Al-Nawawi: Jurist of the Shafi'i School and Compiler of Riyad al-Salihin

Abu Zakariyya Muhyi al-Din Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, who lived from 1233 to 1277, was a Shafi'i jurist and hadith scholar of Damascus whose writings occupy an unusual position: several of them are still in daily use, seven and a half centuries after his death, by Muslims who have never heard his name.

His compilation Riyad al-Salihin is among the most widely read hadith collections in the Sunni world. His set of forty hadith on the essentials of religion is memorised by students everywhere. His Minhaj al-Talibin became the standard reference manual of Shafi'i law and the basis of a long line of commentaries. His commentary on Sahih Muslim remains the classical commentary of choice on that collection, and his al-Adhkar is the standard classical anthology of prayers and invocations.

He accomplished this in a working life of roughly twenty years. He arrived in Damascus as a student at eighteen, and he died at forty-four, having produced a body of work whose scale is difficult to reconcile with the span of time available. The biographical tradition explains it by an austerity of life so complete that it left nothing but study, and while such accounts of scholarly figures are conventional, in his case the volume of the output gives the tradition a certain corroboration.

Origins and Education

Al-Nawawi was born at Nawa, a town in the Hawran plateau south of Damascus, in the month of Muharram of 631 of the Hijra, corresponding to October 1233. His nisba is taken from the town. Some sources give his birth as 1234 and his death year as 676 or 677 of the Hijra; the dates 1233 and 1277 are the ones most generally accepted.

His father was a merchant of modest means and pious reputation, and the family was not a scholarly one. The biographical literature records that the boy's aptitude was noticed locally and that his father was encouraged to direct him to study, and that he had memorised the Quran before adolescence.

In 1251, at about eighteen, he was brought to Damascus and enrolled at the Rawahiyya college, where he lived in a room and began the systematic study of law, hadith, Arabic grammar and the ancillary sciences. The accounts of this period describe an extraordinary regime — a dozen or so classes a day in different subjects with different teachers, with annotation and revision — and while the specific figures come from the admiring tradition, the pattern of intensive multi-subject study under many teachers simultaneously is exactly what the Damascene college system of the period was organised to deliver. The tradition reports more than twenty teachers of standing in the city during these years, and gives specific measures of his early pace of study: a memorisation of al-Ghazzi's al-Tanbih, a standard Shafi'i legal primer, completed within some four and a half months, followed by a year spent mastering a quarter of al-Shirazi's longer al-Muhadhdhab under his teacher Kamal al-Din ibn Ahmad. Later biographers add that he continued at this intensity, occupied with study or revision at every hour including while walking between lessons, for roughly the first six years of his time in the city before he began composing works of his own — a detail that, if only approximately accurate, indicates a formation unusually concentrated even by the standards the Damascene system otherwise produced.

The city he entered is the key to his career. Thirteenth-century Damascus, under Ayyubid and then Mamluk rule, held the densest concentration of endowed colleges and hadith institutes in the Sunni world, described in the article on the Mamluk Sultanate and studied in detail in Michael Chamberlain's work on Damascene scholarly life. A student of ability had access to the leading authorities in every discipline, and a scholar who established himself could expect appointment to teaching posts funded by permanent endowments.

He performed the pilgrimage with his father in 1253, and the sources record an illness during the journey. Beyond that he appears to have travelled little, which distinguishes him from the hadith scholars of earlier centuries whose formation depended on extensive journeys; by his time the great collections were established texts to be studied rather than material to be gathered, and Damascus itself held teachers with the necessary chains of transmission.

Career and Public Position

Al-Nawawi's public career was that of a teacher and a writer, and its central appointment came in 1267, when he succeeded Abu Shama as director of the Dar al-Hadith al-Ashrafiyya in Damascus.

The Ashrafiyya was the most prestigious hadith institute in the city, and its directorship was the senior position in the discipline in Syria. He held it until his death and by all accounts drew no salary from it beyond what he needed, or none at all — the biographical literature is emphatic about his refusal of stipends, gifts and the material comforts available to a scholar of his standing. The same sources describe a diet and a manner of living deliberately reduced, a refusal of positions that carried income and influence, and — a detail that they treat as significant — that he never married.

Reports of this kind require a note of caution. Ascetic renunciation is a standard theme in the biography of admired scholars, and the specifics are not documented. What can be said is that the accounts are consistent across independent biographers, that his refusal of the ordinary emoluments of office is uniformly reported, and that his output is difficult to explain on any other assumption about how he spent his time.

He also engaged with public affairs on at least one occasion that the tradition records. During a period of hardship in Syria he is reported to have corresponded with the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars on behalf of the population's welfare. The episode belongs to the biographical tradition rather than to documentary record, and it is reported here as such; its persistence reflects the standing he held as a scholar who counselled on matters of the common good, which was part of the recognised role of the Damascene ulama.

In 1277 he returned to Nawa, having deposited his books, and died there on 21 December of that year, corresponding to Rajab 676 of the Hijra, aged forty-four.

Riyad al-Salihin

Riyad al-Salihin is the work by which al-Nawawi is best known outside scholarly circles, and its design explains its reach.

It is a thematic anthology of roughly nineteen hundred hadith, selected from the canonical collections and arranged in chapters by subject: sincerity, repentance, patience, truthfulness, the rights of parents and neighbours, the etiquette of eating and dress, the conduct of speech, the treatment of the weak, the remembrance of God. Each chapter typically opens with relevant Quranic verses and then presents the hadith, with al-Nawawi's brief comments on wording or meaning where needed.

Three editorial decisions made it what it became. He selected for ethical and devotional relevance rather than legal argument, so the collection speaks to conduct rather than to jurisprudence. He drew overwhelmingly on material of established authenticity, chiefly from Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — the collections described in the articles on al-Bukhari and Muslim — which meant the book could be used without technical evaluation by the reader. And he organised it thematically rather than by transmitter or by legal chapter, which makes it usable by anyone looking for guidance on a subject.

The result is a book that functions as a manual of Islamic ethics grounded in prophetic tradition, and it has been printed, translated and taught continuously into the present. Its influence on ordinary Muslim religious formation is probably greater than that of any other work in this article.

The Forty Hadith

Al-Arba'in al-Nawawiyya is a short collection of forty-two hadith — the traditional count of forty being approximate — chosen as statements of the fundamentals of religion.

The genre of the "forty hadith" collection was already established, and al-Nawawi's contribution was the quality of the selection. The texts he chose are those in which the Prophet states a comprehensive principle in a compact form: the hadith on intention, on the definition of Islam, faith and excellence, on the lawful and the unlawful being clear, on the prohibition of harm, on sincerity in religion, on the command to enjoin good. He added a brief explanation of each.

The collection's function is pedagogical, and it has served that function without interruption. It is among the first texts memorised by students of the religious sciences across the Sunni world, it has generated a substantial commentary literature of its own, and it circulates in translation as an introduction to prophetic teaching. Al-Nawawi's own introduction states his purpose plainly: to gather what a Muslim most needs, in a compass that can be committed to memory.

Shafi'i Law: Minhaj al-Talibin and al-Majmu

Al-Nawawi's scholarly standing among specialists rests principally on his legal work, and its influence within the Shafi'i school was decisive.

Minhaj al-Talibin is an abridgement and revision of an earlier compendium by al-Rafi'i, and it became the reference manual of Shafi'i law. Its authority in the school is difficult to overstate: for centuries the Minhaj was the text on which Shafi'i legal education was built, it attracted a large body of commentaries and super-commentaries by the leading jurists of subsequent generations, and its formulations were treated as stating the school's settled position. Where al-Nawawi and al-Rafi'i agreed on a point, later Shafi'is generally regarded the matter as closed. The school itself is described in the article on al-Shafi'i.

Al-Majmu Sharh al-Muhadhdhab was the more ambitious work: a vast commentary on al-Shirazi's al-Muhadhdhab, combining Shafi'i doctrine with comparative treatment of other schools and with detailed hadith criticism of the traditions cited in legal argument. It is generally regarded as his masterpiece and it was left unfinished at his death, reaching only part of the way through the subject matter. What exists is a work of the first rank and among the most substantial achievements of medieval Islamic legal scholarship.

Rawdat al-Talibin, another substantial legal work, and Tahdhib al-Asma wa al-Lughat, a biographical and lexical dictionary serving the study of hadith and law, complete the principal juristic output.

Hadith Scholarship

Al-Nawawi's work in hadith went well beyond anthology.

Al-Minhaj: Sharh Sahih Muslim is his commentary on the collection of Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, and it remains the standard classical commentary on that work — the counterpart, for Sahih Muslim, of Ibn Hajar's later commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari. It treats the chains of transmission, the difficulties of wording, the legal implications of each report, and the differences among the schools, and it is the point of departure for any serious study of the text.

Al-Taqrib wa al-Taysir is a concise manual on the sciences of hadith, abridging Ibn al-Salah's classic treatment, and it functioned as a teaching text in the discipline. Jonathan Brown's study of the formation and reception of the hadith canon situates al-Nawawi within the mature phase of that tradition, when the collections had become fixed objects of commentary and the critical apparatus had been fully systematised.

Al-Adhkar — sometimes titled Hisn al-Muslim in later abridgements, though the original is his — collects the prayers, invocations and formulae of remembrance transmitted from the Prophet, arranged by occasion, with attention to the soundness of each report. It became and remains the standard classical reference for Muslim devotional practice.

Students and the Transmission of His Teaching

Al-Nawawi's closest student, Ala al-Din Ibn al-Attar, is the single most important source for his life, and the relationship between the two deserves to be described rather than left as a citation.

Ibn al-Attar studied with al-Nawawi in Damascus, remained attached to him closely enough to observe the daily habits the biographical tradition reports, and after his teacher's death composed the earliest full account of his life, Tuhfat al-Talibin fi Tarjamat al-Imam al-Nawawi. Nearly everything later biographers report about al-Nawawi's asceticism, his manner of teaching, and the circumstances of his death traces back to this single near-contemporary witness, which is both the source's strength — it is early, specific and written by someone who was present — and the reason the historiographical caution above applies to it: a single admiring witness, however well placed, is not the same evidentiary position as multiple independent ones.

Beyond Ibn al-Attar, al-Nawawi's teaching reached the following generation of Damascene and Egyptian scholars through the ordinary channels of the college system he had worked within, and his books rather than a school of personal disciples became the chief vehicle of his influence — a pattern consistent with the argument, made in the assessment below, that his significance lies in the texts themselves rather than in an institutional legacy built around his person.

Theology and Devotion

Al-Nawawi's intellectual formation combined several strands that were characteristic of the Sunni religious learning of thirteenth-century Syria.

In law he was a Shafi'i, and his legal writing set out the doctrine of that school with the authority described above. In theology he stood within the Ash'ari tradition, the school of theology that had become a principal framework of Sunni belief among Shafi'is and Malikis from the eleventh century onward, which drew on reasoned argument in expounding the articles of faith and read the descriptive expressions of scripture in a manner that preserved the divine transcendence. His commentary on Sahih Muslim reflects these positions where the hadith touch on questions of belief.

In devotional life he was drawn to the disciplined spirituality that flourished among the jurists of his period: care for sincerity of intention, watchfulness over the states of the heart, restraint in food, dress and possessions, and the regular practice of the remembrance of God. Al-Adhkar and the ethical chapters of Riyad al-Salihin are the direct expression of this, and the manner of life the biographers describe is its practical form.

The combination — Shafi'i in law, Ash'ari in theology, hadith scholar by discipline, devout and ascetic in practice — was that of the established Sunni learning of Syria and Egypt in his age, and it is one reason his works could become the common texts of a whole tradition: they expressed the shared learning of the mainstream in a clear and usable form.

Because his books became so widely used, his learning travelled with them, and generations of students absorbed the outlook they carried through works they took up for other purposes — a legal manual, a hadith anthology, a book of prayers. Authority of that quiet, textual kind is a considerable form of influence, and it is the main channel through which al-Nawawi's teaching reached the Sunni world.

Historiographical Note

Al-Nawawi is well documented and the difficulties concerning him are of a particular kind.

The sources for his life are the biographical dictionaries of the Mamluk period and the notices written by his own students, of whom Ibn al-Attar was the closest and produced the earliest account. These are near-contemporary and specific about his teachers, appointments, works and dates. The basic outline is secure.

The problem is that the near-contemporary sources are also devotional. Ibn al-Attar and those who followed him wrote to commemorate a revered teacher, and the portrait they produce — of total renunciation, of a dozen lessons a day, of a refusal of every worldly comfort, of a man who never married and ate almost nothing — belongs to a recognised genre of scholarly hagiography. The specific claims cannot be checked, and some of the numerical details have the flavour of pious enumeration. The prudent position is to accept the general character of the accounts, which are consistent and early, while treating the particulars as literary.

A second point concerns his intellectual position, which is best described in its own terms. He was a Shafi'i in law and an Ash'ari in theology — the established Sunni learning of his time and place — and he was drawn to the disciplined devotional practice of the jurists of his day, while working firmly within the juristic tradition. The most accurate account of him is the one his own works support: a scholar who consolidated the established mainstream of the learning of his age.

Finally, his dates: the year of birth appears as 631 of the Hijra, corresponding to 1233 or 1234, and the year of death as 676, corresponding to 1277, with 677 occasionally given. The variation is minor and unresolved.

Assessment

Al-Nawawi is the outstanding consolidator in Sunni Islam, and consolidation turns out to have been the most durable kind of contribution available to a thirteenth-century scholar.

His genius lay in synthesis rather than in system-building. What he did was take disciplines that had reached maturity — Shafi'i law, hadith scholarship, the commentary tradition, devotional practice — and produce in each the text that subsequent generations would actually use. The Minhaj settled Shafi'i doctrine for the school's remaining history. The commentary on Sahih Muslim became the commentary. Riyad al-Salihin became the ethical anthology. The Forty Hadith became the elementary curriculum. Al-Adhkar became the devotional manual. Five separate fields, five standard works, one working lifetime of about twenty years.

The scale is the part that resists explanation, and it is why the tradition of his asceticism carries some weight: the output is that of a man who did nothing else.

Two observations round out the picture. His achievement was one of synthesis: his works gather and set in order the learning of thirteenth-century Damascene Sunnism, and the Minhaj is properly read as al-Nawawi's authoritative statement of Shafi'i doctrine, which later jurists of the school studied, commented upon, and at points refined further. And al-Majmu, his most ambitious work, was left unfinished at his death, a substantial portion of a still larger design.

What is striking about his position today is how invisible it is. The works are used constantly by people with no interest in their author, in mosques, madrasas and homes across the Muslim world, in Arabic and in dozens of translations. Among the scholars treated in the article on Muslim scholars who changed the world, al-Nawawi has the widest continuing readership and the least public recognition — an outcome that the biographical accounts of his character suggest he would not have minded.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran — the verses that open the chapters of Riyad al-Salihin, structuring the whole work around scriptural themes
• Quran, Surah al-Nahl (16:90) and Surah al-Hujurat (49:10–13) — on justice, good conduct and the ethics of community, among the texts most used in his ethical anthology
• Quran, Surah al-Ahzab (33:41–42) and Surah al-Rad (13:28) — on the remembrance of God, the scriptural basis of al-Adhkar
• Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — the collections from which Riyad al-Salihin and the Forty Hadith are overwhelmingly drawn, and the latter the subject of his major commentary
• Al-Nawawi. Al-Arbain al-Nawawiyya (The Forty Hadith) — his selection of the hadith stating the fundamentals of religion
• Al-Nawawi. Riyad al-Salihin — his thematic anthology of prophetic tradition, together with his own introductory note setting out its purpose and method; consulted here through the Explanation of Riyadus Saliheen
• Explanation of Riyadus Saliheen (Vol 1) — the commentary that reproduces al-Nawawi's introductory note, in which he states his intention to compile a summary of authentic narrations covering the inward and outward manners of the path to the Hereafter, to confine himself to clear authentic hadith referenced to the reliable collections, and to open each chapter with verses of the Qur'an
• Sunnah.com, Riyad as-Salihin — the collection as hosted in full, used for its authorship, its scale of roughly nineteen hundred hadith selected from the six books, and its standing among the most widely read hadith works
• Shamela.ws, Riyad al-Salihin: the Ibn Kathir edition of Mahir Yasin al-Fahl and the Mu'assasat al-Risala edition of Shu'ayb al-Arna'ut — used for the author's full name and death year (676 AH), the thematic arrangement by kitab, and the presence of the author's own preface
• Al-Nawawi. Al-Adhkar — his collection of transmitted prayers and invocations

Classical Islamic Sources

• Al-Nawawi. Al-Minhaj: Sharh Sahih Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj — the standard classical commentary on Sahih Muslim
• Al-Nawawi. Minhaj al-Talibin — the reference manual of Shafi'i law
• Al-Nawawi. Al-Majmu Sharh al-Muhadhdhab — his unfinished masterwork of comparative law and hadith criticism
• Al-Nawawi. Al-Taqrib wa al-Taysir — his manual on the sciences of hadith
• Al-Nawawi. Tahdhib al-Asma wa al-Lughat — his biographical and lexical dictionary
• Ibn al-Attar. Tuhfat al-Talibin fi Tarjamat al-Imam al-Nawawi — the biography by his closest student, the earliest account of his life
• Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrazuri. Ulum al-Hadith — the manual al-Nawawi abridged
• Al-Subki, Taj al-Din. Tabaqat al-Shafiiyya al-Kubra [14th century] — the standard biographical dictionary of the school

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Brown, Jonathan A. C. Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. — on the mature commentary phase of hadith scholarship
• Brown, Jonathan A. C. The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
• Chamberlain, Michael. Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. — the standard study of the institutions in which he was formed and taught
• Heffening, W. and Brown, Jonathan. "al-Nawawi." Encyclopaedia of Islam.
• Hallaq, Wael B. Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. — on the role of authoritative manuals such as the Minhaj in the schools of law
• Calder, Norman. Islamic Jurisprudence in the Classical Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Berkey, Jonathan P. The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
• Makdisi, George. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.

Further Reading

• Melchert, Christopher. The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th–10th Centuries C.E. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
• Irwin, Robert. The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250–1382. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
• Hurvitz, Nimrod. The Formation of Hanbalism: Piety into Power. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. — on the Hanbali tradition of learning in the same period
• Knysh, Alexander. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. Leiden: Brill, 2000. — on the devotional currents with which he was in sympathy
• Nawas, John and Bernards, Monique, eds. Islamic Prosopography. Leiden: Brill, 2005.