Career
His full name was Muhhammad Ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Shawkani. The surname "ash-Shawkani" is derived from Hijrah ash-Shawkan, which is a town outside San‘a’
As a result, he opposed much of the Zaydi doctrine. Of his work issuing fatwas, ash-Shawkani stated "I acquired knowledge without a price and I wanted to give it thus." Participant of the fatwa-issuing work of many noted scholars typically is devoted to the giving of ordinary opinions to private questioners.
Ash-Shawkani refers both to his major fatwas, which were collected and preserved as a book, and to his "shorter" fatwas, which he said "could never be counted" and which were not recorded.
He insisted that any jurist who wanted to be a mujtahid fī"l-madhhab (a scholar who is qualified to exercise ijtihad within a school of Islamic law), was required to do ijtihad, which stemmed from his opposition to taqlid for a mujtahid, which he deemed to be a vice with which the Shariah had been inflicted. Salafis in Saada, would later claim ash-Shawkani as an intellectual precursor, and future Yemeni regimes would uphold his Sunnization policies as a unifier of the country and to undermine Zaydi Shi"ism.
He also profoundly influenced the Ahl al-Hadith in the Indian subcontinent (such as Siddiq Hasan Khan) and Salafis in Saudi Arabia and across the globe.
