Muhammad ash-Shawkani
| Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Abdullah al-Shawkani | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1759 CE /1173 AH |
| Died | 1839 CE /1250 AH Sana'a, Yemen |
| Ethnicity | Yemeni |
| Occupation | Historiographer, bibliographer, Islamic scholar, jurist |
| Religion | Islam |
| Denomination | Sunni |
| Movement | Salafi |
| Main interest(s) | Fiqh |
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| Arabic name | |
| Personal (Ism) |
Muḥammad محمد |
| Patronymic (Nasab) |
ibn ʻAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʻAbd Allah بن علي بن محمد بن عبدالله |
| Teknonymic (Kunya) |
Abu ʻAlī أبو علي |
| Toponymic (Nisba) |
Al-Shawkānī الشوكاني |
Muhammad ash-Shawkani (1759–1839 ) was a Yemeni scholar of Islam, jurist and reformer.
His full name was Muhammad Ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Shawkani. The surname "ash-Shawkani" is derived from Hijrah ash-Shawkan, which is a town outside San‘a’
Born into a Zaydi Shi'a Muslim family, ash-Shawkani later on adopted the ideology within Sunni Islam and called for a return to the textual sources of the Quran and hadith. As a result, he opposed much of the Zaydi doctrine. He also opposed Sufism. He is considered as a mujtahid, or authority to whom others in the Muslim community have 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 any jurist 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.
Salafis in Saada, would later claim ash-Shawkani as an intellectual precursor, and future Yemeni regimes would uphold his Sunnization policies as a unifier of the country and to undermine Zaydi Shi'ism.
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