Al-Risala (al-Shafi'i book)


The Risāla by al-Shafi'i, full title , is a seminal text on the principles of Islamic jurisprudence.
The word risāla in Arabic means a "message" or "letter". Shafi'i's treatise received its name owing to a traditional, though unverified, story that Shafi'i composed the work in response to a request from a leading traditionist in Basra, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān bin Mahdī; the story goes that Ibn Mahdī wanted Shafi'i to explain the legal significance of the Quran and the sunna, and the Risāla was Shafi'i's response.
In this work, al-Shafi'i is said to have outlined four sources of Islamic law, though this division based on four has been attributed to later commentators on the work rather than to Shafi'i himself.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. On al-Bayān
  3. On Legal Knowledge
  4. On the Book of God
  5. On the Obligation of Man to Accept the Authority of the Prophet
  6. On the Abrogation of Divine Legislation
  7. On Duties
  8. On the Nature of God's Orders of Prohibition and the Prophet's Orders of Prohibition
  9. On Traditions
  10. On Single-Individual Traditions
  11. On Consensus
  12. On Analogy
  13. On Personal Reasoning
  14. On Juristic Preference
  15. On Disagreement
The above list of contents follows Khadduri's translation. However, Khadduri rearranged the treatise in two places. Khadduri's chapters 8 and 3 both follow Shafi'i's chapter on Traditions in the original. Khadduri rearranged those chapters because they did "not appear to fit into the logical order of the book." Therefore, if one wishes to read Khadduri's translation while following Shafi'i's original arrangement, one can read the chapters in the following order: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 8, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

Translations

An English translation of the Risāla by Joseph E. Lowry was published in 2013 by the Library of Arabic Literature, printed alongside an Arabic edition of the text in a facing-page translation, under the title ''The Epistle on Legal Theory.''