SHAFI'I, ABU 'ABD ALLAH (MUHAMMAD IBN IDRIS) ASH-

born , 767, Arabia died Jan. 20, 820, al-Fustat, Egypt Muslim legal scholar who played an important role in the formation of Islamic legal thought and was the founder of the Shafi'iyah school of law. He also made a basic contribution to religious and legal methodology with respect to the use of traditions. Little is known for certain of his life. He belonged to the tribe of the Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, to whom his mother was distantly related. His father died when he was very young, and he was brought up, in poor circumstances, by his mother in Mecca. He came to spend much time among the Bedouins and from them acquired a thorough familiarity with Arabic poetry. When he was about 20 he travelled to Medina to study with the great legal scholar Malik ibn Anas. On Malik's death in 795, ash-Shafi'i went to Yemen, where he became involved in seditious activities for which he was imprisoned by the caliph Harun ar-Rashid at ar-Raqqah (in Syria) in 803. He was soon freed, however, and after a period of study in Baghdad with an important jurist of the Hanafi school, ash-Shaybani, he went to al-Fustat (now Cairo), where he remained until 810. Returning to Baghdad, he settled there as a teacher for several years. After some further travels, he returned to Egypt in 815/816 and remained there for the rest of his life. His tomb in al-Fustat was long a place of pilgrimage. During the course of his travels, ash-Shafi'i studied at most of the great centres of jurisprudence and acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the different schools of legal theory. His great contribution was the creation of a new synthesis of Islamic legal thought. Most of the ideas with which he worked were already familiar, but he had the insight to structure them in a new way. Primarily he dealt with the question of what the sources of Islamic law were and how these sources could be applied by the law to contemporary events. His book, the Risalah, written during the last five years of his life, entitles him to be called the father of Muslim jurisprudence.