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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 Salafi
Main interest(s) Fiqh
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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