Shafi'i school

The Shafi'i school is one of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence within Sunni Islam, belonging to the Ahl al-Hadith tradition. It is named after the Muslim scholar, jurist, and traditionist al-Shafi'i (c. 767–820 CE) of the early 9th century. Like the other schools, the Shafiʽis rely on the Quran and the sound books of hadiths as primary sources of law. The Shafi'i school affirms the authority of both divine law-giving (the Quran and the Sunna) and human speculation regarding the Law. Where passages of Quran or the hadiths are ambiguous, the school seeks guidance of qiyas (analogical reasoning). The ijma (consensus of scholars) was "accepted but not stressed". The school rejected the dependence on local traditions as the source of legal precedent and rebuffed the Ahl al-Ra'y (personal opinion) and the Istihsan (juristic discretion). The Shafi'i school is followed by more than 350 million people, comprising around 17.5% of the Muslim population worldwide. As such, it is the third-largest Sunni school after the Hanafi and Maliki schools. The Shafi'i school is predominant in the Horn of Africa, North Caucasus, Southeast Asia, Lower Egypt, Qatar, Kerala and among the majority of the Kurdish Muslim population throughout Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Shafiʽi school was the largest school followed in the Middle East until the rise of the Ottomans and the Safavids who patronized the Hanafi and Ja'fari schools respectively.