To speak of notions of community is to inevitably run up against questions of leadership. In Islamic studies, these questions have been predominantly framed in terms of the religio-political leadership exercised by the ruling class in their various manifestations, both historical and ideal. As a result, studies of the nature of the communal leadership exerted by elite classes often occupy secondary status. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, this paper analyses the role played by the ‘ulama in cultivating certain ethical sensibilities among their constituencies. While some attention will be paid to the particular moral values the ‘ulama sought to foster within the body politic, the focus of the paper will be on the discursive mechanisms through which this particular aspect of their leadership role was imagined, theorized, and enacted, and the meta commitments under which that discursivity operated. Seminal contributions from the likes of Makdisi, Chamberlain, Berkey and Zaman have taught us much about the intellectual structures and networks that facilitated the literary output of the ‘ulama in various locales. More recent work in the social history and anthropology of Muslim societies – the dominant examples here are the contributions of Peirce and Rosen – have made clear that a subsection of the ‘ulama, the q?d?s, found intricate ways of weaving moral considerations into the judicial process in order to uphold, arbitrate, redirect and create shared communal norms. This paper examines the intersection of these two sets of literature by recovering moral commitments embedded in genres usually thought of as strictly legal – fiqh manuals, fatwas, treatises of usul al-fiqh. In particular, I argue that the Aristotelian commitment to conscientious ethical cultivation and habituation, recently examined in a modern Muslim context by Saba Mahmood, found expression in the legal concept of i?r?r. I?r?r, or persistent behaviour, was thought to transform discrete acts into a moral trait, a habitus deeply entrenched in the soul, echoing Aristotle’s observation that “ethical virtue is acquired through habit.” This conception found its way into legal maxims, court judgements and even the fundamental five-fold categorization of legal norms, indicating its deep penetration into ways of thinking about the law. This was a communal task, whose natural agents were thought to be the ‘ulama, once again in line with Aristotle’s vision that the “legislators, by habituating people of the city to do good, make them good.” This paper seeks to explore how seriously they took that role.