In the making of Islam and its laws, a learned community of jurists, authors, teachers and ordinary people intertwined their contributions across geographical and chronological borders. By contesting or undercutting political entities, they asserted the centrality of divine law in the socio-religious lives of humans and advanced the ways in which the law was perceived, practised and discussed. From the formative stages on, texts stood at the forefront of the progress of discussions. For the Shāfiʿī school, diverse transregional stimuluses helped it to survive and spread and occasionally to decay and contract between the ninth and the twentieth centuries. This chapter analyses the pivotal historical elements that enabled the expansion of the Shāfiʿī school, and Islamic law at large, in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean littorals with a focus on individual, collective and institutional circulations from circles of learning. The emphasis here is on the people who participated in and contributed to the circulatory regime from its formative lands to its eventual movements in the oceanic rims, while the next chapter focuses on the texts as such.

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.

This and the next chapter explore the gradations of this process in which Shāfiʿī texts contributed to and benefited from the eventual globalisation, modernisation, technological headways, legal and intellectual networks, and mobility of people, ideas and texts. This chapter in particular focuses on two supercommentaries on the Qurra via its autocommentary Fatḥ to analyse internal responses within the school to textual longue durée, coinciding with and influenced by several major historical developments across the world. It argues that the nineteenth century was a period of multiple syntheses for Shāfiʿīsm in terms of its geographical, intellectual and cultural realms, due to new challenges and prospects it came across in the wider society and specifically among Muslims. The existing internal and inherent divisions in the school were reconciled through constant efforts of its jurists, and this synthesis addressed a larger division in the Islamic world. Faced with new trials from political and legal entities and a few minor but radical sections of the community the traditional body of believers united against what they called bidʿa or false invention. These supercommentaries represent different geo-cultural and political backgrounds, as much as they reflect common trends of their time in adapting the attitudes of many divisions in the school.

The authoritative texts of the Shāfiʿī school such as the Minhāj began to be circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim, where its largest followers had started to take up residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj. This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century with a focus on one commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in Mecca. The trajectories of this commentary reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased mobility toward Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The Tuḥfa addressed its immediate regional contexts, while reasserting the geo-cultural superiority of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs. Its approach was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries. Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqas, now commentators on his Minhāj were divided into two sub-schools.

In the legal textual tradition of the Minhāj and the Tuḥfa, a particular subsequent text and its author mark a point from which to analyse Shāfiʿī experiments in the Indian Ocean rim. This chapter considers Fatḥ al-muʿīn, written by Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn bin Muḥammad Ghazālī al-Malaybārī (d. ca. 1583), an autocommentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn. Both the base text and the autocommentary form an independent family in the Shāfiʿī textual history with their own textual descendants, while they can also be considered as indirect progenies of the Tuḥfa, for they stimulated the Shāfiʿī legacy of Ibn Ḥajar and his oeuvre on the Malabar Coast and the wider territories around the Indian Ocean. They demonstrate how Indian Ocean Muslims made their way into the textual landscape of Shāfiʿīsm, and even into the heartlands of Islam. They added to the long pattern of Islamic thought in a traditional way and also advanced it. The chapter investigates how it criticised many methods and arguments of its intellectual predecessors and generated a different discourse within the school from its peculiar perspective from Malabar and the Indian Ocean at large.

This chapter demonstrates the major trends in the Shāfiʿī discourses in which the texts took a central stage as producers and products, as causes and results of division and cohesion, leading to the school’s expansion. This also shows us how and why certain texts with genealogies from vast textual families became significant in the longue durée of the school. We learn how people and texts come into contact when there are internal and external impulses to address the school’s past, present and its future in the postclassical period. This line of enquiry requires a slightly closer analysis of some texts and actors in the Shāfiʿī school. For this, we focus on the Minhāj family indicated in the previous chapter, and its trajectories and genealogies before and after its composition, taking the Minhāj itself together with its direct or indirect descendants Tuḥfa, Fatḥ, Nihāya and Iʿāna.

“A text that revolutionised the Shāfiʿī school of law” is the best way to characterise the law book Minhāj, the central subject of this chapter. Soon after it was written in Damascus in the thirteenth century, it acquired an immense popularity among Shāfiʿī jurists, to the extent that no other text of the school ever achieved. In the following centuries, it not only influenced but also framed the very ways in which they discoursed about their school. It inspired generations of jurists in their legal-textual praxis, leading to the production of a copious amount of commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic renderings, etc., and that continues to today. Its story presents an interesting phenomenon in the histories of Islamic law, law and Islam at large. This chapter explores its inception and trajectories. It asks why so many jurists engaged with the text and what made it so idiosyncratic that it influenced the textual discourses of such a large community across centuries. Embedded in the larger commentarial mode of juridical advancements of the time, it argues that Nawawī codified the school’s diverse opinions while synthesising the existing divisions. His own detailed engagements with the broader textual corpus of the school in his other works provided material for him to bring out a concise, comprehensive and coherent work that would address larger pedagogical and juridical requirements.