A Tale of Two Ṭarīqas: The Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿī Communities in the Fourth/Tenth and Fifth/Eleventh Centuries

Abstract

This article provides a new account of Shāfiʿī legal history in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries: a tale of two ṭarīqas, or interpretive communities, one in Iraq and the other in Khurasan. I show that these two Shāfiʿī communities developed as distinct social and scholarly collectives before gradually converging in Ayyubid Damascus and eventually coalescing around one authoritative school doctrine in the Mamluk period. I reconstruct the networks of Shāfiʿī jurists in the two regions and show how and why the two groups differed in their legal reasoning and their paradigm of the madhhab (legal school). Although all of these jurists shared a transregional affiliation with the Shāfiʿī madhhab that distinguished them from jurists belonging to other legal schools, I argue that these affinities were countered by geographical boundaries and diverging local developments that led to the differentiation of the Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿī communities. These insights not only complicate our understanding of what constitutes the post-formative madhhab as an institution but also demonstrate how broader intellectual and institutional developments, such as the ascendancy of Ashʿarism, the emergence of new centres of scholarship, and the introduction of the madrasa, shaped the internal workings of the madhhab.

INTRODUCTION

Contributions to the historiography of the Shāfiʿī madhhab (legal school) in the last two decades have significantly advanced our knowledge of the school’s formative development. Among the important studies of Shāfiʿism’s beginnings, Ahmed El Shamsy’s benchmark study of al-Shāfiʿī’s (d. 204/820) legacy established the role of the collective efforts of a multigenerational community of jurists—a ‘community of interpretation’, as he aptly terms it—in the canonization of al-Shāfiʿīs thought and its eventual evolution into a legal school.¹ El Shamsy argues persuasively that this achievement rested on a shared hermeneutic approach to revealed sources.² While the important contributions of El Shamsy and others have shed light on al-Shāfiʿī’s thought and the consolidation of his legacy into a madhhab,³ a gap persists in our knowledge of the school’s evolution after the generation of al-Shāfiʿī’s students, corresponding roughly to the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, when it spread eastward from Egypt to Iraq and Khurasan (present-day Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan).⁴

Primary sources from this period speak of a distinct group of authorities in each locale—‘our Khurasani companions’ (aṣḥābunā al-khurasāniyyūn) and ‘our Iraqi companions’ (aṣḥābunā al-ʿirāqiyyūn)—and later of two separate ‘ṭarīqas’, a term that literally signifies an approach or a method but that is used from the late fourth/tenth century onwards to designate two Shāfiʿī communities, one in Iraq and one in Khurasan (ṭarīqat al-khurasāniyyīn wa-l-ʿirāqiyyīn). Beyond these broad outlines, we still know very little about the two communities, how they were differentiated, and why. Literature on this period tends to depict the Shāfiʿī school as a single homogeneous and cohesive entity. It is a commonplace in Shāfiʿī historiography that members of the Shāfiʿī madhhab throughout time shared a core set of legal doctrines inherited from al-Shāfiʿī and other early authorities, interpretive commitments rooted in al-Shāfiʿī’s hermeneutics, and a distinct communal identity and historical memory vis-à-vis other legal schools. Scholarly analysis of Shāfiʿī social history in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries has therefore centred on the debates and polemics between the Shāfiʿīs and members of other madhhabs—chiefly the Ḥanafīs in Khurasan and the Ḥanbalīs in Iraq—with little attention to the ongoing negotiations within the madhhab itself.⁵ This lacuna is also shaped by the limitations of the primary sources from and about this period, which rarely discuss the Iraqi and Khurasani traditions in an analytical way and thus make a full understanding of the conceptual and historical categories of Khurasani and Iraqi Shāfiʿism elusive.

This article draws on an array of literary, biographical, and historical sources to provide a new account of Shāfiʿī legal history in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries: a tale of two ṭarīqas, or interpretive communities, one in Iraq and the other in Khurasan. Building on El Shamsy’s conceptualization of the madhhab as a community of interpretation, I show that these two Shāfiʿī communities in fact developed as distinct social and scholarly collectives before gradually converging in Ayyubid Damascus and eventually coalescing around one authoritative school doctrine in the Mamluk period.⁶ I reconstruct the networks of Shāfiʿī jurists in the two regions and show how and why the two groups differed in their legal reasoning and their paradigm of the madhhab. Although all of these jurists shared a transregional affiliation with the Shāfiʿī madhhab that distinguished them from jurists belonging to other legal schools, I argue that these affinities were balanced in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries by geographical boundaries and diverging local developments that led to the differentiation of the Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿī communities.

The article is divided into four parts. The first part examines the meaning of the term ṭarīqa and its usage in historical Shāfiʿī sources and secondary literature. It analyses the ways in which Mamluk-era Shāfiʿī biographers and intellectual historians, particularly Muḥī al-Dīn Abū Zakariyya Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), memorialized this stage in the madhhab’s evolution. The second part traces the eastward expansion of the Shāfiʿī school from Egypt into Iraq and later from the capital, Baghdad, into Khurasan and Transoxania. It explains the different trajectories of Shāfiʿism in these two centres on the basis of three primary factors: geographical contingencies, the emergence of distinct interpretive communities, and differences in the intellectual and social integration of Ashʿarism in each Shāfiʿī community. Part three evaluates the mature legacy of each community as expressed in the thought of two prominent mid-fifth/eleventh-century jurists: Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085) in Nishapur and Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 476/1083) in Baghdad. The article closes with a brief consideration of the fading of the ṭarīqas in Iraq and Khurasan, which coincided with their transplantation through networks of teaching and learning to Ayyubid Damascus and was eventually sealed with the synthesis of their respective approaches into a single authoritative school doctrine in the Mamluk period.

1. WHAT’S IN A ṬARĪQA? THE TWO ṬARĪQAS IN SHĀFIʿĪ HISTORICAL MEMORY AND SECONDARY LITERATURE

The term ṭarīqa is used in early Shāfiʿī sources to signify a transmitted legal opinion. This indicates that an early difference between the ṭarīqas of Khurasan and Iraq concerned their diverging transmissions of school doctrine and their distinctive methodologies for weighing competing transmissions within the school. In the period in which the two ṭarīqas emerged, Shāfiʿī jurists were principally focused on consolidating school doctrine by harmonizing the body of opinions transmitted from early authorities and developing a methodology for addressing unprecedented cases.

The most extensive theoretical discussion of the term ṭarīqa is presented by al-Nawawī in his Majmūʿ, a commentary on al-Shīrāzī’s Kitāb al-Muhadhdhab fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī. In his introduction, al-Nawawī defines key terms deployed by early Shāfiʿī jurists, including a position held by al-Shāfiʿī (qawl, pl. aqwāl), a position held by an early authority (wajh, pl. awjuh), and a transmission of school doctrine (ṭarīqa, pl. ṭuruq). Al-Nawawī contrasts aqwāl with awjuh, which are views that prominent early Shāfiʿīs (asḥāb al-wujūh) either derived from the doctrinal principles (uṣūl and qawāʿid) laid down by al-Shāfiʿī or formulated through independent reasoning. A ṭarīqa denotes a particular transmission of either type of position. For instance, a jurist might report via one ṭarīqa that al-Shāfiʿī had two opinions on a given matter and via a second ṭarīqa that he endorsed only one of them. Or one ṭarīqa might convey that Shāfiʿī authorities proffered multiple opinions or rulings (aqwāl or awjuh) to resolve a legal problem while another ṭarīqa asserts a single position on the issue. As a further example, a ṭarīqa might provide details concerning the applicability of a ruling (tafṣīl), whereas another claims that the ruling is straightforward and universally applicable. Al-Nawawī recognizes the complexities involved in arbitrating between conflicting transmitted views, and he therefore offers guidelines for determining the preponderant position in such situations, making extensive reference to the Shāfiʿī hadith scholar Abū ʿAmr Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ’s (d. 643/1245) Adab al-muftī wa-l-mustaftī.⁷

Al-Nawawī also notes that at times the terms wajh and ṭarīqa are used interchangeably, because a wajh can also denote a variant transmission of school doctrine. In Shāfiʿī doctrinal sources, we find copious references to divergent views transmitted by individual Iraqis and Khurasanis as well as to views promulgated by each community as a collective. In some cases, these transmissions pertain to views concerning the most reliable statement from al-Shāfiʿī, while in others, they convey later scholars’ own independently derived rules for new cases. As Fachrizal Halim observes in his study of al-Nawawī’s thought, a particular jurist’s ṭarīqa may have consisted not just of a transmitted view but also of a unique method of interpretation and the specific weights given to various considerations in that jurist’s approach to legal disputation (khilāf).⁸ Halim maintains that the ṭarīqa, in the sense of interpretive approach, of the most prominent asḥāb al-wujūh became normative within the Shāfiʿī school: ‘The influence of their model of reasoning and interpretation was apparently huge, so much so as to attract other jurists to use them as common models of interpretation.’⁹ Over time and in the aggregate, regional patterns in Khurasan and Iraq crystallized into distinctive interpretive approaches, which came to be referred to as the Iraqi ṭarīqa and the Khurasani ṭarīqa.

Although the surviving sources establish the existence of the Khurasani and Iraqi ṭarīqas as two distinct Shāfiʿī interpretive approaches and communities, many questions remain unanswered. For instance, what were the characteristic features of each community? Beyond geography, what intellectual, methodological, and institutional differences demarcated the two branches? What factors contributed to this differentiation? To what extent were the two communities aware of their differences, and what were the dynamics of exchange between them? And finally, how did later Shāfiʿīs remember this stage in their school’s development?

Our sources, both those written in this period and those composed later, have little to say about these issues. Substantive works attribute particular legal doctrines to individual Iraqi or Khurasani jurists or, more often, to the Iraqis or the Khurasanis as a collective (eg, ‘The Iraqis held X, whereas the Khurasanis maintained Y.’) Biographical sources assign jurists to one community or the other and record their teachers and students. Drawing on this biographical cache, several scholars have studied Khurasani and Iraqi juristic networks. In his study of the evolution of the Sunni schools of law, Christopher Melchert identified the important figures of third/ninth- and fourth/tenth-century Shāfiʿism in the East. His criteria for what constitutes a legal school led him to conclude, somewhat contentiously, that Abū al-ʿAbbās Ibn Surayj (d. 306/918), rather than al-Shāfiʿī himself, was the real architect of the Shāfiʿī school.¹⁰ Nail Okuyucu’s Turkish-language study of the consolidation of Shāfiʿism as a corporate unit in the third/ninth century confirms the broad outlines of Melchert’s theory of the evolution of the madhhab, particularly the significance of Ibn Surayj and his disciples in its consolidation.¹¹ Halim’s study includes a chapter describing the Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿī transmissions of school doctrine that al-Nawawī would eventually reconcile.¹²

Beyond jurists’ biographies, on which these studies are largely based, historical sources provide little information about the emergence of differentiated juristic communities in Iraq and Khurasan or, more crucially, about the characteristics that distinguished the two communities. This is perhaps due to the school’s subsequent trajectory: once the madhhab’s dual legacy was fused into a single authoritative doctrine by Mamluk-era jurists, there was little incentive to belabour the differences that had once existed. Breaking this virtual silence, al-Nawawī characterizes the two communities as follows in his long introduction to al-Majmūʿ:

Know that the Iraqis transmit the views (nuṣūṣ) of al-Shāfiʿī, the maxims (qawāʿid) of his school, and the views of early authorities more precisely and reliably than the Khurasanis transmit them, for the most part. [On the other hand,] the Khurasanis are more adept in analysis, research, derivation, and organization (aḥsan taṣarrufan wa-baḥthan wa-tafrī ʿan wa-tartīban).¹³

In al-Nawawī’s view, then, Iraqi Shāfiʿīs were primarily concerned with preserving and transmitting school doctrines in the form in which they had received them, much like hadith transmitters, whereas Khurasanis sought to systematize the school’s doctrines and engaged in analytical and exploratory legal discourse.¹⁴ As the principal synthesizer of the two strands of Shāfiʿism al-Nawawī was intimately familiar with both, making his account particularly compelling.¹⁵

Al-Nawawī’s terse remarks about the varying transmissions of legal doctrine among early Shāfiʿīs and the divergent scholarly cultures and authorial styles of Iraqi and Khurasani jurists tell the beginning of an intriguing but to date untold story. By situating the legal thought of Khurasani and Iraqi jurists within broader social and intellectual developments, I not only confirm and flesh out al-Nawawī’s characterization of the two communities but also reconstruct how and why they developed.

2. THE EMERGENCE AND DIFFERENTIATION OF THE KHURASANI AND IRAQI COMMUNITIES

The historical emergence of the Khurasani and Iraqi Shāfiʿī ṭarīqas was shaped by three main factors, roughly corresponding to three stages of development. The first factor was the geographical distance of Baghdad from the cities of Khurasan, whose economic, political, and religious significance was rising steadily throughout the fourth/tenth century. Since Iraq had been a hub of Sunni learning since the second/eighth century, the key change that led to the existence of two ṭarīqas was the emergence of an indigenous Shāfiʿī scholarly tradition in Khurasan that was both rigorous and distinctive enough to rival that of Iraq. The second factor was the consolidation, over time, of a distinct interpretive community in each locale with its own authorities, characteristic solutions to new and old problems, and styles of legal reasoning shaped by exchange with local interlocutors. Finally, the differentiation of the two communities was entrenched by the third factor: the Khurasani Shāfiʿīs’ deep absorption of Ashʿarism, which influenced their theoretical jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh) and ethico-legal philosophy, their substantive fiqh works, and their style of Sufism in ways unfamiliar to their Iraqi peers.

A. Beginnings: Geography and the emergence of two Ṭarīqas

The eastward expansion of Shāfiʿism from Egypt began in the late third/ninth century. In the decades after al-Shāfiʿī’s death in 204/820, news of his and his students’ prominence caught the attention of Iraqi scholars, some of whom travelled to Egypt to seek out al-Shāfiʿī’s disciples.¹⁶ Upon their return, they became sought-after teachers in their own right and attracted students to Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphal capital where the Shāfiʿī school was quickly developing a following.¹⁷ Among the earliest and most prominent Iraqis who trained with al-Shāfiʿī’s disciples in Cairo was Abū al-Qāsim ʿUthmān b. Saʿīd al-Anmāṭī (d. 288/901),¹⁸ who studied with al-Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān al-Murādī (d. 270/884) and Ismāʿīl b. Yaḥyā al-Muzanī (d. 264/877) in Egypt (see Figure 1). Al-Anmāṭī’s importance for the spread of Shāfiʿism in Iraq was eclipsed only by that of his student Ibn Surayj (d. 306/918), who remains the object of considerable interest and debate among contemporary scholars despite how little we know about his thought.¹⁹

Iraq’s status as a centre of learning was further augmented by the Fatimid conquest of Egypt in 358/969, which made Iraq, and especially Baghdad, the main hub of Sunni cultural and intellectual life. The further eastward spread of Shāfiʿism proceeded largely from Baghdad, which soon overtook Egypt as the centre of Shāfiʿī scholarship. Throughout the fourth/tenth century, a steady stream of bright young minds flocked from the cities of Khurasan to Baghdad to study with Shāfiʿī masters. They had become acquainted with al-Shāfiʿī’s teachings through early Khurasani pioneers who had travelled to Egypt in the previous century to study the books of al-Muzanī and al-Rabīʿ directly with their authors.²⁰ Al-Muzanī’s Khurasani students included ʿAbadān ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Marwazī (d. 294/906)²¹ and Aḥmad b. Sayyār (d. 268/881)²² from Merv and Ibn Khuzayma (d. 311/923)²³ and Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. Ziyād al-Naysābūrī (d. 324/936)²⁴ from Nishapur. Some Khurasani Shāfiʿīs who trained in Egypt, such as Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad, settled in Iraq, whereas others returned home to Khurasan, where they spread the knowledge they had acquired from al-Shāfiʿī’s students. For example, Muḥammad b. Naṣr al-Marwazī (d. 294/906), a student of al-Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān and ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 214/829), actively spread Shāfiʿism in Khurasan upon his return from Baghdad.²⁵ Abū ʿAlī al-Thaqafī (d. 328/940) studied with Muḥammad b. Naṣr as well as Ibn Khuzayma and was remembered for being the first to bring ‘the sciences of al-Shāfiʿī and the minutiae of Ibn Surayj from Iraq to Khurasan’.²⁶

Importantly, many of these figures were also prominent hadith scholars who collected and evaluated reports attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad. This activity was one of the most significant features of the proto-Shāfiʿī school during its eastward expansion. The collection and canonization of Prophetic hadith marked a crucial shift in Sunnism and was closely associated with the paradigm of legal interpretation and epistemology established by al-Shāfiʿī.²⁷ Of the school founders, it was al-Shāfiʿī who championed hadith as the primary vehicle of the Prophet’s normative legacy and elevated hadith above communal practice as the primary determinant of the correct understanding of the Quran and the main source of legal rulings.²⁸ Al-Shāfiʿī’s theorization of the role of hadith served as a major impetus for the compilation and study of hadith in the subsequent century, a movement spearheaded by al-Shāfiʿī’s intellectual heirs in Baghdad and Khurasan, many of whom maintained at least a nominal affiliation with the Shāfiʿī legal school.²⁹ Prominent Shāfiʿīs who played a seminal role in the early study of hadith, such as Ibn Khuzayma, Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 327/938), al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī (d. 405/1014), and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463/1071), were not the exception but the rule: as Jonathan Brown has argued, the canonization of the definitive collections of Prophetic hadith in the fourth/tenth century was an ‘exclusively Shāfiʿī endeavor’.³⁰

The emergence of Khurasan as the second important centre of Shāfiʿism was also tied to the region’s growing political and social significance starting in the fourth/tenth century.³¹ Once local networked scholarly communities had arisen in the principal cities of Khurasan at some distance from Iraq, there was little incentive to travel to Baghdad to study when Shāfiʿī authorities resided closer to home. Khurasanis travelling to Iraq remarked that the legal knowledge they had acquired back home in the East differed slightly from what was taught in Iraq; these comments point to a nascent awareness of distinct communal identities.³²

The first mention in the sources of a nascent scholarly community in Khurasan distinct from the one in Iraq appears towards the end of the fourth/tenth century in the form of references to ‘our Khurasani companions’ (aṣḥābunā al-khurasāniyyūn) and ‘our Iraqi companions’ (aṣḥābunā al-ʿirāqiyyūn).³³ Whereas the Iraqi school was focused on Baghdad and its environs, the Khurasani Shāfiʿī community was spread over a vast geographical expanse centred on four cities and their surrounding villages and townships: Merv, Nishapur, Balkh, and Herat (see Figure 2). Of these cities, Nishapur was the quasi-capital of Khurasan, but it was Merv that produced the earliest, most prominent, and most numerous Shāfiʿīs, which is why the Khurasanis are at times referred to as ‘the Mervis’ (marāwiza).³⁴

Within a generation, these two groups developed into autonomous interpretive communities, differentiated by their approach (ṭarīqat al-khurasāniyyīn and ṭarīqat al-ʿirāqiyyīn) and each known by a foremost authority referred to as the shaykh of the respective community: the Iraqi Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī (d. 406/1016, shaykh al-ʿirāqiyyīn) and the Khurasani Abū Bakr al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī al-Ṣaghīr (d. 417 or 418/1026 or 1027, shaykh al-khurasāniyyīn). These terms signal the formation of a distinct community of legal interpretation in each locale, shepherded by an authoritative figure. Both of these shaykhs traced their intellectual lineages back to the same Baghdadi authority, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad al-Marwazī (d. 340/951).

Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī was the most prominent disciple of Ibn Surayj and the chief of the Baghdadi school after him.³⁵ Originally from Merv, Abū Isḥāq trained a generation of Shāfiʿīs who consolidated and further expanded the school in both Iraq and Khurasan. In Iraq, where the majority of his students remained, the Shāfiʿī community’s growth was led by his illustrious colleagues and students, such as Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥusayn Ibn Abī Hurayra (d. 345/956), Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Māsarjīsī (d. 383 or 384/994 or 995), Abū al-Ḥusayn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn al-Qaṭṭān al-Baghdādī (d. 359/970), Abū al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Marzubān (d. 366/977), Abū al-Qāsim ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dārakī (d. 375/986), and Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935f), whose seminal contribution to the development of Islamic thought we will return to.

The most influential Iraqi branch of Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī’s intellectual lineage passed through his students al-Dārakī and Ibn al-Marzubān to Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī, the shaykh of the Iraqi ṭarīqa.³⁶ Born and raised in Isfarāyīn in northern Khurasan, Abū Ḥāmid was something of a child prodigy. He undertook his primary training in his hometown, where he received authorization to issue legal opinions (fatāwā) before the age of 20. In 364/974f he moved on to Baghdad, where his tuition in Shāfiʿī law continued under Ibn al-Marzubān for some 2 years until the latter’s death and then under al-Dārakī, whom Abū Ḥāmid described as the most learned jurist he had ever met.³⁷ After completing his education, he remained in Baghdad, where he taught Shāfiʿī law from 370/980f onwards, and over the next three and a half decades, he trained the most prominent Iraqi jurists of the subsequent two generations. Venerated by biographers as the ‘second al-Shāfiʿī’, he was even once described, somewhat hyperbolically, as more knowledgeable than al-Shāfiʿī himself.³⁸ His classes are said to have been attended by between three and seven hundred jurists (faqīh) or students of law (mutafaqqih), and his 50-volume commentary (taʿlīqa) on al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar became the main reference work for the Iraqi community after him. Most of the great Iraqi Shāfiʿīs in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, including Abū al-Qāsim Manṣūr al-Karkhī (d. 447/1055), al-Qāḍī Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī (d. 450/1058), and Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058), were his disciples. The Iraqi successor whose legacy would prove most enduring was Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī. Al-Shīrāzī trained with three of Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī’s students, al-Qāḍī Abū al-Ṭayyib, Abū Ḥātim al-Qazwīnī (d. 440/1049), and Abū al-Faraj al-Dārimī (d. 449/1058), and he drew extensively on al-Isfarāyīnī’s taʿlīqa in his works.³⁹

East of Baghdad, another group of Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī’s students were developing an equally dynamic scholarly community in Khurasan under the leadership of Abū Sahl Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Suʿlūkī (d. 369/980) and Abū Zayd al-Marwazī (d. 371/982). Abū Zayd studied Shāfiʿī law with Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī and was described as the latter’s constant companion. After completing his studies with al-Marwazī in Baghdad—and having acquired a reputation for his outstanding skills in legal disputation—Abū Zayd returned to Merv to establish an influential teaching circle that graduated leading Khurasani jurists,⁴⁰ among them al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī.⁴¹

As his name suggests, al-Qaffāl began life as a locksmith, and he is reported to have started his studies at the unusually late age of 30. In one report, he recounts that when he began his studies, he did not even know the difference between the first- and second-person present tense in Arabic, or the distinction between ikhtaṣartu (the first word of al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar) and ikhtaṣarta—implying that he started with the very basic step of learning the Arabic language.⁴² Not much is known about his scholarly formation beyond that he trained with the two most prominent Shāfiʿī authorities in Merv: Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Khiḍrī (d. c. 380/990f),⁴³ who had studied with Abū Bakr al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī (d. 365/976), and Abū Zayd al-Marwazī, at whose hands he graduated (takharraja). According to al-Subkī, al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī often asked both teachers the same question and then compared their responses and reasoning.⁴⁴ He was eventually acclaimed as the most learned jurist of his generation in Khurasan. Students travelled great distances to study with him, and his long life (he lived to be 90 years old) enabled him to train the most important scholars of the next generation, including Abū Muḥammad al-Juwaynī (d. 438/1046), al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn (d. 462/1069), and Abū ʿAlī Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Sinjī al-Marwazī (d. 427 or 430/1036 or 1039).⁴⁵

Al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī and al-Isfarāyīnī were near contemporaries. Although al-Isfarāyīnī was slightly younger than al-Qaffāl, the latter’s late start and al-Isfarāyīnī’s precocity meant that they taught and wrote at the same time, though al-Qaffāl outlived al-Isfarāyīnī by about a decade. Just as the Iraqi school’s legal literature found its consummate representation in the writings of Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, who was linked to al-Isfarāyīnī through several of his teachers, the Khurasani school crystallized in the works of Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, who accessed al-Qaffāl’s legacy through his father and cited al-Qaffāl profusely in his works.

When forming an image of the two Shāfiʿī ṭarīqas in geographical terms, it is important to bear in mind the difference between a jurist’s place affiliation (nisba) and membership in a community. Although the two often matched, this was not always the case, as membership in a scholarly community was based on one’s training and scholarly networks rather than on where one was born or resided. For instance, al-Isfarāyīnī hailed from northwestern Khurasan but relocated to Baghdad, where he trained, taught, and became the undisputed leader of the Iraqi community. Similarly, his teacher al-Dārakī originated from Khurasan but ended up in Iraq, and his teacher’s teacher Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī issued from Merv but settled in Baghdad and became chief of the Baghdadi school. Thus, although al-Isfarāyīnī, al-Dārakī, and al-Marwazī all retained a nisba associating them with their Khurasani hometowns, their primary intellectual affiliation was with Iraqi Shāfiʿism, to which they contributed with their teaching, writings, and leadership. In turn, once the cities of Khurasan had become established as lively intellectual centres, prominent Baghdadi jurists and theologians moved there, triggering an eastward migration of talent. The upshot is that although geographical realities certainly shaped the formation of the two Shāfiʿī communities, these communities were not static, nor was the separation between them absolute. Instead, they were constantly reshaped by the movement of people from one region to the other. Accordingly, the two ṭarīqas were distinguished by their methods, interpretive discourses, and communal identities more than they were defined by geography.

B. Consolidation: The two ṭarīqas as distinct communities of interpretation

Although biographical sources enable us to identify the leading Shāfiʿīs in Iraq and Khurasan, they tell us little about what differentiated the legal discourses of the two communities. We know that both were grounded in the teachings of al-Shāfiʿī, sharing the doctrines and methods of legal reasoning that he and his successors developed. This shared basis connected both Iraqi and Khurasani Shāfiʿīs to what El Shamsy terms the Shāfiʿī ‘community of interpretation’.⁴⁶ El Shamsy identifies three constitutive features of this community: a distinct group identity, a common literature, and a shared intellectual discourse.⁴⁷ Reconstructing the histories of the Khurasani and Iraqi ṭarīqas reveals that these three features took different forms in the two regions, leading to the emergence of two distinct interpretive communities, each defined by its own communal identity and its own literature and intellectual discourse, which relied on authorities and works particular to that community and advanced diverging substantive views and interpretive methods.

Perhaps the most conspicuous indication of the existence of two distinct Shāfiʿī communities of interpretation in the fourth/tenth century is the separate, inward-facing culture within each. Shāfiʿī jurists in this period were always affiliated with either the Khurasani or the Iraqi community, and they were consistently known and identified by a single affiliation; I do not know of any jurist who was not associated with one community or the other, or whose affiliation was unknown or contested. This is not surprising in view of what we know of medieval Islamic scholarly culture, in which students were associated with prominent teachers rather than institutions and teachers exerted authority over their students in myriad formal and informal ways even after the completion of their studies.

The networks of teaching and learning that formed in each community were also remarkably self-referential, signalling a shared discourse within the community that did not extend to outsiders. This meant that authors in one community virtually never cited the major authorities of the other community, and instead of disputing the views of the other ṭarīqa, they often demonstrated little familiarity with its authoritative representatives and their doctrinal views. This dynamic is evident in Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī’s biographical dictionary, Ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ, whose chapter on Shāfiʿī jurists claims to record the biographies of leading Shāfiʿī jurists from al-Shāfiʿī’s students onwards: al-Shīrāzī demonstrates detailed knowledge of Iraqi authorities and starkly contrasting unfamiliarity with, if not outright disregard for, their Khurasani counterparts. Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī receives one of the longest biographical entries in the book,⁴⁸ while the shaykh of the Khurasani ṭarīqa has no entry at all. After the generation of the two shaykhs, al-Shīrāzī’s focus is largely on the students of al-Isfarāyīnī and of al-Isfarāyīnī’s teacher al-Dārakī, many of whom also taught al-Shīrāzī himself, linking him to the legacy of these two Iraqi authorities.⁴⁹ After documenting the lives and achievements of some three dozen Iraqi jurists, with detailed information on their teachers, students, and writings, al-Shīrāzī casually acknowledges the names of some contemporaneous Khurasani authorities but claims to know nothing else about them:

And in Khurasan and Transoxania (mā warāʾ al-nahr) there are many others, such as al-Awdanī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥalīmī, Abū Yaʿqūb al-Abīwardī, Abū Bakr al-Fārisī al-Balkhī, Abū Bakr al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī, Abū ʿAlī al-Sinjī, Abū Bakr al-Ṭūsī, Abū Manṣūr al-Baghdādī, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nīlī, Nāṣir al-Marwazī, Abū Sulaymān al-Shāshī, al-Ghazālī,⁵⁰ Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Juwaynī, Abū Ṭāhir al-Zayādī, Abū Sahl Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Abīwardī, and Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Ḥākim in Samarqand, among others whose death dates I do not recall (lam yaḥḍurnī); God have mercy on them.⁵¹

In his Muhadhdhab, al-Shīrāzī likewise makes no mention of major Khurasani authorities such as al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī. A similar but inverse pattern characterizes the referencing habits of the Khurasani Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, who cites his father and al-Qaffāl frequently throughout his Nihāya but only rarely references Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī or other Iraqi authorities.⁵² This self-contained and internally referential culture was so deeply entrenched that the two communities could use the same nomenclature to refer to two distinct individuals without any concern that the referent would be misapprehended. For example, the appellation ‘al-qāḍī’ was used by Iraqi jurists to refer to al-Qāḍī Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī and by the Khurasanis to refer to al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn.⁵³ These expectations, inclusions, and omissions are indicative of the existence of two discrete interpretive communities that increasingly evolved independently and operated autonomously.

Relying on different sets of authorities and participating in largely separate scholarly conversations, members of the two communities transmitted distinct legal doctrines and developed diverging solutions to new problems, which then became enshrined in each community’s legal literature. As the examples of al-Shīrāzī’s Muhadhdhab and al-Juwaynī’s Nihāya demonstrate, as late as in the mid-fifth/eleventh century prominent Shāfiʿī jurists cited almost exclusively the authorities and transmitted doctrines of their own ṭarīqas. In a few instances, however, they showed awareness of the views of the other ṭarīqa, and at times they contested the conclusions or methods of their counterparts. We also find in al-Shīrāzī and al-Juwaynī’s generation anecdotal evidence of a handful of Shāfiʿī jurists who attempted to bridge the two regional traditions and to reduce the doctrinal differences between them; this is noted of Abū ʿAlī al-Sinjī (d. 427 or 430/1036 or 1039)⁵⁴ and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāwūdī al-Būshanjī (d. 467/1075).⁵⁵

A particularly illustrative example is provided by the public disputations between Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī and al-Shīrāzī that took place in Nishapur when al-Shīrāzī visited the city in 475/1083. Thanks to al-Shīrāzī’s approximate transcription of the exchange, we have a rare record of two of these debates, one concerning the permissibility of coercing a virgin daughter into marriage and the other concerning the consequences of mistaking the correct prayer direction (qibla) in the ritual prayer.⁵⁶

The question at issue in the second disputation was whether a prayer mistakenly performed facing the wrong direction needs to be repeated to be valid. Al-Juwaynī defended the Khurasani position that the prayer must be repeated, whereas al-Shīrāzī contended, with the Iraqis, that no repetition is necessary. Each thus assumed the position of his respective regional community. The divergence between the two positions reflected differing stances on how to approach issues concerning which multiple opinions had been transmitted from al-Shāfiʿī and it was thus not clear which should be considered the school’s authoritative position. Most Khurasani jurists, al-Juwaynī included, argued that the more recent view attributed to al-Shāfiʿī—in this case, that repetition of the prayer is required—had superseded his earlier view, according to which the prayer does not need to be repeated. By contrast, the Iraqis followed al-Muzanī, who maintained that al-Shāfiʿī had never retracted his earlier view and that it was more consistent with his overall legal principles than the purported later view was.

This debate exemplifies both the substantive disagreements between the Khurasanis and the Iraqis and the methodological differences that underpinned them concerning questions such as how to choose between conflicting transmissions and which methods of reasoning should be used to address novel scenarios. A similar dispute between the Iraqis and the Khurasanis over two contradictory opinions attributed to al-Shāfiʿī is also recorded from half a century earlier. One of the transmitted opinions matched the position of the Ḥanafī school’s eponym Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), whereas the other opposed it. Al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī upheld the former transmission and al-Isfarāyīnī championed the latter, arguing that al-Shāfiʿī must have had a reasonable, though unspecified rationale (maʿnā khafī) for contradicting Abū Ḥanīfa.⁵⁷

As such diverging views accumulated, they coalesced into distinct bodies of doctrine particular to each community. Each community’s set of legal doctrines was then reproduced and reinforced through the composition and teaching of specifically Iraqi and Khurasani legal manuals and commentaries. The Iraqi community’s juristic writings revolved around Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī’s commentary on al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar. Many of al-Isfarāyīnī’s Iraqi students, including Abū al-Fatḥ Sulaym b. Ayyūb al-Rāzī (d. 447/1055), Abū al-Ḥasan Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Maḥāmilī (d. 414 or 415/1023 or 1024), Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. ʿAbd-Allāh al-Bandanījī (d. 425/1034), and Abū al-Qāsim al-Karkhī, authored commentaries on his work. In the following generation, their students, such as Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, studied al-Isfarāyīnī’s commentary with his disciples and later based their teaching and compositions on the work.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, Khurasani Shāfiʿīs focused on the writings of al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī and his students al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn and Abū Muḥammad al-Juwaynī until these were synthesized and supplanted by the latter’s son Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī and Abū al-Maʿālī’s student Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111).

In her study of the debates between al-Shīrāzī and al-Juwaynī, Sohaira Siddiqui has noted the contrast between the traditionalist leanings of al-Shīrāzī, who relied primarily on textual arguments, and al-Juwaynī’s greater openness to analogical and other nontextual arguments—a contrast that is also evident in their respective uṣūl al-fiqh works.⁵⁹ These preferences are also illustrated by the two scholars’ arguments in the second disputation, concerning a virgin daughter’s forced marriage. Al-Juwaynī, who was representing the Ḥanafī position in this debate, maintained that a daughter’s virginity was not sufficient grounds to allow her father to coerce her into marriage because no benefit or purpose (maṣlaḥa) was realized by accepting virginity as the ratio legis, or legal cause (ʿilla, pl. ʿilal), that sanctioned coercion.⁶⁰ Unlike al-Shīrāzī, who showed little interest in such rationalizing discourse and did not discuss the ratio legis even in his jurisprudential works, al-Juwaynī and his student al-Ghazālī explored the ratio legis of legal rulings at length in their theoretical jurisprudence; indeed, al-Ghazālī authored an entire book on the topic and made it a cornerstone of his philosophy concerning the higher aims of the law.⁶¹ Al-Shīrāzī, meanwhile, countered al-Juwaynī’s argument about the purposiveness or otherwise of the ratio legis with a hermeneutic principle: in the speech of the Arabs, mentioning an attribute alongside the ruling was tantamount to asserting that the attribute was the ruling’s ratio legis.⁶² Accordingly, the fact that the Prophet stated that a father can marry off his ‘virgin daughter’ against her will was an indication that her virginity was the legal cause for the coercion.

The divergent styles of legal reasoning displayed by al-Shīrāzī and al-Juwaynī in their debates as well as in their works of theoretical jurisprudence are not unique to these two thinkers but emblematic of the respective approaches of the Iraqi and Khurasani communities of interpretation. They are reflected in al-Nawawī’s description, quoted earlier, of the Iraqis as transmission-oriented and the Khurasanis as analytical and systematic. And they underpin the characterizations of Iraqi and Khurasani scholars in the biographical literature. The biographical sketches of Iraqi authorities tend to highlight their fidelity to hadith, whereas the biographies of Khurasani authorities emphasize their ingenuity and innovation in legal thought. For instance, the Iraqi al-Dārakī is said to have privileged reports from the Prophet and his Companions above the established views of both al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfa, arguing that in cases of disagreement it was more appropriate to adhere to the reported views of Companions than to follow the later school founders.⁶³ Similarly, his student Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī’s taʿlīqa is described as chiefly concerned with presenting evidence for Shāfiʿī doctrines and responding to the counterevidence offered by other schools.⁶⁴ Conversely, al-Dārakī’s Khurasani colleague Abū Zayd is described first and foremost as a jurist; he had gathered licences (ijāzāt) to transmit hadith but was preoccupied with teaching law, which led him to neglect hadith transmission. In general, Khurasani Shāfiʿīs such as al-Juwaynī and al-Ghazālī were criticized both during their lifetimes and after their deaths for being insufficiently attentive to the study of hadith.⁶⁵ Instead, the Khurasanis prioritized the derivation of novel legal opinions and the systematization of school doctrine. Abū Zayd was described by his intellectual heir, Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, as the most innately quick-witted jurist of his time (adhkā al-aʾimma qarīḥatan), a commendation that emphasized his legal ingenuity.⁶⁶ The biographer ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Samʿānī (d. 562/1166) praised al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī’s approach to the law as ‘the most solid in systematization and the most engaged in analytical verification’ (amtan ṭarīqa tahdhīban wa-aktharuhā taḥqīqan).⁶⁷ Khurasani authorities such as Abū Zayd and al-Qaffāl also frequently substantiated their legal opinions by invoking legal maxims rather than the scriptural evidence typically employed by their Iraqi colleagues.⁶⁸

It is important to note that these generalized depictions are not intended to discount the diversity that existed within the Khurasani and Iraqi juristic communities. There was certainly a great deal of internal debate and critique within each community, and often jurists of the same ṭarīqa held radically different views on particular issues or relied on very different methodological considerations. For example, al-Nawawī notes that many of the opinions of the Khurasani jurist Abū al-Maḥāsin al-Rūyānī (d. 502/1108) match those of Iraqi jurists rather than those of his Khurasani peers. Methodologically, al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn departed from the approach adopted by his teacher, al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī, to weigh competing transmissions from al-Shāfiʿī when one transmission corresponded with the view of Abū Ḥanīfa and the other was at variance; al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn considered the decisive factor to be the ratio legis underpinning the ruling.⁶⁹ Khurasani jurists also disagreed with one another about the importance of the study and use of hadith as legal evidence, as exemplified by the critique levelled by the Khurasani Abū Bakr Aḥmad al-Bayhaqī (d. 458/1066) at Abū Muḥammad al-Juwaynī for what he saw as a lack of rigour in the latter’s usage of hadith in legal reasoning.⁷⁰

The evidence I have presented about the intellectual orientations of the Khurasani and Iraqi communities in the fourth/tenth century remains anecdotal, and a comprehensive comparative study of the legal doctrines and interpretive approaches of Khurasani and Iraqi jurists is needed to validate or nuance my account. The recent edition and publication of several previously unpublished Shāfiʿī legal works from this period has placed such a study within the realm of possibility.⁷¹

C. Entrenchment: Ashʿarism and interlocutors in the two tarīqas

The third and chronologically the last factor in the entrenchment of the two Shāfiʿī communities was their divergent engagement with theology—specifically, the differing degrees to which each community absorbed Ashʿarī rationalist theology into its legal thought and the different theological interlocutors to whom each adapted its legal reasoning. Although the sociopolitical consequences of the adoption of Ashʿarism by Khurasani Shāfiʿīs has been the subject of numerous studies,⁷² the resultant epistemic and methodological shifts in Khurasani Shāfiʿī legal thought have received less scholarly attention.

The eponymous founder of the Ashʿarī school, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935f), was a member of the Baghdadi Shāfiʿī community who had studied with Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī. Al-Ashʿarī had started out as a member of the Muʿtazilī school of theology, which relied on rational doctrines and forms of reasoning to defend Muslim theology.⁷³ The Muʿtazila were opposed by Sunni traditionalists (ahl al-ḥadīth),⁷⁴ many of whom, such as Ibn Khuzayma and Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), were leading hadith specialists. The traditionalists rejected the rationalist methods and doctrines of the Muʿtazila and insisted that Muslim theology be grounded exclusively in the scriptural sources of the Quran and Sunna. Al-Ashʿarī’s abandonment of Muʿtazilism was a decisive turning point in the conflict between Muʿtazilī rationalists and Sunni traditionalists. Al-Ashʿarī carved out a middle position that defended Sunni beliefs by deploying select doctrines and methods of rational inquiry that he had honed during his 40-year career as a Muʿtazilī. He critiqued the Muʿtazila’s disregard of scripture and their imposition of obligations on God that curtailed His omnipotence, and he proposed an alternative theological paradigm that assimilated and repurposed rational methods and doctrines into the service of Sunni theology. A key innovation introduced by al-Ashʿarī was the religious obligation to engage in naẓar, or rational justification of God’s existence, His essential attributes, and other core theological doctrines.⁷⁵

It is one of the curious twists of history that the locus of al-Ashʿarī’s teachings shifted away from his native Baghdad immediately after the generation of his direct students, and the popularization of his thought was accomplished largely by Shāfiʿīs in Khurasan, which became the bastion of Ashʿarism.⁷⁶ Its introduction to the region is often credited to al-Qaffāl’s student Abū Sahl al-Suʿlūkī, who studied Ashʿarī theology in Baghdad with al-Ashʿarī and his disciples during his 15-year sojourn in the city.⁷⁷ Upon his return to Khurasan, al-Suʿlūkī’s efforts to spread Ashʿarism were bolstered by the influx of Ashʿarī theologians into Nishapur between 290/902 and 343/955; many immigrated at the behest and insistence of prominent Nishapuri Sufis.⁷⁸ The newcomers included three second-generation students of al-Ashʿarī through al-Bāhilī (d. c. 370/980): Abū Bakr Ibn Fūrak (d. 406/1015),⁷⁹ Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāyīnī (d. 418/1027),⁸⁰ and Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013), the lone Mālikī among the three.⁸¹ Later biographers such as al-Subkī and Abū al-Qāsim ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176), highlighted the instrumental role that Ibn Fūrak, Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāyīnī, and al-Bāqillānī played in disseminating Ashʿarī doctrines in Khurasan, particularly in Nishapur. Another prominent Ashʿarī who migrated to Khurasan was Abū Manṣūr ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī (d. 429/1037).⁸² Once in Nishapur, these scholars quickly attracted followers, often through madrasas constructed specifically for them.⁸³

In advancing what was then an avant-garde theological approach, Nishapuri Ashʿarīs, the vast majority of whom were Shāfiʿīs, had to contend with both the established traditionalism of Shāfiʿī hadith scholars and the political influence of the Shāfiʿīs’ rivals, the Ḥanafīs, who were associated primarily with Muʿtazilism. The debates within the Shāfiʿī school culminated in what Rodrigo Adem describes as a ‘changing of the guard’ in Nishapur: the traditionalist authority and interpretive approach of pre-Ashʿarī Nishapuri Shāfiʿīs was challenged and ultimately superseded by the rationalist commitments of the Ashʿarī newcomers.⁸⁴ Pioneers of the emerging Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿī current in Nishapur such as Ibn Fūrak authored works refuting the emulative approach of earlier Nishapuri Shāfiʿī authorities such as Ibn Khuzayma and Abū Bakr al-Ṣibghī (d. 342/953), Ibn Khuzayma’s successor as the mufti of Nishapur, who had also studied hadith with the leading hadith scholar Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 277/890). Adem shows that the aim of Ibn Fūrak’s seminal work Mushkil al-ḥadīth was, at least in part, to counter these earlier scholars’ prohibition on figurative interpretation of God’s attributes and to demonstrate that the Ashʿarī methodology did not represent a break with the past.⁸⁵

Back in Baghdad, Iraqi Shāfiʿīs were divided over al-Ashʿarī’s legacy. Although some, such as al-Bāhilī, continued his work, most seem to have largely abandoned it, and after the generation of al-Bāhilī’s students, we find no Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿī theologians of note in Baghdad and no important works of Ashʿarī theology authored by Iraqis. Many Iraqi Shāfiʿīs rejected al-Ashʿarī’s project outright and maintained fidelity to the emulative ahl al-ḥadīth theological paradigm. This camp included the shaykh of the Iraqi ṭarīqa, Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī, who broke with his contemporaries Ibn Fūrak and al-Bāqillānī by strongly censuring al-Ashʿarī’s project. Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī posited a sharp distinction between al-Shāfiʿī’s linguistically oriented jurisprudence and the theologized jurisprudence of al-Ashʿarī, and according to Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), Abū Ḥāmid inaugurated an anti-Ashʿarī current among Shāfiʿī jurists.⁸⁶ Other Iraqi Shāfiʿīs, perhaps the majority, may have nominally professed Ashʿarism but contributed little to elaborating its doctrines and resisted integrating its rationalist methods and concepts into jurisprudence, law, and ethics. As we will see in the next section, this current among Iraqi Ashʿarīs was exemplified by Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī, who defended Ashʿarī doctrines in theology while resisting the impingement of rationalist theology on jurisprudence and law.

The Khurasanis’ and Iraqis’ respective receptions of al-Ashʿarī’s legacy influenced each community’s engagement with its intellectual rivals. The construction of arguments in Islamic law depended greatly on one’s interlocutor’s substantive and methodological commitments, which determined the effectiveness of one line of reasoning over another in debate.⁸⁷ Although there is still a great deal that we do not know about the intellectual cultures of Khurasan and Iraq in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, we do know that the primary rivals of Iraqi Shāfiʿīs were the Ḥanbalīs, whereas Khurasani Shāfiʿīs competed mainly with the Ḥanafīs in the realm of law and with the Muʿtazila in the area of theology.⁸⁸ In fact, Khurasani Shāfiʿīs’ espousal of Ashʿarism exacerbated the already existing factional strife between them and the Muʿtazilī-leaning Ḥanafīs, eventually setting off violent clashes between the two parties. The tensions culminated in state persecution of Ashʿarīs in Nishapur in the mid-fifth/eleventh century and the consequent exile of several hundred Ashʿarīs, among them al-Juwaynī and the theologian and Sufi Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), who was a student of Ibn Fūrak.⁸⁹

Their differing opponents shaped the approaches of the two Shāfiʿī communities. The Iraqis were influenced by their Ḥanbalī interlocutors’ hadith-leaning textualism and fidelity to transmitted doctrine, while the Khurasanis’ kalām-oriented reasoning reflected the rational and theoretical approaches of the Ḥanafīs and the Muʿtazila of Khurasan. The difference between the two communities’ methodological and epistemological orientations is evident in the writings of their foremost representatives, to which we now turn.

3. TWO INTELLECTUAL PARADIGMS IN FIFTH/ELEVENTH CENTURY KHURASAN AND IRAQ

By the mid-fifth/eleventh century, the differentiation of the two Shāfiʿī communities in Khurasan and Iraq was firmly established, and its effects could be seen in the theoretical jurisprudence, law, and legal ethics of each community and in the legal reasoning and writing of its jurists. Indeed, it is possible to speak of two competing intellectual paradigms. The Iraqi Shāfiʿīs inclined toward the ahl al-ḥadīth paradigm, which privileged careful preservation and transmission of authoritative earlier opinions in the style of hadith scholarship. Iraqi jurists largely opposed speculative theorization in theology, and even when they nominally subscribed to Ashʿarism, their theological writings were epigrammatic and mostly mimetic of core Ashʿarī doctrines. Furthermore, they insisted that Ashʿarī doctrines and methods should not encroach on theoretical jurisprudence. They also tended to keep Sufism and legal ethics separate as fields of inquiry and appeared indifferent towards the ethical implications of the law’s detailed provisions; they had little interest in deploying Ashʿarī doctrines in the service of legal ethics and philosophy. By contrast, Khurasani Shāfiʿism was more analytical, experimental, and kalām-leaning, and it fused Ashʿarī theology, Shāfiʿī law, and Sufism into a synthesis of Sunni normativity that became paradigmatic for classical Islam and remains so today.⁹⁰ Ashʿarism’s emphasis on rational investigation in theological matters informed Khurasani Shāfiʿīs’ theoretical jurisprudence and gave rise to a sophisticated discourse about theological and normative legal ethics.

The characteristic orientation of each community is evident in the thought of its foremost representative. The writings of al-Juwaynī and al-Shīrāzī represent the crowning achievements of their respective regional communities. Examined in their historical context, they provide a window on the intellectual paradigms of Khurasani and Iraqi Shāfiʿism.

A. Al-Juwaynī and the Kalām-leaning Shāfiʿism of Khurasan

The Khurasani fusion of Shāfiʿism, Ashʿarism, and Sufism was pioneered in Nishapur in the fifth/eleventh century by al-Juwaynī and his students, who composed its most enduring written legacy. The distinctive synthesis constructed by the Nishapuri school united Ashʿarī theology, Shāfiʿī law, and Sufi piety into what Tilman Nagel has called ‘die neue Frömmigkeit’ (the new piety).⁹¹ Al-Juwaynī and his students indigenized Ashʿarism in Khurasan by integrating it with their legal thought and Sufi practice. The resulting Nishapuri synthesis was disseminated through the Niẓāmiyya madrasa.

(i) Maṣlaḥa and Ashʿarī uṣūl al-fiqh

The incorporation of Ashʿarī theology into Khurasani Shāfiʿism initiated a new style of Ashʿarī theoretical jurisprudence that contrasted starkly with the tradition of language-focused jurisprudence introduced by al-Shāfiʿī. This Ashʿarī uṣūl al-fiqh was the primary vehicle for the indigenization of Ashʿarī rationalist theology, as it enabled Shāfiʿī theologians to popularize their doctrinal commitments.⁹² Not only was the religious obligation to engage in naẓar, or rational justification of theological doctrines, detailed and defended in works of jurisprudence, but a number of other seminal Ashʿarī doctrines were also expounded in such works. Some of these were explicitly theological, such as human beings’ obligation to thank their divine benefactor and God’s obligation to do what is in the interest of human beings (al-ṣalāḥ wa-l-aṣlaḥ).⁹³ Other doctrines laid out in works of Ashʿarī uṣūl al-fiqh concerned legal epistemology and methodology but had significant theological implications; these included debates around legal analogy (qiyās), the existence of legal obligations before revelation, and whether jurists with contradictory legal opinions could be simultaneously correct (taṣwīb/takhṭiʾa).⁹⁴

Many of these doctrines had been adopted by Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿī theologians in one form or another in the course of their debates with the Muʿtazila. One doctrine with conspicuous legal implications was that of maṣlaḥa, or the proposition that the divine law’s purpose, or telos, was to secure the common good or public welfare.⁹⁵ This proposition was first introduced by Muʿtazilī theologians and was premised on the assumption that God was obligated to act with an objective (gharaḍ) or purpose (maqṣūd). They argued that since He was above acting for His own ends, it was incumbent on Him to act in the interest (ṣalāḥ) of His creation and to accomplish the optimum (al-aṣlaḥ) for them. Muʿtazilī uṣūl al-fiqh presupposed this theological tenet and consequently held that the law always and necessarily benefited creation. The doctrine was further buttressed by the deductive argument that given God’s divine attributes of wisdom and power, the law issuing from Him had to be beneficial to its subjects. This reasoning made maṣlaḥa logically prior to God’s commands, if not their direct cause.

Many of the legal writings of early Muʿtazilī jurists have been lost, but the few surviving sources show that the theorization of maṣlaḥa along these lines was current among at least some Muʿtazilī-inclined Shāfiʿīs, such as al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī and Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. ʿUmar al-Khaffāf (d. fourth/tenth century), as well as among their Ḥanafī counterparts, including al-Karkhī and his student Abū Bakr al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981). The most detailed surviving account of how benefit pervades the law is found in al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī’s Maḥāsin al-sharīʿa.⁹⁶ The work is underpinned by the objective ethics associated with Muʿtazilism in this period, which al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī articulates in the following way: ‘If you affirm for things a Creator who is wise and powerful, then He must intend good for His servants, rewarding them for ordering society in a way that serves their benefit and for acting in conformity with how their intellect was constructed and their nature innately disposed.’⁹⁷ On the basis of this premise, he proceeds to analyse the detailed provisions of Shāfiʿī law in terms of the benefits they achieve and their utility in establishing a just social order.⁹⁸

The majority of the Shāfiʿīs in Khurasan espoused the cause of Ashʿarism and rejected the theological underpinnings of Muʿtazilī reasoning, but in the course of their extensive debates with the Muʿtazila regarding the purposiveness of God’s law, Khurasani Ashʿarī jurists universally adopted the assumption of the law’s purposiveness through a detheologized theory of maṣlaḥa. Ashʿarī theologians categorically affirmed theological voluntarism and thus did not accept the Muʿtazilī argument that God was obliged to secure the optimum for His creation. But they defended the law’s benefit on the basis of an inductive study of existing legal norms, which, they contended, established that the law consistently upheld human interests as an empirical fact rather than a moral obligation on God. Having justified maṣlaḥa as a normative theological value, they then integrated it into Ashʿarī uṣūl al-fiqh within the theory of legal analogy (qiyās), where it functioned as the substantiating principle for a sound analogy that extends an existing legal rule to a novel situation.⁹⁹

Nishapuri Shāfiʿīs, led by al-Juwaynī, were at the forefront of the scholarly effort to strip maṣlaḥa of its theological trappings and incorporate it into Ashʿarī uṣūl al-fiqh. Al-Juwaynī’s Burhān stands out for its developed discussion of the objectives (maqṣad, gharaḍ) of legal rulings, which was unprecedented in works of Sunni uṣūl al-fiqh. Maṣlaḥa is central to al-Juwaynī’s understanding of the law’s operation, and in his work he thus entreats jurists to apprehend the deeper purposes of the law: ‘Whoever fails to comprehend the objectives (maqāṣid) underlying God’s commands and prohibitions has failed to perceive the basis for the establishment of the law.’¹⁰⁰ Al-Juwaynī’s legal theory also accommodates considerations of maṣlaḥa when treating cases not addressed by scripture through analogical reasoning.¹⁰¹ His theory of the purposefulness of individual rulings rests on his typology of legal causes, which categorizes legal rulings according to the importance of the objective they serve into essentials (amr ḍarūrī), general needs (ḥāja ʿāmma), enhancements (makrūmāt, mandūbāt), and very rare rulings for which no objective or benefit can be discerned.¹⁰² This typology signals the broader purposes of the law that later came to be known as maqāṣid al-sharīʿa.

Al-Juwaynī’s leading student al-Ghazālī expanded on his teacher’s contribution and transformed the Khurasani Shāfiʿī theory of benefit. As El Shamsy has shown, al-Ghazālī disembedded maṣlaḥa from the realm of theology and rationalized an inductive, quasi-empiricist, Quran-inspired teleology in which the law’s purposefulness was justified in terms of existing legal rules established through revelation.¹⁰³ Once discerned, the intelligible structure immanent in the law could be used to extend rules analogically to new cases using the test of appropriateness (munāsaba). This test, which quickly eclipsed other formal methods of evaluating legal causes, assesses whether a presumptive cause serves the overall purposes of the law. Although this method of analogy was practiced from early on, al-Ghazālī was the first to theorize it, and his theory was subsequently widely adopted.¹⁰⁴ Al-Ghazālī is also the earliest scholar known to have articulated the five universal values (kulliyyāt) promoted by the laws of all revealed religions—namely, the preservation of life, lineage, property, religion, and reason. Aron Zysow suggests that the doctrine of the five universal values was developed before al-Ghazālī within the Khurasani branch of the Shāfiʿī school, and he proposes that it may have originated with al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī, who died a century before al-Juwaynī.¹⁰⁵ The earliest definitive textual evidence that has reached us is a mention of the first three of these values by al-Juwaynī. Al-Ghazālī added the remaining two and also followed al-Juwaynī by dividing the five interests into essentials, needs, and enhancements.¹⁰⁶ Al-Ghazālī elucidates the relationship between maṣlaḥa and maqāṣid by defining maṣlaḥa not as what procures benefit and averts harm—a definition that he rejects—but as the preservation of the law’s five objectives.¹⁰⁷ He also severely restricts the scope of interests about which the law is silent (maṣāliḥ mursala), a category upheld by Mālikī jurisprudents, by stipulating strict conditions for these unattested interests, tethering them to the five central objectives of the law and limiting them to the grade of necessities.¹⁰⁸

As El Shamsy remarks, it may appear counterintuitive that the systematic use of maṣlaḥa in the process of legal analogy coincided with the decline of Muʿtazilī objectivist ethics and the ascendancy of Ashʿarī ethical subjectivism exemplified by al-Juwaynī and al-Ghazālī.¹⁰⁹ Intellectual historians continue to investigate the genealogy and stages of evolution of the concept of maṣlaḥa among Ashʿarīs, but research to date has established the conspicuously Khurasani lineage of the most important contributors to the theorization of maṣlaḥa. I have briefly surveyed the seminal contributions of al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī, al-Juwaynī, and al-Ghazālī here, and this history continues with the contributions of subsequent generations of Khurasani Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿī jurist-theologians, notably Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d 606/1210) and Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī (d. 631/1235), who further refined this divine command ethics towards a teleological-consequentialist moral philosophy.¹¹⁰

Khurasani Shāfiʿīs’ innovative arguments for the purposiveness of the law are thrown into even sharper relief when they are compared with the thought of their leading Iraqi contemporaries, such as Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī. Although al-Shīrāzī acknowledges that maṣlaḥa is found throughout the law and is contingent on God’s decree,¹¹¹ he does not engage with the ontology and epistemology of ethical value in the manner that al-Juwaynī does. Similarly, we find little theorization about maṣlaḥa’s role in al-Shīrāzī’s discussions of analogical reasoning in his uṣūl al-fiqh works. Instead, al-Shīrāzī maintains a strict insistence on the autonomy of uṣūl al-fiqh from his nominal Ashʿarī theology, and his uṣūl al-fiqh largely follows the source-based positivism of al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla, which privileges linguistic analysis of scripture and resists methods of rational analysis.¹¹² One result of this Iraqi distinction as it pertains to maṣlaḥa is that Iraqi Shāfiʿīs limited the role of maṣlaḥa in their assessment of legal causes. For instance, al-Shīrāzī’s discussion on qiyās does not mention maṣlaḥa among the diverse methods for identifying the legal cause, in contrast to the theories of al-Juwaynī and al-Ghazālī, which grant pride of place to maṣlaḥa in the search for the legal cause.¹¹³ In short, in contending with Muʿtazilī objectivist ethics, Khurasani Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿīs espoused a theory of maṣlaḥa and its underlying meta-ethics that was absent not just from the other legal schools but even from the Iraqi branch of the Shāfiʿī school.

(ii) Legal maxims in Khurasani Shāfiʿism

Another significant and related development in Khurasani legal thought was the pioneering role played by Khurasani Shāfiʿīs in developing legal maxims or canons (qawāʿid fiqhiyya). A legal maxim (qāʿida, pl. qawāʿid) expresses in a succinct adage or aphorism a broad tendency or a fundamental pattern that characterizes either the entire body of legal rulings or a subset thereof.¹¹⁴ Jurists inferred legal maxims inductively from the aggregate body of legal rules and used them to guide their legal interpretation and practice. Some maxims circulated already in early legal texts, and by the fifth/eleventh century, there was an emerging trend among jurists to explicate the legal doctrines of their schools on the basis of maxims immanent in the schools’ legal rules.¹¹⁵ As I show elsewhere, al-Juwaynī played a central role in this development through his Nihāyat al-maṭlab, a commentary on al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar, and through his Ghiyāth al-umam, his main political treatise.¹¹⁶

The Nihāya is a novel work in which al-Juwaynī lays out an unprecedented maxim-based approach to Shāfiʿī substantive law. His contribution is to highlight and extract the underlying maxims that had remained latent or unarticulated in the Shāfiʿī school up to that point.¹¹⁷ In the opening lines of the Nihāya, al-Juwaynī asserts that he is primarily concerned with determining and refining the maxims and subsidiary principles of the school and its rational foundations (taqrīr al-qawāʿid wa-taḥrīr al-ḍawābiṭ wa-l-maʿāqid fī taʿlīl al-uṣūl).¹¹⁸ He further explains that when faced with a new issue for which there is no precedent, he infers the correct ruling through these maxims (kharrajtuhā ʿalā al-qawāʿid).¹¹⁹ The organization of the Nihāya reflects the work’s goal: he systematically extracts the unstated maxims and principles that govern Shāfiʿī rulings and compiles similar cases under the maxim that explains them.

In the process, al-Juwaynī develops a more systematic vocabulary for the school’s maxims. A comparison of his terminology with those of three contemporaneous Iraqi Shāfiʿīs—al-Maḥāmilī, al-Māwardī, and al-Shīrāzī—shows that unlike his contemporaries, al-Juwaynī uses terms such as aṣl and qāʿida in a systematic and technical way to denote particular types of legal maxims and authoritative precedents.¹²⁰ He also distinguishes maxims that are specific to a school or a legal topic (qāʿidat al-bāb, qāʿidat al-faṣl, qāʿidat al-madhhab) from maxims that are shared among schools or pertain to the law as a whole (qāʿidat al-sharīʿa).

Al-Juwaynī was aware that his approach differed from those of his colleagues. In the Ghiyāthī, he stresses the importance of maxims to the application of the law and highlights the originality of his contribution.¹²¹ He contrasts his approach explicitly with the more demonstrative, case-based approach of other jurists, subtly critiquing their neglect of the higher-order maxims on which the cases are based.¹²² He singles out his Iraqi peer al-Māwardī, denouncing his shallow legal knowledge, his reliance on the doctrines in existing works of law, his frequent transmission errors, and his willful ignorance and blindness.¹²³ As I have shown elsewhere, al-Juwaynī’s theorization of legal maxims played a significant role in the subsequent development of legal maxim treatises.

Al-Juwaynī’s Nihāya reflects an emerging interest in maxims among Khurasani Shāfiʿīs of the fifth/eleventh century. This interest was part of an investigative approach to legal analysis that endeavoured to identify and elucidate the underlying principles and patterns structuring the law. The available literary evidence indicates that the development of legal maxims began among Baghdadi Ḥanafīs such as Abū Ṭāhir al-Dabbās (d. 320/932 or 340/951) and Abū al-Ḥasan al-Karkhī (d. 340/952) before the school’s centre of gravity shifted to Transoxania, where Ḥanafī legal maxims discourse flourished in compositions such as al-Dabbūsī’s (d. 430/1039) Taʾsīs al-naẓar and Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Nasafī’s (d. 537/1142) commentary on al-Karkhī’s Risāla. It seems plausible that Khurasani Shāfiʿīs picked up their interest in maxims from the Ḥanafīs.¹²⁴

The hypothesis of likely Ḥanafī influence on Shāfiʿīs in Khurasan is supported by an anecdote about the Ḥanafī scholar Abū Ṭāhir al-Dabbās, who had reportedly distilled the jurisprudence of the Ḥanafī school into 17 core maxims. Every night following the evening prayer, after all the worshippers had departed the mosque, al-Dabbās, who was blind, would recite these maxims to himself. When the Shāfiʿī scholar Abū Saʿd al-Harawī (d. 518/1124) heard about this, he travelled to al-Dabbās. One night, he rolled himself up in a straw mat and hid in the mosque. When the people had left, al-Dabbās locked the door of the mosque and began his recitation. But he had recited only seven maxims when al-Harawī was overcome by a coughing fit, alerting al-Dabbās to his presence. Al-Dabbās beat al-Harawī and threw him out of the mosque. Al-Harawī returned to his disciples and recited to them the seven maxims he had acquired. Al-Dabbās, for his part, never again repeated his maxims in the mosque.¹²⁵ The historicity of this encounter is questionable,¹²⁶ but this anecdote nonetheless suggests a route of influence from Ḥanafīs to Eastern Shāfiʿīs. Ḥanafī influence is likewise indicated by the report that the Khurasani Shāfiʿī authority al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn, al-Qaffāl al-Marwazī’s disciple, responded to the Ḥanafīs’ use and development of legal maxims by setting forth four maxims that, he maintained, constituted the basis of the Shāfiʿī school’s legal corpus and were widely known among the Shāfiʿīs in Herat.¹²⁷ These four maxims, which constituted basic tools of legal problem solving, were ‘Certainty is not overruled by doubt’, ‘Hardship begets facility’, ‘Harm is removed’, and ‘Custom is a referee’. They were augmented by a fifth maxim, ‘Actions are judged by their ends’, and these five universal maxims (al-qawāʿid al-khamṣ) were eventually adopted as the foundation for all other maxims by Mamluk-era Shāfiʿī maxim compilers.¹²⁸

For Khurasani Shāfiʿīs such as al-Juwaynī, a concern with legal maxims would have been ‘in the air’ among their fellow Central Asian jurists and theologians, inspired at least in part by the competitive juristic environment that had prompted Shāfiʿīs such as al-Qāḍī Ḥusayn to attempt to articulate the underlying logic of Shāfiʿī law in the form of maxims in order to defend their legal doctrine as internally coherent in a mode familiar to their Ḥanafī adversaries. The interest in maxims may also have been promoted by the deductive methodology of Muʿtazilī theologians who distilled their core theological doctrines into five principles (uṣūl), though this hypothesis requires more research. What we do know is that maxim thinking among Khurasani Shāfiʿīs corresponded with the inductive and rationalizing approach that they used to establish the existence of maṣlaḥa as the overarching aim of the law. After all, legal maxims, like maṣlaḥa, reflect patterns and principles immanent in legal rulings that express the underlying rational and moral values of the law and could be identified through a close and careful reading of legal doctrine.

(iii) Integrating law with Sufism

The third component of the Khurasani synthesis, alongside Ashʿarī theology and Shāfiʿī law, was Sufism. Several studies have traced the migration of leading Ashʿarī theologians from Baghdad to Nishapur at the urging of prominent Nishapuri Sufis. They have also established the seminal role that Khurasani Shāfiʿīs played in the integration of Sufism into the social fabric and intellectual discourse of Muslim societies as a discipline connected to and bolstered by both theology and law.¹²⁹ The integration of Ashʿarī theological doctrines into Sufi cosmology, metaphysics, and ethical schemes is a hallmark of the writings of prominent Nishapuri Ashʿarī theologians such as al-Qushayrī and al-Ghazālī. Conversely, these scholars also embedded and intertwined themes from Sufi mysticism and ethics into their legal discourses to produce a synthesis that emphasized the inward and outward meanings of acts carried out in obedience to the law.

The paradigmatic work in this regard is al-Ghazālī’s Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn), in which he uses theological doctrines to argue that outward adherence to the law cultivates inward states of deep gnosis and spiritual development.¹³⁰ In fact, a reader unversed in Ashʿarī doctrines will be unable to understand much of the Iḥyāʾ, which builds on and assumes prior knowledge of such doctrines as the nature of God’s attributes,¹³¹ the Ashʿarī position on the divine attribute of speech,¹³² and the metaphysics of Ashʿarī causality.¹³³ Similarly, al-Ghazālī incorporates significant reflections on Sufi ethics and mystical secrets as discursive themes in his theological works. For instance, in the course of proving the proposition that God is not located in any direction in his Iqtiṣād fī al-iʿtiqād, al-Ghazālī expounds at length on the spiritual meanings associated with turning towards the heavens and raising the hands during supplication within a broader argument that God is not specified by the direction ‘above’ and that the seat of glorifying God is the heart.¹³⁴ A similar integration of Sufi and Ashʿarī epistemologies and doctrines is also evident in the thought of al-Ghazālī’s predecessor al-Qushayrī. Martin Nguyen places al-Qushayrī within a long tradition of Sufi Ashʿarism started by Abū Sahl al-Suʿlūkī, who settled in Nishapur in 337/948f.¹³⁵

This synthesis of Sufism and Ashʿarism was in no way inevitable. Not only did Iraqi Sufis not contribute to this project, but even some Khurasani contemporaries of al-Qushayrī and al-Ghazālī, such as Khwāja Abū Ismāʿīl ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī (d. 481/1089) of Herat, developed a Sufi science deliberately devoid of any Ashʿarī influences. Al-Anṣārī was expelled from Nishapur and imprisoned on account of his rejection of Ashʿarism, which he elaborated in his Kitāb Dhamm al-kalām wa-ahlih (Condemnation of kalām and Its practitioners), a substantial polemic denouncing rationalist theology and the doctrines of al-Ashʿarī.¹³⁶ Al-Anṣārī went on to author an influential work describing the waystations on the spiritual path that resembles the Sufi works authored in Iraq in the previous century by displaying no trace of rationalist theology.¹³⁷

(iv) Dissemination through the Niẓāmiyya

How did Khurasani Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿīs disseminate their unique Sunni synthesis, particularly in light of their persecution in the Seljuk period? Despite the early difficulties they faced, the fortunes of Nishapur’s Ashʿarīs quickly improved with the ascendancy of Niẓām al-Mulk (Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Isḥāq al-Ṭūsī, d. 485/1092), who served as vizier under the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslān (r. 455–65/1063–72) and his son Mālik-Shāh (r. 465–85/1072–92). During his long tenure, Niẓām al-Mulk assumed control of virtually all administrative affairs in Khurasan. His enduring legacy was the establishment of a chain of educational institutions that came to be known as Niẓāmiyya madrasas, first in Baghdad and Nishapur and then in other major cities including Herat, Damascus, Balkh, Merv, and Basra. Niẓām al-Mulk used the madrasas as a vehicle to promote Ashʿarī theology and Shāfiʿī law, which constituted the vision of orthodox Islam to which he personally adhered. Rather than simply designating each madrasa for a particular scholar, as was customary, Niẓām al-Mulk appointed prominent Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿīs to head his madrasas while presiding over the Niẓāmiyya system himself.¹³⁸

As the head of the first Niẓāmiyya school, established in Nishapur, he selected Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, who returned from exile to assume the chair at Niẓām al-Mulk’s bidding. While serving as chair of the Nishapur Niẓāmiyya, al-Juwaynī wrote his most important works, which demonstrate the successful assimilation of Ashʿarī doctrines and methods and the expansion of its exploratory and principle-based approach into jurisprudence and legal doctrine. It was also at the Niẓāmiyya that al-Juwaynī trained his most influential students, including al-Ghazālī and al-Anṣārī, who advanced and built on his legacy. Through the synthetic writings produced by prominent Khurasani Shāfiʿīs such as al-Juwaynī, al-Qushayrī, and al-Ghazālī, the approach of the Khurasani ṭarīqa, and particularly the distinct Nishapuri synthesis, reached Damascus in the following century and shaped the thought of sixth/twelfth-century Damascene Shāfiʿī luminaries such as Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad b. ʿAsākir (d. 620/1223) and ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām (d. 660/1262).¹³⁹

B. Al-Shīrāzī and the Hadith-Leaning Shāfiʿism of Iraq

As already noted, although Ashʿarism originated in Baghdad, its centre of gravity moved to Khurasan after the generation of al-Ashʿarī’s students and their students. Some Iraqi Shāfiʿīs, such as Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī, rejected Ashʿarī theology outright, while others nominally professed Ashʿarism but neither developed Ashʿarī theology further nor integrated its doctrines and methods into their jurisprudence, ethics, or legal reasoning. On the whole, in place of the rationalizing, discursive, and analytical legal paradigm advanced by their Khurasani peers, Iraqi Shāfiʿīs privileged an emulative, transmission-based legal methodology that focused on the preservation and transmission of the established legal doctrines of the school and on imitation of its early authorities. Unlike the Khurasanis, who adopted a synthetic and systematizing approach to the range of disciplines, the Iraqis kept fields of knowledge and methods of inquiry separate, resisting the impingement of rationalist theology and Sufism on jurisprudence and law.

Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī is the prime representative of the Iraqi community’s paradigm. As we have already seen, a comparison of his jurisprudential and doctrinal works with those of al-Juwaynī illustrates the divergences between the Iraqi and Khurasani approaches. Whereas al-Juwaynī incorporates doctrines and themes from Ashʿarī theology into his theoretical jurisprudence, al-Shīrāzī maintains a strict insistence on the autonomy of theoretical jurisprudence from theology.¹⁴⁰ For instance, while al-Juwaynī and his successors deliberate extensively about the purposefulness of the law in conversation with the Muʿtazila, al-Shīrāzī acknowledges that maṣlaḥa is found throughout the law but does not attempt to elucidate its underlying ontology and epistemology or use maṣlaḥa to identify the legal cause in his theory of qiyās.¹⁴¹ Similarly, al-Juwaynī explains Shāfiʿī legal doctrines with reference to broadly applicable maxims and principles, but al-Shīrāzī shows little interest in identifying patterns in the law or articulating them in the form of maxims.

As George Makdisi has observed, al-Shīrāzī’s legal theory largely follows the model of al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla by adhering to a source-based positivism and rejecting rationalist methods and doctrines.¹⁴² This textualism, consistent across al-Shīrāzī’s writings, privileges emulation of past authorities, including their methods of reasoning and their styles of authorship. Even more explicit evidence of his opposition to the Ashʿarī rationalization of uṣūl al-fiqh is found in the specific arguments that al-Shīrāzī makes in his works of theoretical jurisprudence, al-Lumaʿ and al-Tabṣira. In these works, al-Shīrāzī frequently espouses jurisprudential positions that are explicitly opposed to those of the Ashʿarīs. Éric Chaumont notes that whenever al-Shīrāzī mentions the Ashʿarīs in the Tabṣira, he does so to disagree with them, and he frequently distinguishes between Ashʿarī jurisprudential views and those of himself and his companions (aṣḥābūna), by which he seems to mean Iraqi Shāfiʿīs specifically.¹⁴³ Examining al-Shīrāzī’s handling of the disputed jurisprudential question whether the meanings of Arabic words change when used in connection with religious issues (naql al-asmāʾ fī al-sharʿ), Chaumont concludes that al-Shīrāzī deemed revelation immediately comprehensible to its audience of Arabic speakers, who had perfect knowledge of its language and nuances, its interpretation, and the derivation of its legal rulings.¹⁴⁴ This meant that theological doctrines and rational methods were irrelevant and their intrusion into jurisprudence was unwarranted. This picture is supported by al-Shīrāzī’s own explicit witness: in response to a Ḥanbalī scholar who accused al-Shīrāzī of being an Ashʿarī, he reportedly declared, ‘These are my books on uṣūl al-fiqh in which I profess doctrines opposed to those of the uṣūl of al-Ashʿarī.’¹⁴⁵

Al-Shīrāzī’s resistance to the increasingly influential paradigm of Ashʿarī uṣūl al-fiqh has sparked a debate about his theological commitments.¹⁴⁶ Ibn ʿAsākir raises the issue in his biography of al-Shīrāzī, in which he—rather predictably, given his own staunch Ashʿarism—argues that despite al-Shīrāzī’s jurisprudential positions, he was a committed Ashʿarī in theology.¹⁴⁷ Contemporary scholars have also discussed al-Shīrāzī’s possible Ashʿarism at length.¹⁴⁸ The discovery and publication of a short theological tract, al-Ishāra, authored by al-Shīrāzī has added weight to the thesis of his Ashʿarism and shown that the assertion that he was anti-Ashʿarī is too broad.¹⁴⁹  Al-Ishāra is clearly an Ashʿarī work, but it is brief and merely enumerates well-known Sunni doctrines in the style of ahl al-ḥadīth theological creeds. These short treatises are not discursive theological works properly speaking and display none of the depth and rational sophistication we find in the developed, multivolume kalām works of al-Juwaynī and al-Ghazālī.

The argument in favour of al-Shīrāzī’s Ashʿarism is further bolstered by the public stances that he took in support of Ashʿarī theologians. Baghdad was the stage of many public controversies about Sunni orthodoxy in his time, and arguably the most important was the issuance of a public creed by the caliphs Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Isḥāq al-Qādir (r. 381–422/991–1031) and his son Abū Jaʿfar ʿAbd-Allāh b. al-Qādir al-Qāʾim (r. 422–67/1031–75). Ashʿarīs were a minority in Baghdad, outnumbered by the more influential Ḥanbalī theologians, who derived support from al-Qādir’s Sunni revival.¹⁵⁰ It is in this context that al-Shīrāzī complained that an opponent could disparage his theological commitments in front of laypeople merely by calling him an Ashʿarī.¹⁵¹ It did not help that Khurasani Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿīs visited Baghdad and inflamed the simmering tensions between the Ḥanbalīs and the Shāfiʿīs. One such episode in 469/1076 was ignited when Abū Naṣr al-Qushayrī (d. 514/1120), the son of Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī and a student of al-Juwaynī, came to Baghdad and publicly denounced Ḥanbalī theological doctrines at the Niẓāmiyya mosque. When violent clashes broke out between the two factions, the caliph was forced to intervene and called a conciliatory council attended by representatives of both sides.¹⁵² Makdisi also mentions two ‘abortive attempts for Ashʿarī infiltration of the Niẓāmiyya’ made by Khurasanis in 475/1083 and 495/1102, which ended with the immigrant giving up and returning home.¹⁵³

As head of the Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad, al-Shīrāzī presided over an Ashʿarī safe haven within a predominantly Ḥanbalī intellectual and social sphere. Al-Shīrāzī sided with the Ashʿarīs. He corresponded with Niẓām al-Mulk and later with the vizier Fakhr al-Dawla Abū Naṣr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad (d. 483/890) and his son ʿAmīd al-Dawla about the conflicts with the Ḥanbalīs and recommended steps towards their resolution.¹⁵⁴ Nonetheless, these broader social tensions and the ongoing conflicts with the Ḥanbalīs prompted al-Shīrāzī to downplay Ashʿarī doctrines. Although the textual and historical records indicate that al-Shīrāzī personally adhered to Ashʿarī doctrines and defended them in public debates, he was by no means a theologian, and he drew a clear line between Ashʿarī theological doctrines and the realm of jurisprudence, which he believed ought to remain impervious to theological and rational speculation.

The Iraqis’ orientation did not go unnoticed by the Khurasanis. By al-Juwaynī and al-Shīrāzī’s generation, Iraqi and Khurasani jurists were meeting each other, engaging in disputation, and sometimes reading and criticizing each other’s writings and arguments. The Khurasanis scoffed at the Iraqis’ ignorance of jurisprudence and the rational sciences and at their formulaic legal writings, in which they merely regurgitated existing doctrines; al-Juwaynī’s criticism of al-Māwardī’s shallow legal understanding and unimaginative transmission of legal doctrines is a prime example.¹⁵⁵ Conversely, the scholarship of Nishapuri Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿīs was weaker in the discipline for which the Iraqi community was commended: expertise in hadith. Khurasan had been an important early hub of hadith scholarship; the authors of all six canonical Sunni hadith collections hailed from Greater Khurasan and Transoxania, as did many of the foremost hadith experts of this period, including Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī, his son Ibn Abī Ḥātim, and al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī. However, with the introduction of Ashʿarism and its rationalizing methodology to Khurasan, the hadith sciences were demoted in importance. Although jurists in Khurasan still learnt hadith, prominent Nishapuri Shāfiʿī jurists and theologians were consistently critiqued for being insufficiently versed in hadith, for neglecting to teach it, and for failing to adhere to its rigorous standards in their legal discourse. This would be an ongoing criticism of the thought of Nishapuri Shāfiʿīs, as exemplified by the numerous critiques of al-Juwaynī’s and al-Ghazālī’s deficiencies in the domain of hadith.¹⁵⁶

4. CONCLUSION: ON CANONIZATION AND THE END OF THE TWO ṬARĪQAS

In this article, I have examined the history of the two Shāfiʿī ṭarīqas in Khurasan and Iraq in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. Through a reconstruction of the intellectual networks that constituted the two communities and an analysis of the thought of prominent figures in each community, I have shown that by the mid-fourth/tenth century, what had been fluid Shāfiʿī networks had evolved into two discrete interpretive communities. The fault lines between the two communities included claims of membership in distinct lineages of authority and the championing of different doctrinal rules, methodological commitments, and views concerning the relationship between rationalist theology and legal theory. These insights not only complicate our understanding of what constitutes the post-formative madhhab as an institution but also demonstrate how broader intellectual and institutional developments, such as the ascendancy of Ashʿarism, the emergence of new centres of scholarship, and the introduction of the madrasa, shaped the internal workings of the madhhab.

Although I have recounted the history of the Shāfiʿī school in this period as a narrative of social and intellectual developments within two communities of interpretation, it could also be told through the lens of canonization.¹⁵⁷ From this perspective, the story begins with the foundational canonization undertaken by al-Shāfiʿī, aptly depicted by El Shamsy as the establishment of a paradigmatic methodology that prioritized a canonized set of revelational sources, particularly hadith, in formulating legal conclusions while demoting competing sources of authority.¹⁵⁸ Al-Shāfiʿī’s students and successors then enshrined his works as a ‘secondary canon’ through their critical engagement with his thought.¹⁵⁹ Within the emerging communal institution of the madhhab, scholars shared a commitment to al-Shāfiʿī’s legacy but nonetheless upheld a variety of particular interpretive approaches, which can be situated along a textualist–rationalist continuum. El Shamsy points out that already in the generation of al-Shāfiʿī’s direct students, the more traditionalist orientation of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Buwayṭī (d. 231/846) distinguished itself from the more rationalist proclivities of al-Muzanī.¹⁶⁰ These divergent orientations within the Shāfiʿī community found expression in the gradually differentiated ‘canons’ of the two ṭarīqas. The Khurasani and Iraqi communities thus represented two competing methodological and epistemological legacies of the Shāfiʿī school and of Islamic intellectual history more broadly: the emulative and transmission-based approach of ahl al-ḥadīth and the rational investigation (naẓar) of speculative theologians. As we have seen, each community coalesced around a slightly different canon, invoked a different set of authorities, transmitted distinct legal doctrines, developed its own solutions to new problems, and engaged in scholarly disputes with its particular local interlocutors.

This period, in which two distinct interpretive communities championed two competing canons, was downplayed in the school’s historical memory because the subsequent trajectory of the school was one of unification: the gradual synthesis of the two ṭarīqas thanks, in large part, to the work of al-Nawawī in Mamluk Damascus, effectively restored the school as a single canonical community. The vitality of Khurasani Shāfiʿism had started to wane towards the end of the fifth/eleventh century, and Iraqi Shāfiʿism followed it in decline, though to a lesser extent. The reasons for this development lay in a combination of geopolitical transformations that gradually drew the focus of intellectual life away from the Eastern centres of the empire towards the new Ayyubid capital of Damascus. Even before the destruction wrought by the Mongols, Khurasan had suffered from instability caused by interschool clashes and Ghuzz raids, both of which often turned bloody and drove many scholars to migrate westwards.¹⁶¹ Iraq’s decline was less drastic, but it, too, was increasingly overshadowed by the rising star of Damascus.¹⁶²

Although Damascus had retained a cultural allegiance to Shāfiʿism since the late third/ninth century, for several centuries it had been home to only a small and marginal community of Shāfiʿī jurists. The inauguration of a sustained tradition of Shāfiʿī scholarship in Damascus was facilitated by the migration of jurists into the city starting in the Seljuk period. The newcomers brought with them the scholarly genealogies of the two ṭarīqas. Iraqi Shāfiʿism arrived first, facilitated by the relative proximity of and historic ties between the regions, and it became the dominant Shāfiʿī tradition in Damascus. In the process, it fused with the city’s centuries-old indigenous scholarly heritage, which shared important features with the Iraqi orientation: it was nominally Shāfiʿī, focused on hadith transmission, and privileged traditionalism in theology. This dominant intellectual current was further shaped by engagement with the anti-Ashʿarī and Ḥanbalī currents in Damascus. The later immigration of Khurasani Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿīs gave rise to a second scholarly tradition in Damascus that championed rationalism, analysis, and synthesis.

The emergent Shāfiʿī community in Damascus did not develop its own indigenous ṭarīqa to rival those of Khurasan and Iraq. Instead, the two currents gradually converged, experiencing some tensions during the Ayyubid period before eventually being fused into a single authoritative Shāfiʿī doctrine in the Mamluk period. This fusion was the accomplishment of al-Nawawī, who is lauded for having undertaken a ‘second refinement’ of the school.¹⁶³

Footnotes