Ethnicity Yemeni Name Muhammad ash-Shawkani Religion Islam Died 1834, Sana'a, Yemen | Denomination Sunni Main interests Fiqh Movement Salafi | |
Occupation Historiographer, bibliographer. Similar People Muhammad Nasiruddin al‑Albani, Ibn Hazm, Muhammad ibn al Uthaymeen, Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al‑Aziz ibn Baz | ||
Great muslims in history muhammad ash shawkani part 2 2 by dr muhammad musa al shareef
Muhammad ash-Shawkani (1759–1839 ) was a Yemeni scholar of Islam, jurist and reformer.
Contents
- Great muslims in history muhammad ash shawkani part 2 2 by dr muhammad musa al shareef
- Great muslims in history muhammad ash shawkani part 1 2 by dr muhammad musa al shareef
- Name
- Biography
- Legacy
- Works
- References
Great muslims in history muhammad ash shawkani part 1 2 by dr muhammad musa al shareef
Name
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’
Biography
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.
Legacy
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.
Beyond Yemen, his works are widely used in Sunni schools. He also profoundly influenced the Ahl al-Hadith in the Indian subcontinent (such as Siddiq Hasan Khan) and Salafis in Saudi Arabia and across the globe.