How did you…

Posted under fiqh, law, thinkers by rahma

…chose a madhab?  For all my blurkers out there (and I know you exist), if you follow a madhab, how did you chose it?

My development as a new muslim was rather haphazard, as I didn’t really have a single guide offering a monolythic perspective on Islam.  It seems that converts are often guided towards a particular perspective on islamic practice, based on who they hang out with and what materials they are given to study.  Oftentimes, here in the US at least, the path they’re lead on tends to be salafi in orientation.

Instead, I dabbled, reading things here and there, until I finally settled on “traditional islam,” and determined that I should pick a madhab to start getting everything right with Allah (swt).  Originally, I tended towards the hanafi madhab, because it seemed to have the most books available in english, as well as a good fatwa resource at SunniPath.

However, I now would consider myself shafi’i.  Why?  I wish I could say that it is because I studied all the madhabs in depth and found that the rulings of the shafi’is were more sound.  Alas no, I’m attracted to the shafi’i madhab because my favorite islamic scholar, Imam al Ghazali, was a shafi’i.  If it was good enough for him, then it’s good enough for me.

Of course, now that I know what I’m looking for, I’ve found a decent amount of shafi’i resources -  SunniPath, Al Maqasid, and Reliance of the Traveler - that provide enough for the seeker such as myself.