There has been intense debate among scholars of Islamic law about the origins of a system of jurisprudence in early Muslim societies. Since George Makdisi’s seminal work, The Rise of Colleges, scholars have debated when and how the various elements of the elaborate Islamic legal enterprise crystallized. Christopher Melchert has recently argued that the ‘schools’ of Islamic law consolidated by the end of ninth century, much earlier than suggested by Makdisi. In a related development, Joseph Lowry has forcefully argued that al-Shafi’s Risale, written in the early part of 9th century, was a mature presentation of a systematic theory of Islamic jurisprudence. Both Lowry and Melchert have deepened our understanding of the institutional aspects of early Islamic legal developments. What remains somewhat obscure are the conceptions of moral selfhood, individual will, resolve, aesthetic judgments and human nature that legal theories and institutions presuppose, rather require, for the latter to perform their work and become authoritative in the lives of people. This essay interrogates Shafi’s Risala with a view to uncovering conceptions of selfhood that are latent in this seminal and early work of Islamic legal theory. I argue that Shafi’s legal theory relies, implicitly, on particular conceptions of moral agency and moral motivation that forms the bedrock upon which his legal theory is built. For instance, Shafi’s emphasis on Bayan as a source of moral guidance pre-supposes a dialogical self, one that engages in an inner dialectic to reach a probable moral judgment. Such a conception of the self then lends itself well to his emphasis on the centrality of textual sunnah over lived practice. Since al-Shafi’s theory became normative for subsequent legal developments in the Islamic tradition, we can argue that the conceptions of moral selfhood that his theory relies on were also widely inhabited and practiced in early Muslim society. Thus, this study helps us identify key features of early Muslim selfhood by paying attention to ethical conceptions latent in al-Shafi’s Risala. Muslim selfhood, especially in the formative period of the Islamic tradition, is a subject that remains to be thoroughly investigated according to prominent Islamic legal and ethical scholars such as Ebrahim Moosa. Understanding early conceptions of Muslim selfhood would throw into sharper relief pre-modern and modern ideas about Muslim moral agency and identity.