Our Hardest Battle: The War Nobody Sees

Imam Abu ‘Abdullah Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi’i said, “I have never faced a battle harder than the battle between my self and my heart.”

Imam ash-Shafi’i had memorised the entire Qur’an by age seven, memorised Imam Abu ‘Abdullah Malik ibn Anas’ al-Muwaththa’ by age ten, and travelled between Makkah, Madina, Yemen, Baghdad, and eventually Cairo in pursuit of knowledge, at a time when travel itself carried genuine physical risk.  He founded an entire madzhab, one of the four schools that continue to govern Sunni jurisprudence today.  A man of that discipline, describing his internal battle as harder than anything else he faced, is making a claim worth taking seriously.

Imam ash-Shafi’i developed his legal reasoning in Iraq, producing what scholars now call his qawl qadim, his old position, on numerous questions of fiqh.  After relocating to Egypt later in life, he revised a substantial portion of these rulings, producing his qawl jadid, his new position, based on fresh evidence and local context he encountered there.  Reversing one’s own published legal conclusions, in public, as a scholar whose authority rested on being right, is not a small act of intellectual humility.  It is exactly the battle he described: the self wants to defend its earlier position out of pride, while the heart, properly ordered, wants only the correct ruling regardless of whose name was attached to the earlier one.  He fought that battle in full public view, repeatedly, and the qawl jadid stands today as the primary reference for the Shafi’i madzhab because he won it.

Most people spend considerable energy preparing for external battles: career setbacks, financial pressure, conflict with other people.  Almost nobody trains deliberately for the one battle Imam ash-Shafi’i ranked hardest, the daily contest between the self’s appetite and the heart’s better judgement.