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.

The writings of al-Jahiz are regularly adduced as an example of Hellenism's early impact on medieval Arabic intellectual culture. His relationship to Aristotle in particular is a growing preoccupation among scholars, who have nevertheless done little more than enumerate al-Jahiz's many borrowings from and disagreements with "the author of the Organon" [sahib al-Mantiq]. My paper proposes a more sophisticated model for the relationship between these two thinkers, one predicated not on mere "debt" but a nuanced "influence" more usually invoked by poetic criticism than in history of philosophy. For it is not the case that citations of Aristotle sit inertly within al-Jahiz's texts. In fact al-Jahiz is in relentless dialogue with his predecessor, often treating him more as a rival than a source. It will be observed that al-Jahiz's overt borrowings from Aristotle are matched by his covert reworkings of received Aristotelian paradigms. These latter escape notice without close attention to the corpus of Aristotelian texts available in al-Jahiz's day – above all the paraphrase of the Organon by Muhammad b. 'Abd Allah b. al-Muqaffa' (son of the better-known author of Kalila wa-Dimna). My focus is on the third section of the Organon, which is the Peri Hermeneias (Aristotle’s treatise "On interpretation"), and two important revisions of its doctrines by al-Jahiz. The first of these is Aristotle's claim that assertoric statements can only be true or false; the second is the four-part semiotic paradigm (consisting of writing, "things in speech," "things in the soul," and external pragmata) with which Peri Hermeneias begins. In his own treatment of these questions al-Jahiz does something very telling, which is to make expansions on the Aristotelian paradigm without naming Aristotle explicitly. So it is that to the categories of truth and falsehood al-Jahiz adds a third category, which is the factually incorrect statement made in genuine ignorance without the intention to lie. And in place of Aristotle's semiotic model (prefaced by Ibn al-Muqaffa' with the dictum "these matters have four aspects") al-Jahiz will develop a five-part semiotic model in his books al-Hayawan and al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin. In neither case is Aristotle mentioned by name, an omission which is no less significant than the explicit references to Aristotle long noted by readers of al-Jahiz. In so contending, I hope to contribute to a more informed and nuanced apprehension of the medieval Arabic reception of Greek philosophy.