بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيم
The Shafiʽi (Arabic: شَافِعِي) madhab is one of the four primary traditional schools of Islamic law in the branch of Sunni Islam. It was founded by the Arab scholar Muhammad ibn Idris Al-Shafiʽi, a pupil of Malik, in the early 9th century. The school rejected “provincial dependence on traditional community practice” as the source of legal precedent and “argued for the unquestioning acceptance of the Hadith as “the major basis for legal and religious judgments”.
Like the other schools of fiqh, Shafiʽi relies predominantly on the Al-Quran and the hadiths for Sharia. Where passages of Al-Quran and hadiths are ambiguous, the school first seeks religious law guidance from ijma – the consensus of Islamic scholars. Without consensus, the Shafiʽi school relies on qiyās (analogical reasoning) next as a source.
The Shafiʽi school was widely followed in the early history of Islam, but the Ottoman Empire favoured the Hanafi school when it became the dominant Sunni Muslim power. One of the many differences between the Shafiʽi and Hanafi schools is that the Shafiʽi school does not consider istihsan (judicial discretion by suitably qualified legal scholars) as an acceptable source of religious law because it amounts to “human legislation” of Islamic law.
The Shafiʽi school is now predominantly found in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Lower Egypt, the Swahili coast, Hijaz, Yemen, Kurdistan, The Levant, Dagestan, Chechen and Ingush regions of the Caucasus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Kerala, Hyderabad Deccan and some other coastal areas in India, Singapore, Myanmar, Thailand, Brunei, and the Philippines.