Imam al-Shafi'i (full name Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i, 767 Gaza – 820 Cairo) was an Islamic jurist and mujtahid, the founder of the Shafi'i school, one of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence.
Scholarly contribution
He is known for “al-Risala,” the work that established the principles of jurisprudence (Islamic legal methodology) as an independent, systematic discipline. In it he set the sources of law (the Quran, the Sunna, ijma and qiyas) in a defined order and developed a method that balanced hadith with ra'y (reasoning).
Life
He lived in Mecca, Medina, Baghdad and finally Cairo; he studied under Imam Malik and founded his own legal school. His views became the basis of the Shafi'i school, followed across a large part of the Muslim world.