Muḥammad al-, 313
Katz, Marion, 198
Kenya, 331
Kerala, 254, 333, 366
Keyzer, S., 346–351, 353–354, 358, 360
khaṭīb (sermoniser), 44, 53
khawāṣṣ (specialists), 39–40
Khayyāṭ, Muḥammad bin Yūsuf Ḥusayn al-, 313, 318
khiyāral-majlis (option of contracting session), 151–153, 386
Khulāṣa by Ghazālī, 86–89, 92–93
Khurasan, 35, 38, 40, 49, 58, 64, 78, 104, 106, 123, 158–159, 167,
389
Khurasanis, 34, 40, 80, 83, 86, 88, 105–107, 156, 159, 258, 378
Kiswahili, 323, 328–332, 335
kitab kuning, 270, 284, 317
Kitab Malay, 328
Kitab Toehpah. See Toehpah
Koccaṅṅāṭi, 259
Konkan, 48, 229
Koṇṭōṭṭi, 265
Kōṭancēri, Aḥmad Kuṭṭi Musliyār, 219, 267
Kōṭṭakkal, 260
Kūfa, 152
Kuññāli Marakkārs, 230, 260
Kuññippaḷḷi, 233
Kūrānī, Ibrāhīm al-, 389
Kurdī, Muḥammad al-, 117, 210, 221, 275, 303, 308
Kurdī, Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Malik al-, 46
Kurdish, 303
Kurdistan, 209, 218, 275–276
kutub mutadāwala. See circulatory texts

Lamu, 162, 229, 272–274, 331

landraad (regional court), 337–338, 345, 368
Latin, 354
Latour, Bruno, 23
Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes by van den Berg, 356
legal cosmopolis, 17–18, 22–23, 388
legal theory, 5, 88, 153, 237, 274, 384. See also uṣūl al-fiqh
legislators, 8
Leiden, 290, 335, 342, 347–348, 353, 355
Levant, 5, 13, 35, 53, 64, 75, 149, 195
lime, 252
lithograph, 268
lithographed manuscripts, 328–329
“Little Mecca”, 229
Little Meccas, 276, 390–391
localisation, 278, 316, 328
Lodhīs, 59
London, 335, 356, 362
longue durée. See textual longue durée
Lubāb by Maḥāmilī, 80, 84

Maʿbarī, Abū Bakr Ṣādiq, 230

mabsūṭ, pl. mabsūṭāt (expansum), 74–75, 90, 273
Madagascar, 366
maḏhab (official view of the school), 133, 136, 139, 155
maḏhab al-salaf, 304
maḏhabs (legal schools): formation of, 37, 360
standardisation of, 7–8
Madras, 365
madrasas (colleges), 11, 40, 44–47, 54, 58, 63, 71, 160, 171, 181,
205, 213, 230, 263, 276, 304
Madrasat al-Khayyāṭ, 313
Maḥallī, Burhān al-Dīn al-, 52
Maḥallī, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-, 52, 111, 113, 169, 172, 237,
353. See also Kanz al-rāghibīn
Maḥāmilī, Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad al-, 80, 83
Mahfanī, Faqīh Ḥusayn bin Aḥmad al-, 96
maḥfūẓāt, 161
maḥkamas (legal courts), 44, 47
Maimonides, 95
Majmūʿ by Nawawī, 26, 85, 105, 133, 136, 151, 159, 166, 191–192,
197, 273
Makhdūms of Ponnāni, 229–232, 236, 238, 244, 260, 262, 265–266
Makhzūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-, 184
Makkī, Abū al-Walīd Mūsā al-, 184, 388
Malabar, 53, 57, 96–97, 108, 116, 213, 221, 225–267, 297, 310,
363–365, 367
Malabārī (Arabi-Malayalam), 100, 331–332, 365–366
Malabari, Bawa Kaya Ali Hisamuddin al-, 56
Malabari, Maulana Naina bin Naina al-, 56
Malabaris, 56, 113, 219, 231, 235–236, 250, 263, 366, 368
Malay, 100, 324–326, 333–334, 341, 346;
idioms, 280
language, 284, 309, 323–324
notes, 329
press, 313, 318
translations, 326, 332
world, 283, 310, 312, 357, 369, 372, 385
Malayalam, 28, 226, 241, 255, 259, 323, 330, 333, 365–366
Malaybārī, al-. See Zayn al-Dīn
Malaysia, 334, 341, 368
Mālik bin Anas, 152–153
Mālikī school (Mālikīsm), 6, 22, 37–38, 44, 46, 48, 52, 123, 151, 201,
245, 257, 357, 365, 372, 380, 387
Mālikīs, 153, 201–202, 300, 390
Malindi, 63, 274
Mamlūks, 49, 130, 145, 148–150, 155, 157, 178, 183, 222, 247–248,
260, 375, 389
Mangalore, 66, 95
Mangkubumi, 343
Manhaj al-ṭullāb by Anṣārī, 111, 144, 326
“manifesto of book distribution”, 364
Manṣūr ʿUmar, the Rasūlid ruler, 49
Manṣūr, al-, ʿAbbāsid ruler, 157
manuscript culture, 76, 122, 324, 327, 329, 363
Māppiḷas, 221, 232, 259, 262, 265, 363, 366
Marghīnānī, Burhān al-Dīn al-, 337
marital laws, 96, 120, 193, 236, 238
networks, oceanic, 65, 255
maritime wave of Shāfiʿīsm, 36, 65, 213, 224
Marjān, Shihāb al-Dīn, 261
marriage, 83, 107, 118–120, 134, 169, 171, 186, 194, 204, 255, 290,
325, 329, 335, 351
masʾala (pl. masāʾil) legal problem, 77, 120, 245
Masjid al-Ḥarām. See Holy Mosque
masjids. See mosques
Maslak al-atqiyāʾ by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Malaybārī, 27
Mataram, 62, 280, 337, 343–344
matriliny, 194
Mauritius, 366
Māwardī, 90, 346
Mecca, 37–38, 91, 107–108, 112, 115–116, 175, 183, 195, 197, 202–
222, 229, 231–243, 255, 262, 271–277, 283–285, 293, 295,
297, 307, 362, 366, 370, 375, 386–389
a riot in 1551, 197
as a centre of Shāfiʿīsm, 201–205
as a historical place, 197–198
ban on women in, 197
-centred approach, 193–194, 200, 213, 222–223, 375, 378
conflicts between Sharīfs and Ottomans in, 294
consumption of drugs in, 197
customs of, 299
different legal schools in, 201–202
donations sent to, 312
early scholarship in, 183
educational development in, 184–185
institutions in, 181
intermediation of, 175
Ottoman control of, 180–181
pilgrimage to, 197, 199
pilgrims in, 185
printing in, 314, 318
regional elements as law, 200
scholarly families in, 185
sharīfs of, 180–182
“Mecca of South India”, 229
Meccan sub-school, 109, 200, 210, 301, 306
Meccan weed, 198
Mecelle, 305
Medina, 6, 13, 22, 37, 48, 59, 89, 152, 155, 159, 185, 195, 200–203,
210, 221, 233, 261, 283, 285, 289, 298, 389
memorisation of legal texts, 89, 143, 161–162, 264
merchants. See traders
Messick, Brinkley, 16, 161, 255
metaphysics, 348
Meursinge, Albert, 345–346
micro-communities, 43, 47, 49, 51, 54, 60–64, 218, 246, 262
miḥrāb (prayer niche), 42
Minangkabau, 326
minbar (pulpit), 42
Minhāj (in full Minhāj al-ṭālibīn) by Nawawī, 26–29, 52, 63, 73–76,
80, 88, 91–94, 98, 102–115, 118–124, 129–176, 186–197,
206, 212–224, 237–244, 251, 264, 270–274, 290, 299, 304,
308, 315, 325–342, 351–362, 369–387, 391
as a progression in Nawawī’s writings, 135–136
as a textbook, 160–161, 171, 252
books and chapters in, 119–120
hierarchisation in, 146
categorisations of disagreements in, 139
citations in, 121
commentaries on, 163, 167
contrastive opinions in, 141–142, 147
contrastive opinions in, 140
contrasts with Muḥarrar, 142–143, 147, 151
critique of the Muḥarrar in, 111, 136, 143
 form of, 160
prioritisation in, 144
heirarchisation in, 140–141
legacy of, 161–162, 166, 224
methods of, 136, 143
on maritime trade, 149–151, 153–154
on traders, 154–155
on two ṭarīqs, 158–159
paraphernalia of disputes in, 139
personal opinions in, 141, 143
poems on, 163
prioritisations in, 139–140, 144
rhetorical statements, 163
specialist families for, 168
specialists of, 168
stated objective of, 143
technical terms in, 136, 146
terminological integrity of, 148
translations of, 334
typology of, 167
works prioritised above, 166
Minhājīs, 112, 162
Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb by Sinkilī, 63, 309, 324, 345, 385
Miṣrippaḷḷi (the Egyptian Mosque), 260
modernists, 109, 319–320, 376, 379
Mogadishu, 48, 55, 257, 261
Mogharaer Code, 338–344, 353, 368
Mombasa, 48, 272
Mongols, 127, 129, 132, 149–150, 155, 160, 167, 170, 375, 385, 389
Montesquieu, 20
mosques (masjids), 36, 40, 43–44, 46, 61–63, 79, 134, 211, 231,
249, 252, 260–263
Mughals, 58–59, 62, 211, 236, 249, 386
Mughnī (in full Mughnī al-muḥtāj) by Sharbīnī, 26, 111–113, 206, 223,
251
Muhaḏḏab by Shīrāzī, 49, 72, 79–80, 84–86, 98, 105, 132–133, 169
Muḥammad, Ḥasan Makkī, 273
Muḥammad, the Prophet, 6, 10, 47, 51, 73, 87, 113, 146–147, 185,
212, 233, 259, 364
Muhammedanisches Recht by Sachau, 79, 358, 360
Muḥarrar by Ibn Taymiyya, 158
Muḥarrar by Rāfiʿī, 73, 91–93, 97, 109–111, 119, 133, 136, 142–147,
151, 154, 157–163, 171, 216, 304, 326–329, 337–344, 353,
372
muḥarrar (the term), 92, 158
Muḥarrars, 340
muḥarrir (editor), 135, 158
mujtahids, 244
Mukhtaṣar by Buwayṭī, 76, 104, 110
Mukhtaṣar by Muzanī, 49, 68, 74, 76–79, 83, 87–88, 90, 93, 97, 104,
315
Mukhtaṣar by Abū Shujāʿ. See Ghāya
mukhtaṣars (epitomes), 74–75, 83, 89–90, 92, 241
Mulqin, Sirāj al-Dīn ʿUmar al-, 168
multi-text manuscript, 290, 326–327
“multiple Meccas”, 108, 388
Munsyi Abdullah, 279
Muqaddima by Bā Faḍl, 114
muqriʾ (reciter), 44, 53
Muqtadī bi Amr Allāh, ʿAbbāsid ruler, 83
Murādī, Rabīʿ bin Sulaymān al-, 38, 76–77, 140
Musa, Saidi, 328, 332, 336
Muṣannif, Abū Bakr al-, 27
“Muslim Lake”, 3
“Muslim Mediterraneans”, 151
Musliyār, Kariṅkappāra Muḥammad, 267
Musliyār, M. T. Abdulla, 189
Musliyār, Niramarutūr Bīrān Kuṭṭi, 267
Musliyār, Pāññil Aḥmad Kuṭṭi, 267
Musliyār, Veḷḷiyānpuraṃ Zayd ʿAlawī, 267–268
Muṭīʿī, Muḥammad Najīb al-, 85
Muttaqī, Alī al-, 277
Muwaṭṭaʾ by Mālik, 157
Muzanī, Ismāʿīl bin Yaḥyā al-, 38, 73, 76–79, 83, 87–90, 93, 97, 104,
122, 140, 145, 151, 164, 183, 388
Muzjad, Aḥmad bin al-, 244
mysticism, 3, 5, 63, 88, 100, 232, 237, 269, 289, 340, 365, 385

Nafḥat al-saylāniyya by Shaykh Yūsuf, 366

Nagōre, 230
Nahrawālī, Quṭub al-Dīn al-, 27
naṣṣ (statement by al-Shāfiʿī), 121, 139–140, 143, 190
Nawā, 131
Nawawī al-Bantanī, Muḥammad bin ʿUmar, 26, 29, 91, 109, 115,
219, 263, 280, 282–317, 388
 and the Dutch, 295–296
Banten Revolts, 295
biography of, 282, 313
education of, 283
familiarity with Bakrī, 287
journeys of, 283, 314
audience of, 284
patronage for, 313
students of, 284
style of, 290
teachers of, 283, 285, 308
works by, 282, 284, 286, 290, 317
Nawawī, Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-, 8, 26–29, 44, 73–74, 79–89, 93, 97,
105, 107, 110–111, 122, 127, 132–170, 182, 187–192, 197,
199, 206–207, 212, 223, 228, 244–245, 254, 273, 289, 360,
386, 389
as the muḥarrir of Shāfiʿīsm, 135–136, 158
biography of, 131, 135
dating the works by, 165
education of, 132
encounter with Baybars, 145
if he contradicts himself, 165
legal writings by, 133–134, 162, 165
library of, 133–134
miracle by, 132
patronage for, 135
preference over Rāfiʿī, 132, 165
unifies two ṭarīqs, 156–159
Nayars, 247–248
Netherlands, 352, 356, 369–370
networks: macro, 34, 37–38, 40–41, 64, 68, 385
micro, 29, 36–41, 43, 64, 68, 92, 104, 118, 183
oceanic/maritime, 9, 57
proto, 36
Nihāya (in full Nihāyat al-zayn) by Nawawī al-Bantanī, 28–29, 88,
109, 113, 115, 117–118, 122, 270, 282, 287–302, 306–319,
353, 376–379, 383, 386, 388, 391
authorial intention behind, 287
disagrees with Fatḥ, 297
methods in, 291
on political power, 296–297
publication of, 287, 313–314, 316
reception of, 316–317
references and sources for, 288–289
regionality in, 299
Nihāyat al-amal by Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī, 288–289, 306
Nihāyat al-maṭlab by Juwaynī, 88, 92
Nihāyat al-muḥtāj by Ramlī, 26, 111–113, 206, 209, 220–221, 223,
249, 273, 289, 306–307
Nile Delta, 285
nisba. See patronyms
Nishapur, 43, 45, 58, 76, 83, 86, 88
Nissim, Nahray ben, 95
Niẓām al-Mulk, 45, 82
Niẓāmiya University of Hyderabad, 315
Niẓamiyya College, 82
nomos (human world), 15
non-Arabs (‘ajam), 92, 108, 193–194, 207–208, 222, 307, 376, 381
Numayy, ʿAjlān bin Rumaytha Abī, Meccan ruler, 181, 261

“oceanic turn”, 151

Oman, 49, 255, 257, 387
opium, 198
orderly disorder, 18
Orientalists, 79, 91, 285, 305, 332, 356, 379
Ottomans, 7, 58–59, 94, 127, 173–184, 202–205, 210, 222, 224,
231, 236, 247–248, 293–294, 297, 305, 311–313, 320,
375–376, 385–386

Pacific Ocean, 33, 321, 324, 366–367, 373, 388

Padang, 270, 272
Palembang, 270–271
Palestine, 37, 178, 218
panegyric, 210, 328
paraphernalia of disputes, 139–140, 144, 147, 190, See also under
Minhāj
Paravaṇṇa, 259
Pasisir script, 335
Patanī, Ṭāhir, 277
patriarchy, 193–194, 284, 317
patriliny, 194
patronyms (nisba), 54–55, 57, 97, 106, 172, 220, 244, 267
Pattani, 63, 313, 318
Paṭūr, P. K. Kuññubāva Musliyār, 333
Pedersen, Johannes, 28
penance, 142
Persia, 49
Persian language, 258–259, 325
Persians, 57, 59, 258–259
personal library, 133
pesantren, 61, 269–270, 283–284, 309, 317
Petry, Carl, 53
physis (natural world), 15
“pilgrim shaykhs”, 312
pilgrimage, 10, 33, 91, 120, 153, 173, 183, 193, 197, 199, 208, 229,
231, 251, 256, 264, 301, 312, 329
Pires, Tomé, 252
plagiarism, 290
Pollock, Sheldon, 18–19
pollution of water, 191
Ponnāni, 96, 213, 225, 229–230, 233, 235–236, 250, 257, 262, 265,
267, 276–277, 286, 368, 388, 390–391
college or mosque-college, 231, 234, 236, 238, 266
curriculum in, 236–238, 241, 266
mosque in, 231, 260
teachings from, 266
texts produced in, 237, 266
Portuguese, 27, 180, 183, 210, 225–226, 229–231, 234–235, 240,
247–250, 257, 260, 375
Portuguese language, 259
postage, 364
postclassical era/period, 5, 12–13, 25, 28–29, 65, 68, 75, 78, 98,
102–103, 109, 118, 129, 149, 169, 378–379, 384
Pouwels, Randall, 272
Prange, Sebastian, 254, 257
predecessors (mutaqaddimūn), 165
“printed manuscripts”, 328
printing presses, 268, 282, 313–314, 331, 368
printing technology, 123, 299, 315, 319, 329, 363
prioritisation, 160, 188, 375, 378
economy of, 149
political economy of, 130, 156, 160, 170
politics of, 130, 144, 146–149, 155, 221
strategy of, 130
procedural laws, 120, 353
professionalisation of judiciary, 160
Prophetic traditions. Seeḥadīths
provincialising Islamic law, 19, 21, 380–382, 384
public laws, 346, 361
pūṇūl, 253
Puttūr, Ibrāhīm al-Fayḍī, 333

qadīm (old opinion), 381

Qādirī order, 258
qāḍīs (judges), 55, 61, 230, 232, 244, 249–250, 259, 267, 292, 294,
296, 386
Qalāwūn, Mamlūk ruler, 148–149
Qamūlī, Najm al-Dīn Aḥmad al-, 89
Qarafī, Shihāb al-Dīn al-, 202
Qārī, Mullā ʿAlī al-, 59
Qayd al-jāmiʿ by Mahfanī, 96, 171, 261
Qazwīn, 91–92
Qazwīnī, ʿAbd al-Ghaffār al-, 187
qibla (direction of prayer), 106
qiyās, 6, 71, 189, 388
quadripartite division of law, 21, 118–119, 121
Qurʾān, 3, 5, 15, 36, 40, 84, 87, 110, 132, 146–147, 161, 178, 207,
212, 233, 253, 257, 283–286, 307, 324–325, 328, 331
exegesis (tafsīr), 5
Qurashī, Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad al-, 184
Qurashī, Qāsim al-Jumaḥī al-, 48–49, 72
Quraysh, 194–195
Qurra (in full Qurrat al-ʿayn) by Malaybārī, 93, 114–115, 117, 227,
233–236, 239, 241–243, 263–268, 273, 276, 278, 281, 284,
288, 290–292, 296, 302, 309–311, 317, 319, 376, 387
as a mukhtaṣar, 241
commentaries on, 263
style and language of, 242

racialism, 19, 51, 193–195, 222, 373

Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 341, 369
Rāfiʿī, Qāsim bin ʿAbd al-Karīm al-, 8, 73, 89, 91–92, 97, 109–110,
119, 122, 132–133, 136, 143, 145, 151, 157, 164–165, 187,
244–245, 304, 337, 339–341, 344, 353
railway, 364
Railway Mail Service, 364
Raj, Kapil, 23
Ramaḍān, 142, 243, 252
Ramlī, Shams al-Dīn al-, 26, 107, 112–113, 115, 119, 172, 179, 206–
209, 214–224, 234, 244, 249, 273, 289, 292–293, 297,
300–308, 353
Ramlī, Shihāb al-Dīn al-, 107, 112–113, 179, 186, 206, 208, 223
Ranīrī, Nūr al-Dīn al-, 26, 57, 172, 270, 309, 324, 369, 385
rationalism, 104
Rawāḥiyya College, 132, 149
Rawḍa by Nawawī, 89, 133, 136, 166, 187, 273
reading revolution, 70, 78, 331
reconciliation. See synthesis
Red Sea, 180, 247, 302
reformism, 330
“reformists”, 298, 303–304, 306, 319
regionality, 199–200, 228, 255–256, 282, 292, 295, 380–382
religious elites, 248, 258, 278, 349
Renaissance, 17
reverse journey, 228, 310, 388
ribāṭs, 181
Ricci, Ronit, 18, 309, 326
Ricklefs, M. C., 343
Risāla by al-Shāfiʿī, 70, 76–77, 88, 315, 388
ritual laws, 118, 120, 199, 302, 326
riwāqs (learning communities), 179
Robinson, Francis, 236, 239
Roman script, 323, 330, 333, 336
Roorda, Taco, 347–351

Sabīl al-muhtadīn by Banjarī, 26, 275, 309, 324, 385

Sachau, Eduard, 79, 326, 358, 360–362, 373
sacred thread (zunnār, yajñopavītam, pūṇūl), 253
Ṣādiq, Jaʿfar al-, 6, 37
Ṣafawids, 58, 183, 236
Ṣafawiyya order, 59
Safīnat al-najāt by Sālim al-Ḥaḍramī, 326, 328, 332
Sahfana, 48, 72
Ṣaḥīḥ of Bukhārī, 332
Sahsawānī, Muḥammad Bashīr al-, 298
Saigon, 364–365
Saint Helena, 367
Sakhāwī, Shams al-Dīn al-, 162
Saladin, Ayyūbid ruler, 46, 53, 90
Salafīs and Salafīsm, 304
samāʿ (hearing), 215
Samʿānī, Abū Saʿd ʿAbd al-Karīm al-, 382
Sambas, Aḥmad Khaṭīb, 283, 295
Samudra Pasai, 56, 60–61
Ṣanʿāʾ, 48
sanad. See silsila
Sanskrit, 18, 226
Sanskrit cosmopolis, 18
Saqqāf, ʿAlawī al-, 115–116, 299, 303
Sassanids, 359
Saʿud, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz bin, 287
Saudi Arabia, 4, 286, 320, 394
Sayfiyya Madrasa, 55
Sayyid Bakrī, aka Sayyid Abū Bakr Shaṭā al-Dimyāṭī, 26, 29, 109,
115, 121, 219, 280–291, 314, 317–318, 362
as a teacher, 286
biography of, 285
children of, 286
 familiarity with Nawawī al-Bantanī, 286
sisters of, 287
works by, 286
Sayyid ʿUthmān ʿAlawī, 296, 356, 370
School of Oriental and African Studies, 362
Selim I, the Ottoman ruler, 180, 182
Seljūqs, 45, 58, 83
Semarang, 335, 337–338, 340, 343, 368
Semarang Compendium. See Mogharaer Code
semiotic strategies, 122
Serat Kitab Tupah, 335
seven zones, 20
Shabrāmalsī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī al-, 91, 209, 221
Shāfiʿī cosmopolis, 5, 18, 27, 97, 101, 103, 108, 115, 118, 124, 161–
162, 306, 373–374, 376, 388, 391
Shāfiʿī, Idrīs al-, 2–10, 36–38, 52, 54–55, 61–70, 73, 76–78, 85, 88,
93, 97, 104–105, 110, 118, 121, 123, 127, 136, 139–141,
145, 150–159, 164, 179, 183, 190, 195, 240, 254, 260, 273,
286, 315, 325, 381, 388
Shāfiʿī-Ḥanafī conflict, 43, 85, 294, 386
Shāfiʿīsation, 63, 201, 210, 218, 224, 238, 277, 387
Shāh Ismāʿīl I, Ṣafawid ruler, 58
Shaḥrī dialect, 255
Shamsy, Ahmed El, 38
Sharbīnī, Khaṭīb al-, 26, 91, 108, 111–115, 179, 206, 208, 214–218,
223–224, 234, 244, 303
Sharīʿa courts, 296, 305
Sharīfs of Mecca, 180–182, 202, 205, 210, 294
Sharwānī, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-, 217, 219, 276, 283, 361
Shawkānī, Muḥammad al-, 303
Shaybānī, AbūʿAbdullah Muḥammad, 37
Shaybānī, Muḥammad, 258
Shaykh al-Islam of Khurasan, 58
Shaykh Yūsuf al-Maqāssarī, 60, 366, 389
Shīʿīs, 37–38, 58–59, 64, 157, 167, 275, 306
Shīʿīsm, 6, 40, 46, 58–59, 181, 221, 257–258, 265–266, 389
Shimla, 356
Shiraz, 58, 64, 69, 82, 203, 220, 267
Shīrāzī, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-, 45, 49, 71–72, 79, 82–86, 105–107,
132–133, 258, 346
Shirazis, 34, 58
Siddiqui, Sohaira, 107
sijillāt, 202
Silk Road, 58, 127
silsila (scholarly genealogy), 55, 72–73, 93, 97, 277
Silsila Fakhriyya, 237, 259
Sindh, 33, 97, 171, 202
Sindī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-, 97, 171
Singapore, 279, 302, 334, 356–357
Sinkilī, ʿAbd al-Raʾūf, 63, 309, 324, 345, 385
Ṣirāṭ (in full Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm) by Ranīrī, 26, 172, 270, 309, 324, 385
siyar (procession or march), 145
siyāsat al-sharīʿa, 64, 246
Siyu, 272, 331
slavery, 119–120, 294
slaves, 10, 45, 60, 387
Somalia, 49, 273
South Africa, 60, 366
South Canara, 334
Soviet Union, 257
Spevack, Aaron, 289
Sri Lanka, 60, 236, 256, 268–269, 331, 345, 366–369
Sri Lankan Malays, 269
standardisation, 170, 188
steamships, 279, 299, 312–313, 321
Subkī, Tāj al-Dīn al-, 27, 54, 80, 85
Subkī, Taqiyy al-Dīn al-, 54, 85, 134, 163–164
substantive law, 22, 26, 28, 71, 144, 170, 197, 199–200, 255, 380.
See also furūʿ al-fiqh;
substantive texts as a source for history, 144
successors (mutaʾakhkhirūn), 165
Suez Canal, 173, 279, 321
Sufism, 59, 229, 258, 269, 271, 306
Sulaymaniyya College, 219
Süleyman, Ottoman ruler, 182, 205
Sultan Agung, the Mataram ruler, 63
Sumatra, 60, 353
Sumayṭ, Sayyid ʿUmar bin Aḥmad bin, 274
Sunbulawaynī, Yūsuf al-, 283
Sundanese, 326, 334
Sunnī (Sunnīsm), 7, 46, 51, 58–59, 64, 69, 71, 134, 157–158, 170,
177, 181, 184, 188, 193, 201, 265–266, 289, 294, 297–298,
304, 306, 375, 389
Surabaya, 312, 334
Surakarta, 343
Surat, 229
Surayj, Abū al-ʿAbbās bin, 72–73, 78, 389
Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn al-, 86, 135, 205, 231, 289, 384, 390
Swahili Coast, 274, 308, 328
Swahilis, 219, 285, 287, 314, 358, 362, 372. See also Kiswahili
syllabus. See curriculum
synthesis, 302, 307–308, 377
synthesis in Shāfiʿīsm, 12, 29, 103–104, 109, 118, 156, 158–159,
170, 282, 284, 291, 300–302, 306–311, 317, 319, 377–378
Syria, 90, 131, 145, 283
systematisation, 130, 170, 218
terms for, 122

ṭabaqāt (biographical dictionaries), 27, 82

Ṭabarī, Abū al-Ṭayyib Ṭāhir al-, 82
Ṭabarī, Muḥammad bin Jarīr al-, 37
Ṭabarīs, 203
Ṭablāwī, Manṣūr al-, 216
Taḏnīb by Rāfiʿī, 92
tafsīr, 283. See also under Qurʾān
Tahḏīb (in full Tahḏīb al-asmāʾ wa al-lughāt) by Nawawī, 27
Taḥmīd Allāh II, Banjar ruler, 385
Tāj al-ʿĀlam, Ṣafiyyat al-Dīn, Acehnese ruler, 346, 385
tājir (trader, dealer), 53
tājir al-khāṣṣ (“outstanding merchant”), 52
takhyīr (selection), 308
taʿlīq (doctoral dissertation), 72, 74, 83–84, 213
Tamil, 268, 323, 333, 364–365, 368. See also Arwī
Tamil Nadu, 268, 366, 368
Tamils, 28, 265, 268, 331, 368, 373
Tanara (West Java), 283
Tanbīh by Shīrāzī, 71–72, 79–86, 98, 132, 166, 258, 346
Tanjavur, 230
Tanqīḥ by Abū Zarʿa, 80–81, 94, 98, 166
Ṭanṭā, 177
Tānūr, 229, 257, 267
Tanzania, 117, 273, 336, 387
Taqrīb by Abū Shujāʿ. See Ghāya
tarājim (biographies), 27
Tarājim ʿUlamāʾ Jāwa by Djajadiningrat, 27
tārīkh (chronicles), 27
Tarīm, 115, 211, 302
ṭarīqs, 139, 143, 156, 158–159
tarjamas, 75, 323, 330–331, 336
tarjīḥ (determination of preponderance), 108, 190, 308
Tarshīḥ by Saqqāf, 115–117, 270–271, 299, 318
taṣawwuf. See mysticism
taṣḥīf, 266
taṣḥīḥ (preparatory and corrective material), 75, 84, 122, 266–267,
315
“text-families”, 168
“text-specialists”, 168
textual: categories, 74
community, 70, 168
connectivity, 121–122
discursive tradition, 97, 129, 166
 families, 29, 65, 69, 79–80, 84, 89, 94, 97–98, 102, 114, 186, 310,
353
genealogy, 21, 29, 87, 91, 93, 186, 316, 318, 375, 379
textual longue durée, 8–9, 12, 17, 21, 23, 29–30, 65, 68, 75, 79, 85,
93–94, 97–98, 102, 124, 144, 183, 222, 274, 277–282, 288,
292–293, 299, 309–310, 319, 322–323, 337, 357, 370–373,
377–379, 384, 387–388, 391
textualism, 297, 320
textuality or text-centredness, 68–70, 93, 102, 124
Thailand, 313
thatching, 252
Thawrī, Sufyān al-, 37, 78
theology (kalām), 3, 5, 54, 63, 289, 315, 365
Tipu Sultan of Mysore, 363
Toehpah, 335, 346, 348–350, 353
Toulmin, Stephen, 17, 19
trade: maritime, 151, 154
on a ship, 151–152
Shāfiʿī discussions on, 149, 151, 154
traders, 51–53, 65, 94–95, 154–155, 180, 210, 247, 249, 260, 262,
312. See also tājir
traditionalism, 104
transdiscursivity, 160, 164–165, 168
translations, 20, 28, 30, 144, 164, 169, 236, 263, 315, 320–377, 388,
404
colonial, 336–337, 345–346, 352, 368, 372
commentarial, 322, 324, 328–330, 332, 336, 365
cultural, 322, 370
 equivalent (tarjama musāwiya), 325
Afrasian, 370
inserted notes as, 329
interlinear, 324–327, 353
intermittent, 324, 327
literal, 330, 332–334, 336
untranslatability of scripture, 325
Transoxiana, 35, 38, 64, 78
transregional spectrum, 13, 159
transtemporal spectrum, 5, 13, 26, 61, 68
travel for education, 10
Tuan Guru, 366
Tughluq, Sultan Muḥammad, 61
Tuḥfa (in full Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj) by Ibn Ḥajar, 28–29, 93, 109, 111–
114, 116, 122, 175–228, 239–254, 264, 270–275, 283–293,
299–302, 307–308, 315, 324–327, 332, 335, 346, 350–353,
361–362, 369, 375–379, 383, 386
authorial motivation, 187–188
citations in, 122
commentaries on, 207, 215–221
criticisms against, 207, 215–216
discussions on Mecca, 192–194, 196–197, 199–200
legacy of, 207, 214
on ḥajj, 199
style and method, 189–191
translations of, 334–335
typologies of, 191–192
Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn by Malaybārī, 27, 232, 234–235, 240, 249, 262,
363
Tuḥfat al-ṭāmiʿīn by ʿAbd al-Qādir, 331, 368
Ṭūlūn, Aḥmad bin, 38
Tuman Bay II, the Mamlūk ruler, 180
Turkey, 180, 320
Turkish, 202, 219, 305

ʿUbbādī, Ibn Qāsim al-. See ʿAbbādī

Uduppi, 334
Uganda, 261
ʿulamāʾ, 40–41, 203, 239
ʿulamāʾ al-khams. See “Five Scholars”
Umm by al-Shāfiʿī, 68, 71, 76–78, 88, 93, 97, 104, 110, 118, 140,
145, 149, 163–165, 273, 379, 388, 391
umma (Islamic community), 36, 44
ʿUqūd al-lujayn by Nawawī al-Bantanī, 284, 290, 317
Urdu, 314–315, 365, 367
ʿurf, 6, 22, 383–384
uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory), 70
Uzbekistan, 258

Vaḷapaṭṭaṇam, 259
Value Payable Post, 364
van Bruinessen, Martin, 270, 317
van de Bruinhorst, Gerard, 336
van den Berg, L. W. C., 131, 270, 351–352, 354, 405
van Hoevell, W. R., 349
van Imhoff, Gustaaf Willem, 338
vernacularisation, 30, 322–323, 328, 371, 377, 379
Veth, P. J., 349–350
VOC. See Dutch East India Company
Vollenhoven, Cornelis van, 15, 341, 351

Wahhābīsm, 297–298, 320

Wajīz by Ghazālī, 79, 86–89, 92–93, 118, 133, 187, 228, 251
Wanāʾī, ʿAlī bin ʿAbd al-Barr al-, 209
Wasīlat al-rajāʾ by Ḥasan bin Amīr, 328
Wasīṭ by Ghazālī, 49, 79–80, 86–88, 93, 98, 105–106, 118, 132–
133, 228
Weber, Max, 15
Western Ghats, 230
Wijoyo, Alex, 317
Wüstenfeld, Ferdinand, 360
Wye, John William, 363

Xi, Zhu, 128

yajñopavītam, 253
Yamanī, Sirāj al-Dīn ʿUmar al-, 89
Yamanī, Yaḥyā bin Abū al-Khayr al-, 49
Yazīdīs, 275
Yemen, 4, 20, 27, 37, 48–50, 53–54, 64, 84, 95, 161, 169, 209–213,
220, 229, 244, 250, 255, 260, 262, 318, 387
Yemenis, 47, 49–50, 108, 213, 223, 257, 314, 376
Yiju, Abraham Ben, 95
Yogyakarta, 343

Zabīd, 49, 244

Zabīdī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin Ziyād al-, 244
Zabīdī, Aḥmad bin al-Muzjad al-, 244
Zabīdī, Ismāʿīl bin al-Maqarī al-, 186
Ẓāhir, Malik al-, 56, 60
Ẓahīra, Jamāl al-Dīn, 203
Ẓahīras, 203
Ẓāhirī al-Iṣfahānī, Dāwūd al-, 37, 388
Zakī, Rasūl bin Yaʿqūb al-Kurdī al-, 220
Zamorins, 229–230, 234, 246–250, 260, 292
Zamzam, 203
Zamzamī, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ʿIzz al-Dīn, 203–205
Zamzamīs, 203–205
Zanzibar, 272–273, 360, 369
Zayd, Aḥmad bin, 283
Zaydīsm, 37, 181–182
Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, Jr, 26, 29, 108–109, 213, 227–236, 250,
255, 260, 262, 276–277, 288–289, 296, 300–301, 363
biography of, 232–234
travels of, 233, 235
works by, 232, 234–235
Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, Sr, 230–232, 236–238, 242, 259, 289
Zaynī Daḥlān, Aḥmad, 219, 285, 287, 293–294, 298, 300–301, 305–
306, 319
Zoroastrians, 258
Ẓufār, 255
zunnār, 253
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