Al-Shafi‘i

Born in Gaza in 767 CE to the Quraysh tribe's Banu Muttalib clan, al-Shafi'i moved to Mecca at age two and grew up there before living in Medina, Yemen, Baghdad, and Egypt. He served as a judge in Najran and became a scholar whose work cut across jurisprudence, hadith, theology, and asceticism. His book al-Risala gave Islamic legal principles their first coherent structure, fundamentally redirecting how law would be understood and applied. He died in 820, leaving his name to one of Sunni Islam's four major schools of jurisprudence.