Muhammad_ash-Shawkani

Muhammad ash-Shawkani

Muhammad ash-Shawkani (1759-1834 CE ) was a Yemeni scholar of Islam, jurisprudent, and reformer.

Name

His full name was Muhammad Ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abdullaah al-Shawkani . The surname "ash-Shawkani" is derived from Hijrah ash-Shawkan, which is a town outside San‘a’

Biography

Born into a Zaydi Shi'a Muslim family, ash-Shawkani later on adopted the Salafi ideology within Sunni Islam and called for a return to the textual sources of the Quran and hadith. He viewed himself as a mujtahid, or authority to whom others in the Muslim community had to defer in details of religious law. Of his work issuing fatwas, ash-Shawkani stated "I acquired knowledge without a price and I wanted to give it thus. Part of the fatwa-issuing work of many noted scholars typically is devoted to the giving of ordinary opinions to private questioners. Ash-Shawkani refers both to his major fatwas, which were collected and preserved as a book, and to his "shorter" fatwas, which he said "could never be counted" and which were not recorded.

He is credited with developing a series of syllabi for attaining various ranks of scholarship and used a strict system of legal analysis based on Sunni thought. He insisted that a jurists who wanted to be a mujtahid fī'l-madhhab (a scholar who is qualified to exercise ijtihad within a school of Islamic law), was required to do ijtihad, which stemmed from his opposition to taqlid for a mujtahid, which he deemed to be a vice with which the Shariah had been inflicted.

Works

Nayl al-Awtar
Fath al-Qadir - Tafsir al-Shawkani
al-Badr at-tali
''Tuhfatu al-Dhakirin - Sharh Uddatu Hisna al-Haseen: a superb one volume commentary on the collection "Uddatu Hisna al-Haseen", on ahadith of Adhkar, by Ibn Al-Jazari (d. 833H)
Al-Fawaid al-Majmu'ah Fil Ahadith ul Mau'zoo'ah
Irshad ul Fuhool - a book on jurisprudence, considered as one of the best and one of the most scholarly introductions to Islamic Jurisprudence