The Revival of Shāfiʿism and Intellectual Life in Damascus

Chapter 1 describes the restoration of Damascus in the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries under successive Seljuk, Zangid, and Ayyubid dynasties, with a focus on the revival of religious and intellectual life in the city through the patronage of political elites and the influx of scholars from other parts of the Muslim world. The chapter traces the formation of two competing Shāfiʿī legal traditions in Damascus. The dominant and longer-established tradition was formalist, traditionalist, and transmission-oriented, and it combined centuries-old indigenous Damascene scholarly culture with the Iraqi Shāfiʿī tradition, which had taken root in Damascus starting in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century. The second minority tradition drew on the Khurasani strand of Shāfiʿism, which had arrived in Damascus in the second half of the sixth/twelfth century, and it was more analytical, exploratory, and rationalist in orientation.