The Schools of Thought
The schools of Sunni Islam are each named by students of the classical jurist who taught them. The Sunni schools (and where they are commonly found) are
- Hanafi (Turkey, the Balkans, Central Asia, Indian subcontinent, China and Egypt)
- Maliki (North Africa, West Africa and several of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf)
- Shafi'i (Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, East Africa, Yemen and southern parts of India)
- Hanbali (Arabia).
- Zahiri No longer exists
- Qurtubi No longer exists
- Laythi No longer exists
These schools share many of their rulings, but differ on the particular hadiths they accept as authentic and the weight they give to analogy or reason (qiyas) in deciding difficulties.
The Shiite schools comprise:
- Jafari (Iran, Iraq)
- Zaydi
- Abathi (Oman)
Read more about this topic: Principles Of Islamic Jurisprudence
Famous quotes containing the words schools and/or thought:
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“There were none of the small deer up there; they are more common about the settlements. One ran into the city of Bangor two years before, and jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, where it thought it recognized one of its kind.... This the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)