2 - Circulatory Texts

Summary

Texts played a central role in the transregional and transtemporal spread and survival of the Shāfiʿī school and Islamic law broadly. Jurists were primarily concerned to engage with texts, studying, teaching, interpreting, abridging, commenting, referencing and cross-referencing, contextualising, systematising and prioritising them. Texts constituted their spheres of influence, and through them they defended and established themselves as authorities on religious law. Properly formulated legal texts and pronouncements of fatwās or judgements on the basis of texts constituted the axis of the fuqahā estate. The whole community of jurists became active with discourses on works written by masters, their disciples, disciples’ disciples and so on. This “textuality” was there in the prototype of micro-networks and its later developments, but the intensification of macro-networks of fuqahā estates made texts more crucial, for they facilitated the circulation of juridical ideas across long distances and periods.