Muhammad ash-Shawkani

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<region> scholar Medieval era
Name:	name
Birth:	1760 CE ^[1]
Death:	1834 CE ^[1], 1255 AH ^[2]
School/tradition:
Influences:
Influenced:

Muhammad ash-Shawkani (1760-1834 CE ^[1]) was a Yemeni scholar of Islam, jurisprudent, and reformer.

1 Name
2 Biography
3 Works
4 Legacy
- 4.1 Views
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Name

His full name was Maulana/Qadi/Imam Muhammad Ibn Ali al-Shawkani ^[3].

[edit] Biography

He was from the Shia Zaydi school of law originally, and called for a return to the textual sources of the Quran and hadith. He viewed himself as a mujtahid, or authority to whom others in the Muslim community had to defer in details religious law. Of his work issuing fatwas, ash-Shawkani stated "I acquired knowledge without a price and I wanted to give it thus."^[4] Part of the fatwa-issuing work of many noted scholars typically is devoted to the giving of ordinary opinions to private questioners. Ash-Shawkani refers both to his major fatwas, which were collected and preserved as a book, and to his "shorter" fatwas, which he said "could never be counted" and which were not recorded.^[5]

He is credited with developing a series of syllabi for attaining various ranks of scholarship and used a strict system of legal analysis based on Sunni thought. He insisted that a jurists who wanted to be a mujtahid fī'l-madhhab (a scholar who is qualified to exercise ijtihad within a school of Islamic law), was required to do ijtihad, which stemmed from his opposition to taqlid for a mujtahid, which he deemed to be a vice with which the Shariah had been inflicted.^[6] Despite his Shiite background, he is regarded as a great revivalist by Sunni Islamic movements and has influenced contemporary Islamist movements in other parts of the Muslim world such as the Ahl-e-Hadith in India. His legal decisions and discussions are frequently used in contemporary debate among Muslim scholars.