Shafii School

One of the four surviving Sunni schools of jurisprudence.

Shafii theory does not admit an unstated benefit as an independent source, holding that a benefit the texts do not indicate cannot ground a ruling.

Al-Shafii rejected juristic preference by name, and the argument attributed to him is that a jurist who prefers on his own judgement has made himself a lawgiver rather than an interpreter.

The face veil follows in Shafii law from the ruling on covering rather than from regional custom.

The Shafii school counts the invocation a verse of the opening chapter and recites it aloud in the audible prayers, where the Hanafi and Hanbali schools say it silently and the Maliki school omits it.

The Shafii school recites the qunut supplication in the dawn prayer every day, where the other schools keep it for the Witr or for times of calamity.

Shafii law counts the face and the hands among what a woman covers before those outside the prohibited degrees, where the Hanafi and Maliki schools except them.

Circumcision is an obligation in Shafii law rather than a recommended custom.

In Shafii law khums is the fifth of the spoils of war set aside in the Quran, not a standing annual levy on surplus wealth.

Independent reasoning in the Shafii school is exercised within the method al-Shafii set out in the Risala, and the classical schools argued at length over whether reasoning outside a school remained open at all.

Shafii law requires dust proper for the dry ablution, where the Hanafi and Maliki schools accept any clean substance of the earth.

Innovation divides into good and bad, on the fivefold scheme al-Izz ibn Abd al-Salam set out.

The attribution of the collection to Ali is disputed in Sunni scholarship, which reads it as a later compilation whose material cannot all be traced to him.

Sunni jurists across the schools questioned both the authority claimed for the 1989 ruling and its reach beyond the jurisdiction that issued it.

Hadith are affirmed as a source of law and doctrine in the Shafii school, drawn from the Sunni six-book canon shared across Sunni Islam.

Al-Shafii accepted consensus but narrowed it, holding that only agreement on what the whole community knows and transmits can be established with certainty.

Ijtihad and taqlid are both foundational method in the Shafii school.

Al-Shafii made analogy the fourth and last source and closed the list at four, the Quran, the Sunnah, consensus and analogy, which is the settlement the later Sunni schools argued inside.

Sharia, elaborated through Shafii jurisprudence, the school founded by Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii, who systematized the classical theory of Islamic legal sources, is affirmed as binding.

The Quran, held to be the literal and uncreated word of God revealed to Muhammad, is canonical scripture across every branch of Islam, including this tradition.

The Risala of al-Shafii is conventionally taken as the first systematic statement of legal theory, and the school is named for the jurist who made the theory precede the rulings rather than follow them.

The forbidden category is affirmed in Shafii law as the strongest of the five rulings.

Jihad is a chapter of Shafii law, and the school's treatment of the division of the world into the abode of Islam and the abode of war is the one later theory most often works from.

The poll tax and the protected status it buys are treated in Shafii law, which reads the categories of those eligible for it narrowly, restricting it to the peoples of the book.

The division into grave and lesser sins is affirmed in Shafii doctrine.

Kaffara is affirmed in Shafii law as a defined expiation.

The Shafii school, whose founder set out the classical theory of the sources and their order.

The five rulings are the classification of acts in Shafii jurisprudence.

Accepts istishab, the presumption that an established ruling continues until displaced, and rejects istihsan as legislating by preference.

The Shafii school treats walima as a strongly emphasised sunna.