Abstract
This article provides a new account of Shafi'i legal history in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries: a tale of two tariqas, or interpretive communities, one in Iraq and the other in Khurasan. I show that these two Shafi'i communities developed as distinct social and scholarly collectives before gradually converging in Ayyubid Damascus and eventually coalescing around one authoritative school doctrine in the Mamluk period. I reconstruct the networks of Shafi'i jurists in the two regions and show how and why the two groups differed in their legal reasoning and their paradigm of the madhhab (legal school). Although all of these jurists shared a transregional affiliation with the Shafi'i madhhab that distinguished them from jurists belonging to other legal schools, I argue that these affinities were countered by geographical boundaries and diverging local developments that led to the differentiation of the Iraqi and Khurasani Shafi'i communities. These insights not only complicate our understanding of what constitutes the post-formative madhhab as an institution but also demonstrate how broader intellectual and institutional developments, such as the ascendancy of Ash'arism, the emergence of new centres of scholarship, and the introduction of the madrasa, shaped the internal workings of the madhhab.