Al-Shafi‘i

Abū ʿAbdullāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (28 August 767 — 19 January 820) was a Palestinian-Arab Muslim theologian, writer, and scholar, who was the first contributor of the principles of Islamic jurisprudence (Uṣūl al-fiqh). Often referred to as 'Shaykh al-Islām', al-Shāfi‘ī was one of the four great Imams, whose legacy on juridical matters and teaching eventually led to the Shafi'i school of fiqh (or Madh'hab).

Quotes

 * He who seeks pearls immerses himself in the sea.
 * O Allah! You blessed me with Islam and I didn’t ask You for it, O Allah bless me with Jannah and I am asking for it.
 * My sin had burdened me heavily. But when I measured it against Your Grace, O Lord! Your Forgiveness came out greater.
 * Do not love the one who doesn’t love Allah. If they can leave Allah, they will leave you.
 * Knowledge is that which benefits not that which is memorized.
 * Diwan al-Imam al-shafi'i, (book of poems - al-shafi'i) p. 100; Dar El-Marefah Beirut - Lebanon 2005
 * He said to the effect that no knowledge of Islam can be gained from books of Kalam, as kalam is not from knowledge and that "It is better for a man to spend his whole life doing whatever Allah has prohibited - besides shirk with Allah - rather than spending his whole life involved in kalam.
 * Ibn Abi Hatim, Manaaqibush-Shaafi'ee, p. 39

Quotes about

 * For centuries, scholars from the four different schools of Islam had taught in the Holy Mosque and crowds of students had traveled from near and far to gather in halaqas, circles of study, around their preferred teachers. The faithful prayed, at slightly different times, behind their imams; there was a prayer station for each school: Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi, and Hanbali. When King Abdelaziz took control of Mecca in 1924, the Wahhabi clerics objected to the arrangement that had prevailed so far in the Holy Mosque. If the community of Muslims was one, and the call to prayer was one, why not pray behind one imam? The Wahhabi clerics won the debate, thereby dealing themselves all the power. But there was no rotation or compromise: the sole imam who would lead all five daily prayers in the Holy Mosque came from Wahhabi circles, with all that that entailed in puritanical intolerance. The number of halaqas dwindled rapidly, from several hundred to around thirty-five in the late 1970s. The Sufi sheikh that Sami had consulted that first day of the Mecca attack, Mohammad Alawi al-Maliki, was still drawing crowds, lecturing in his corner of the courtyard of the Holy Mosque, on the chair he had inherited from his father in 1971, the chair that been passed through generations. But few others were able to resist the onslaught of Wahhabi zeal. Harmony could be brought back, Sami thought, only if diversity was allowed to thrive again in the House of God. But this was not how the Al-Sauds would proceed. That was not the deal they had cut with Bin Baz to save their throne.
 * Kim Ghattas Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)