Islam as a faith is a totality and by nature includes every area of life - nothing in Islam is out of the realm of the divine, which is a natural extension of the Islamic doctrine of Tawhid (Oneness of God). Combined with this thought is the fact that we as Muslims believe in a concept of The Real or Allah that in its core essence is unchanging. Yet the manifestations of the One in this world are unique in the sense that we are each individuals who "contain" God in our individual ways in the framework of the Sacred Law or nature.
What is not changing is the final Revelation in this world through the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in the form of the Qur'an. Yet the Qur'an, like everything else that is a part of the divine totality is a living entity, breathing in a continual process of renewed creation.
Jurisprudence is the branch of the Islamic sciences that admittedly causes the most friction in my own life (not as a concept, but in the human part of its reality). In accepting Islam I believe fully and completely in the need for a divine law. Better, I see the divine law in every element of the universe, right down to the human-in-the-world; the universe exists and functions on the basis of the divine law. Yet humanity by nature is an imperfection which at one and the same time provides the very necessity for a law and a clear path to The Real, but humans also must make sense of that law and path in daily lived experience, and humans are fallible creatures. And it is precisely here that is the rub.
How do we as humans take the divine law and make something so permanent in its underlying essence and ideals of morality and justice in the light of the final Revelation applicable to a changing world?
This book by Al-Shafi'i is a classic of Islamic jurisprudence. It can be tedious reading for those who are not Muslim or inclined towards legal history as it is filled with individual examples and illustrations of Shafi'i's method, some of which touch the smallest details of life. Shafi'i starts with the Qur'an (as does all of Islamic jurisprudence) as the first source in legal decisions, then the Sunnah (words, actions) of the Prophet followed by the consensus of the Islamic community on a given legal question and finally analogy or method of comparison.
One illustration of the dissonance I experience in my own life is that I believe that the Prophet Muhammad is the window to the divine, and that the love of the Prophet and his Sunnah is essential to Muslim life. I also believe the Prophet to be infallible and the symbol of perfection in the form of the Islamic "Universal Man". Yet everything that the Prophet has left for us outside of his being a vessel for the delivery of the Qur'an has come down to us - transmitted - through fallible humans. This is no reflection on the science of isnad or chain of transmission or transmitters from which these sayings and reported actions of the Prophet have come down, it's simply a statement of Islamic faith that the transmitters were by nature fallible humans as they were not of the Prophetic substance, no matter how reliable we might deem them.
My question simply is this: Does this infusion of raw fallible humanity into the divine transmission of the law cloud our vision of how that law should be manifested? Because not only are we dealing with transmitters of traditions of the Prophet, we are also dealing with a long chain of scholars/jurists who existed in a cultural milieu that influences their entire being, and therefore the legal decisions they make, no matter the claims to impartiality. Personally I see no easy answers to this question and I see the same question being grappled with in the Islamic community. Questions that have never come up during the formative days of Islamic law are now being faced, specifically as they relate to certain forms of bioethics, human rights and new modes of existence in a modern, technical world.
Shafi'i as a scholar was one of the most respected, if not the most respected jurist in Islamic history. Al-Ghazali was a scholar in the Shafi'i school as were many other notable Islamic figures. Shafi'i law is one of the four major Sunni Islam schools of law alongside Hanbali, Maliki and Hanafi law. This treatise is actually constructed in the form of a dialogue that Shafi'i is having with an interlocutor of the Hanafi school.
My "mark down" of this book is mostly a reflection of my own struggles with jurisprudence and is not meant as a reflection of the qualities of the book as a legal document (I'm not a jurist) nor is it meant as an indictment of the Shafi'i school of law. It is also not to be understood that I am questioning the importance of Islamic jurisprudence or its place in the life of the Muslim. I'm not. I simply believe that we are required as Muslims to learn all we can about this part of Islamic life. Furthermore, we are required as an Islamic community to uphold that part of the legal process, ijma (consensus of the community), in a responsible and informed manner.