3 - Architecture of Encounters

Summary

This chapter demonstrates the major trends in the Shāfiʿī discourses in which the texts took a central stage as producers and products, as causes and results of division and cohesion, leading to the school’s expansion. This also shows us how and why certain texts with genealogies from vast textual families became significant in the longue durée of the school. We learn how people and texts come into contact when there are internal and external impulses to address the school’s past, present and its future in the postclassical period. This line of enquiry requires a slightly closer analysis of some texts and actors in the Shāfiʿī school. For this, we focus on the Minhāj family indicated in the previous chapter, and its trajectories and genealogies before and after its composition, taking the Minhāj itself together with its direct or indirect descendants Tuḥfa, Fatḥ, Nihāya and Iʿāna.