Legal School Affiliation among Competing Social Actors in Ninth-Century Egypt

Egypt in the ninth century was the site of both profound socio-political turmoil and intense intellectual rivalry. By the end of the century, the supremacy of the old Arab aristocracy had given way to a new elite of Turkic military men. The once-loyal Abbasid province had become a de facto independent state under Ahmad b. Tulun. And competition between three schools of legal thought (madhahib, sing. madhhab) had culminated in a thorough reversal of fortunes: the hitherto dominant Maliki school was humiliated, while Shafi‘ism—the underdog of the past—was elevated to unprecedented prominence.

This paper will demonstrate that these transformations were not unrelated. Specifically, it shows that (1) the doctrines of the different legal schools attracted different constituencies, and represented an important element in the self-definition of certain social groups; (2) political actors also chose to support specific legal schools in order to further their strategic goals; and (3) the historical trajectories of the legal schools were intimately tied to the social and political fortunes of their adherents. This project of correlating legal school affiliation with social divisions has a precedent in Richard Bulliet’s The Patricians of Nishapur (1972), but the present study is the first to highlight the crucial role of doctrinal differences. The detailed and descriptive sources available on ninth-century Egypt reveal not only the ways in which the doctrines and authority of the legal schools were harnessed for social and political purposes, but also how the schools themselves were constructed within a particular matrix of social relationships.