| Full name | Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Shawkani |
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| Born | 1759 CE |
| Died | 1834 CE/1250 AH |
| Era | Medieval era |
| Region | Yemeni scholar |
| School | Muslim |
| Main interests | Theology |
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Muhammad ash-Shawkani (1759–1834 CE [1]) was a Yemeni scholar of Islam, jurisprudent, and reformer.
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His full name was Muhammad Ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Shawkani.[2] The surname "ash-Shawkani" is derived from Hijrah ash-Shawkan, which is a town outside San‘a’[3]
Born into a Zaydi Shi'a Muslim family, ash-Shawkani later on adopted the ideology within Sunni Islam and called for a return to the textual sources of the Quran and hadith. He viewed himself as a mujtahid, or authority to whom others in the Muslim community had to defer in details of religious law. Of his work issuing fatwas, ash-Shawkani stated "I acquired knowledge without a price and I wanted to give it thus."[4] Part of the fatwa-issuing work of many noted scholars typically is devoted to the giving of ordinary opinions to private questioners. Ash-Shawkani refers both to his major fatwas, which were collected and preserved as a book, and to his "shorter" fatwas, which he said "could never be counted" and which were not recorded.[5]
He is credited with developing a series of syllabi for attaining various ranks of scholarship and used a strict system of legal analysis based on Sunni thought. He insisted that any jurist who wanted to be a mujtahid fī'l-madhhab (a scholar who is qualified to exercise ijtihad within a school of Islamic law), was required to do ijtihad, which stemmed from his opposition to taqlid for a mujtahid, which he deemed to be a vice with which the Shariah had been inflicted.[6]
Imam al-Shawkani (states: "The Prophet (Allah bless him & give him peace) is alive in his grave, as has been established in the Hadith "The Prophets are alive in their graves". (See: Nayl al-Awtar, 5/101).