Shafi`i's Risala is generally thought to represent the very first work on legal theory in the Islamic legal tradition. Yet, despite its widely recognized importance, its actual content has received only superficial attention. Most students of it have contented themselves with reducing its message to a four-part outline (Qur'an, Sunna, ijma` and ijtihad / qiyas ) and have completely ignored the many concrete examples of legal reasoning offered in it by the author to illustrate the application of his theory. A comparison of these examples of legal reasoning with the theoretical claims made in the Risala reveals a tightly constructed, highly systematic theory of law. The entire Risala is organized around Shafi`i's concept of the bayan , the notion that all law is reducible to a finite number of combinations of Qur'an and Sunna. Shafi`i's major hermeneutic rubrics-- `amm / khas[dotbelow]s[dotbelow], naskh, jumla / nas[dotbelow]s[dotbelow], ikhtilaf al-h[dotbelow]adith, nahy and ijtihad/qiyas --are all subsumable under his categories of the bayan . Shafi`i's example problems illustrate the application of his hermeneutic rubrics, which, in turn, prove the validity of his use of the bayan as an overarching description of the law as a whole.
