Editing Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i (section)

==Legacy==
Writers of the later Shafi’i school distinguish between Shafi’i’s early teaching (''al-qadim''), in Iraq, and his later (''aljadid''), in Egypt. Nine or ten short works on jurisprudence are extant, as many as half of which may be early; otherwise, the early teaching is lost except for scattered quotations. The later works that survive are the ''Risala'' (Epistle), an exposition of how to infer ordinances from the evidence of revelation; the ''Umm'' (Guidance), a large, systematic collection of ordinances; and the rest of the short works. Two large works sometimes published in his name, a substantial collection of [[hadith]] and a collection of ordinances from the Quran, are later extracts from known works. Other works (statements of his creed, comments on asceticism) are likely pseudonymous.

At the level of theory (''usul al-fiqh''), medieval Muslim commentators credit Shafi’i with reconciling the two great early approaches to discerning the law, mainly hadith and ''ra’y,'' traditionalism and rationalism. The traditionalists proposed to base Islamic law entirely on what had been transmitted from the earliest generations, especially hadith reports of what the Prophet had said and done. The rationalists allowed more play to reason and sometimes, when it came to revelation, argued for reliance on the Quran to the exclusion of hadith. With the traditionalists, on the one hand, Shafi’i’s ''Risala'' argues for reliance on revelation before reason and for hadith as a necessary complement to the Quran. On the other hand, with the rationalists, it proposes a sophisticated system of manipulating the revealed texts to justify the law.