The Shāfiʻīs

your ambition in seeking jurisprudence has been dispute and wrangling and the vindication of your school at all costs, and the acquiring of teaching posts and of eminence — then what is this for a jurisprudence of the hereafter? It is rather a jurisprudence of this world. I do not think you will say tomorrow, before God Most High, “I learned the science for Thy face and taught it in Thee.” Beware of blundering and saying it, and being told: “You lie. You learned only that it might be said, He is a scholar — and it has been said”; and then the order is given for you, and you are dragged to the Fire, as Muslim transmitted in the Ṣaḥīḥ. So do not believe that your school is the best of the schools and the dearest to God Most High, for you have no proof of that, nor has your opponent either. Rather the imams, may God be pleased with them, are all of them upon much good: in what they got right they have two rewards upon every question, and in what they got wrong, one reward upon every question.

( The Shāfiʻīs )

The Shāfiʻī jurists are among the shrewdest of men and the most knowing in religion, for the foundation of their school is built upon following the established, connected hadiths, and their imam is one of the chiefs of the people of hadith, (1) and his merits are many. If, you there, you acquire his school in order to make a religion of it before God and to drive ignorance away from yourself, then you are well; but if your ambition is like the ambition of your brethren among the idle jurists, whose aim is offices and colleges and this world and comfort and splendid clothes — then what is this for a blessing of learning? Nor is this a pure intention; rather it is a selling of learning under a fine form of words, a hastening after the wage and a taking on of the burden of sin, and a heedlessness of God Most High. Had you a craft, you would be well: eating from the earning of your right hand and the sweat of your brow, holding your own soul cheap, not swelling with pride over learning; or had you a trade, you would resemble the scholars of old, who never set eyes on colleges and never heard of endowed posts, who fled when they were sought for the judgeship, who made worship of their learning and gave it freely to men, and were content with a coarse garment and a crust — as the imam Abū Isḥāq, the author of al-Tanbīh, was not long ago, and as the shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn, the author of the book al-Minhāj, was but yesterday, and as you see my master ʻAbd Allāh ibn Khalīl today. And in any case, beware of wrangling in discussion even when you are in the right, and do not contend over a question you do not yourself hold, and beware of pride and of self-satisfaction in your learning. How happy for you if you come off from it even-handed, with nothing against you and nothing for you! For by God, my eye has never caught sight of a man of wider learning or of stronger intelligence than one called Ibn Taymīyah — with his abstinence in food and dress and women, and his standing up for the truth and his waging of jihād by every means possible. I have wearied myself in the weighing of him and the searching of him out until I grew sick of it over long-drawn years, and I have found nothing that set him back among the people of Egypt and Syria, and made their souls loathe him and hold him cheap and call him a liar and charge him with unbelief, except pride and self-satisfaction and an excess of passion for the headship of the shaykhly office, and the holding cheap

— Notes —

[16] (1) And this refutes what Ibn al-Farrāʼ transmits, by way of Ibn Abī Ḥātim from Aḥmad: “al-Shāfiʻī was a jurist and had no acquaintance with hadith.” End. And it refutes what the judge

[17] ʻIyāḍ says in al-Madārik: “We grant him the imamate in jurisprudence and in sound consideration, but he has no imamate in hadith and no acquaintance with it.” End. And the author is Shāfiʻī in the branches and Ḥanbalī in creed (according to their own usage)