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 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.