By Mahmood Kooria
Introduction
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) is one of the most famous intellectuals in Islamic history. His legacy in philosophy, theology, logic, metaphysics, and mysticism has been widely analyzed. Few scholars, however, have examined his contributions to Islamic law and his role as a jurist, despite the ten works he authored on Shāfiʿī law and his reputation as "the second al-Shāfiʿī" (al-Shāfiʿī al-thānī) and "the younger al-Shāfiʿī" (al-Shāfiʿī al-ṣaghīr). Aḥmad Zakī Manṣūr Ḥammād, Felicitas Opwis and Ebrahim Moosa have compared Ghazālī's legal theory to that of other jurists within and outside the Shāfiʿī school.[1] Even so, his treatises on substantive law have yet to be studied.
In this essay, I provide revised excerpts from a longer essay on two of Ghazālī's substantive legal texts and argue that he codified Shāfiʿī school doctrine by drawing on the growing literature of the school and synthesizing its internal divisions.[2] By focusing on the processes of codification in the long history of Islamic law, we can identify the individual and collective religious-political projects of scholars such as Ghazālī. His contributions to substantive law in the fifth/eleventh century exemplify the complexities of codification.
Ghazālī, the Jurist
Ghazālī was born and raised in Tus (in Khurasan), and studied in Jurjan and Nishapur with many scholars, including the Shāfiʿī jurists ʿAbd al-Mālik al-Juwaynī, better known as Imām al-Ḥaramayn (d. 478/1085). He worked at the court of the Seljuq vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 485/1092), where his erudition, knowledge, debating and oratory skills, and networking capacity facilitated his rise to prominence. In 484/1091, he moved to Baghdad and took a position at the Niẓāmiyya College, established by Niẓām al-Mulk in 457/1065. In 488/1095, he left his prestigious position, withdrew from fame and worldly affairs, and shifted his focus to spiritual explorations and the study of taṣawwuf (mysticism). Before this transition, he made major contributions to substantive law by writing four interconnected texts: the Basīṭ, the Wasīṭ, the Wajīz, and Khulāṣat al-Mukhtaṣar.
Of these four texts, the Basīṭ is the earliest,[3] written at the beginning of Ghazālī's career in Nishapur and Baghdad.[4] The Wasīṭ is an abridgement of the Basīṭ, and the Wajīz is an abridgement of the Wasīṭ.[5] He abridged the Wajīz and used it as the basis for the Khulāṣa, the last of his substantive legal writings.[6] The Wasīṭ and the Wajīz circulated widely among Shāfiʿī circles, while the Khulāṣa was Ghazālī's own favorite among his legal oeuvre.[7] This essay focuses on the Wajīz and Khulāṣa for their status as mukhtaṣars (digests or summaries) of the Shāfiʿī school in order to understand how Ghazālī attempted to codify the school doctrine through these two texts.
Ghazālī, the Codifier
Ghazālī initially engaged with the long tradition of the school through the Basīṭ and the Wasīṭ, in which he aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of Shāfiʿī doctrine by bringing together the most important discourses of the school. He presented them as a coherent and convincing narrative based on existing and new methodologies. His main task was to assemble the divergent and opposing viewpoints of the school, which had grown into an extensive corpus over a period of 250 years. He also brought together the opinions of both the Iraqi and Khurasani branches (ṭuruq, sing. ṭarīqa: "paths"), without supporting either exclusively, even though his background was in Khurasan.[8]
After canonizing Shāfiʿī doctrine in the Basīṭ and the Wasīṭ, Ghazālī attempted to codify its doctrine in the Wajīz and the Khulāṣa following the existing, albeit infrequent, practice within the school. Before him, there were several attempts at codification in the form of mukhtaṣars that summarized the legal teachings of Imām al-Shāfiʿī. However, most of those belonged to one of the two ṭarīqas, and Ghazālī sought to overcome this factionalism within the school. Thus, he produced the Wajīz and Khulāṣa not despite the previous mukhtaṣars, but because of them, as his approach to codifying law differed from previous attempts, with extra attention to the process and its outcome.
In premodern codifications, jurists attempted to present concise, structured and authoritative rules without detailed discussion of internal disagreements. Codification thus offers scholars venues from which to explore the textual form of a school, group, branch or region as well as the historical contexts in which the codes developed and were formulated. At the same time, their authoritative appeal for personal and collective implementation should not be interpreted to mean that all codes were consistently enforced or followed by their intended audiences. In the preface of Wajīz, Ghazālī writes at length—ironically—about his linguistic skill and legal precision in his codification project:
Here I present you, the enthusiastic seeker, passionate aspirant, with this Wajīz, for which you have been desperately waiting, pleading, and demanding for so long. I have churned out for you the gist of substantive law (fiqh), I have extracted for you its quintessence and sifted through the minutiae of divine law (sharʿ), culled its best and robust [rulings], and condensed for you an expansive and extensive authoritative standpoint. I have lightened for your memory that weighty burden, combined all the legal problems (masāʾil) with their roots [principles] and branches [substantive laws] into nicely drafted words in light and short sheets, charged it with the rarest of substantive laws under the aggregation of maxims, and marked its treasures. . . . [I have done] all this to avoid circumlocution and to separate the chaff from the grain. Thus, the text has been refined with concision, eloquent composition, marvelous structure, beautiful presentation, and elegance of the school's principles and rare substantive laws.[9]
This wordiness in the introductory part fades as the text progresses, but the author maintains the usage of many alliterations, homographs, and anagrams. In addition to the precision in language, he appears to make the work appealing literarily with rhyming words and word endings, a rare feature in legal works. He occasionally explains his rationale in the choice of words or the minute differences between two words which otherwise appear to be synonymous or redundant. If one were to analyze the legal texts as a literary genre, the Wajīz would stand as an ideal candidate.
While emphasizing Shāfiʿī viewpoints, the Wajīz focuses almost exclusively on stating each legal issue without much analysis or reasoning. Unlike Ghazālī's previous two works, it does not delve into the internal discursive tradition of the school or engage with other schools. He states: "I have limited myself to citing what is evident (ẓāhir) in the school of Imām al-Shāfiʿī al-Muṭṭalibī (may God bless him) instead of citing the distant viewpoints and his companions' views (wujūh)."[10] Occasionally, he does identify contrasting views of the Mālikī and Ḥanafī schools or idiosyncratic Shāfiʿī opinions, using technical phrases, but he avoids substantiating the Shāfiʿī position or the preponderant view of the school.
With the Khulāṣa, Ghazālī's codification project culminated. The text is notable not only for its structure and organization but also for its sophistication as a code. It is a mukhtaṣar of a mukhtaṣar of a mukhtaṣar (i.e., a summary of a summary of a summary); that is to say, it is based on Juwaynī's Mukhtaṣar, which was itself a critical summary and engagement with the Mukhtaṣar of Muzanī (d. 878). Ghazālī writes:
Sheikh al-Imām Abū Muḥammad al-Juwaynī, father of my teacher and mentor of Imām al-Ḥaramayn (may God bless their souls), has written a Mukhtaṣar on the Mukhtaṣar, refining it by removing wordiness and circumlocution, and shortening what Muzanī has elaborated upon in the sections and chapters. . . . But he ended up producing a summary not so different from what he aimed to summarize. He shortened it only in intention [and not in reality].[11]
This tripartite process of summarizing establishes the Khulāṣa as an evolved treatise on law. Although Ghazālī suggests that it is a critical summary of the Mukhtaṣar of Muzanī, scholars have also suggested that it is a direct abridgement of the Wajīz.[12] By comparing the Khulāṣa with the Wajīz and Mukhtaṣar of Muzanī, we can see the gradual intellectual development of Ghazālī's legal thought. In this short substantive legal text, he retains the structure he had developed in his earlier writings, including the Wajīz, but also deviates from it in order to adhere to Muzanī's Mukhtaṣar even though the latter lacks the same structure or much of its contents and vocabulary. He acknowledges that the Khulāṣa is his "fourth text," the "shortest among the works."[13] We thus see him confirming progress in his codification project while also going back to the earliest known code of the school.
The structure and organization of the Khulāṣa are more sophisticated than his earlier works. This was deliberate, as Ghazālī states: "I have doubled the reins in my attention to maintain concision and compactness, and to formulate with brevity and order, to invigorate enthusiasts and ease memorization for students."[14] A notable example of precision occurs early in the text. In the Basīṭ, Ghazālī commences with a lengthy prayer exalting God and the Prophet, along with a categorization of knowledge and its disciplines, placing law in the highest rank, before outlining his aims. In the Khulāṣa, the prayer is merely two words, with no discussion of knowledge, and the author immediately announces his aims and methods. Another instance: in the Basīṭ, Ghazālī divides the "book" (kitāb) on purity into two sections, (1) a prolegomenon (muqaddima) and (2) objectives (maqāṣid). The prolegomenon contains chapters on the rules governing water purity (for performing religious rituals), what nullifies the purity of water, the search for pure water, and water vessels. In the section on objectives, we find chapters on ablution, cleaning after defecation, impurities, and bathing. He further divides each chapter into sub-chapters, articles, clauses, debates, and problems. By contrast, the Khulāṣa has seven short chapters on purity laws (on water, vessels, ablution, cleaning after defecation, impurities, bathing, and wiping over socks), with sub-chapters and articles.
In the Khulāṣa, Ghazālī presents Shāfiʿī school rulings without detailed reference to opposing viewpoints. This is a central feature of codification, as nuanced discussion serves no purpose in a code designed for the daily administration of law and order or to use as a textbook for law students. However, Ghazālī occasionally refers to the opinions of Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) and Mālik bin Anas (d. 179/795), but not to those of Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) and Ṭabarī (d. 310/923). This may be because the Khulāṣa depends on the Mukhtaṣar of Muzanī, and Ghazālī restricts himself here to Muzanī's discursive scope. In Muzanī's era, prominent legal debates were between the followers of Abū Ḥanīfa and Mālik. Al-Shāfiʿī found a middle ground and formed his own school, which Muzanī followed, while the Ḥanbalī school had not yet developed based on Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal's teachings. Therefore, Muzanī engaged with the arguments of Abū Ḥanīfa and Mālik and their followers, and Ghazālī is content with citations from Muzanī's Mukhtaṣar, although he could have quoted many other sources. He also mostly disregards debates within and outside the Shāfiʿī school. He does this to aid muftis (jurists who issue legal opinions), judges, and administrators of law and order, who must deal with plaintiffs and defendants regardless of their school affiliation. A direct and flattened statement of the major school disagreements undoubtedly helps these legal practitioners reach decisions appropriate to the school of the litigants.
The multipartite process of summarizing the Shāfiʿī doctrine established the Khulāṣa as an evolved code of law. Ghazālī considered the text the most satisfying of all his legal writings, especially after he had left the law: "I have spent a large part of my life writing books in the school and organizing my work into the Basīṭ, the Wasīṭ, and the Wajīz, with elaborate and embellished classifications and sub-classifications. For all the effort I invested, the Khulāṣat al-Mukhtaṣar would have been enough." [15]
Conclusion
Despite authoring many works in the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law and being recognized among Shāfiʿī circles as "the second al-Shāfiʿī" and "the junior al-Shāfiʿī," Ghazālī's contribution to substantive law remains to be thoroughly explored. Prior to his departure from the legal-scholarly world towards spirituality, he extensively engaged with Islamic legal theory and substantive law during his illustrious careers in Nishapur and Baghdad. Among his texts, four interconnected works—the Basīṭ, the Wasīṭ, the Wajīz, and the Khulāṣa—are most recognized among the Shāfiʿīs. The latter two works, Wajīz, and Khulāṣa, are his mukhtaṣars, wherein he codified the school doctrine. This essay highlighted these two works to demonstrate how Ghazālī conceptualized and implemented the codification and standardization of Islamic law within the framework of the school to which he belonged.
[1] Ebrahim Moosa, "Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111)," in Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, eds. Oussama Arabi, David Powers and Susan Spectorsky (Leiden, Brill, 2013), 261–94; Felicitas Opwis, "Shifting Legal Authority from the Ruler to the ʿUlamāʾ: Rationalizing the Punishment for Drinking Wine during the Seljūq Period," Der Islam 86 (2011): 65–92.
[2] Mahmood Kooria, "'If Ghazālī is a Prophet, the Wajīz is His Miracle': Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī's Codification of Shāfiʿī Law," Arabica (forthcoming).
[3] However, the Basīṭ is either his second or third treatise among his overall works in substantive law. Scholars disagree on which ones were his first and second texts.
[4] ʿAlī Muʿawwid and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawǧūd, Introduction to al-Ghazālī, al-Wajīz fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī (Beirut, Dār al-Arqam, 1997), 65.
[5] Ghazālī, al-Wasīṭ fī al-madhhab, eds. Aḥmad Maḥmūd Ibrāhīm and Muḥammad Muḥammad Tāmir (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 1997); Ghazālī, Basīṭ, MS 2111 (174–76 Fiqh Shāfiʿī), Ẓāhiriyya Library, Damascus, accessed on October 10, 2019 at: https://ia801304.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/21/items/M-00023/2111.zip.
[6] Ghazālī, al-Wajīz fī fiqh al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, eds. ʿAlī Muʿawwid and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Arqām, 1997); Ghazālī, al-Khulāṣa al-musammā Khulāṣat al-Mukhtaṣar wa-naqāwat al-muʿtaṣar, ed. Amjad Rashīd Muḥammad ʿAlī (Riyadh: Dār al-Minhāj, 2007).
[7] Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qurʾān wa duraru-hu (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl wa-Dār al-Āfāq al-Jadīda, 1988), 22.
[8] For more on the division between the Iraqi and Khurasani branches, see Mariam Sheibani, "A Tale of Two Ṭarīqas: The Iraqi and Khurasani Shafiʿi Communities in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries," Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (2024): 1–30.
[9] Ghazālī, al-Wajīz, 1:104–07.
[10] Ibid., 105.
[11] Ghazālī, al-Khulāṣa, 55.
[12] For the first view, see Sayyid ʿAlawī Saqqāf, Mukhtaṣar al-fawāʾid al-Makkiyya fī mā yaḥtāju-hu ṭalabat al-Shāfiʿīyya, ed. Yūsuf ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Marʿashlī (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2004), 34–36; for the second view, see Amjad Rashīd Muḥammad ʿAlī, Introduction to al-Ghazālī, al-Khulāṣa, 13–16. For both views, see Muʿawwid and ʿAbd al-Mawǧūd, Introduction to al-Ghazālī, al-Wajīz, 1:73.
[13] Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qurʾān, 22.
[14] Ghazālī, al-Khulāṣa, 55.
[15] Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qurʾān, 22.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Mahmood Kooria, "If Ghazālī is a Prophet, the Wajīz is His Miracle": Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī's Codification of Shāfiʿī Law, Islamic Law Blog (Aug. 14, 2025), https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/08/14/if-ghazali-is-a-prophet-the-wajiz-is-his-miracle-abu-%e1%b8%a5amid-al-ghazalis-codification-of-shafi%ca%bfi-law.
Suggested Chicago citation: Mahmood Kooria, "'If Ghazālī is a Prophet, the Wajīz is His Miracle': Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī's Codification of Shāfiʿī Law," Islamic Law Blog, August 14, 2025, https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/08/14/if-ghazali-is-a-prophet-the-wajiz-is-his-miracle-abu-%e1%b8%a5amid-al-ghazalis-codification-of-shafi%ca%bfi-law.
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