Author Biography and History of Islamic Jurisprudence

Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Hajwi ath-Tha'alibi al-Fasi was a Moroccan Maliki scholar born in Fez in 1291 AH (1874 CE). He came from a distinguished scholarly family of Moroccan origin and received a thorough traditional education at the Qarawiyyin mosque-university — one of the oldest universities in the world — before becoming one of the leading Islamic legal scholars of early twentieth-century Morocco.

Al-Hajwi served in a number of important positions in the Moroccan religious-legal establishment, including as a teacher at the Qarawiyyin and as a senior official in the Moroccan government during both the pre-Protectorate and Protectorate periods. His engagement with French colonial rule of Morocco was complex: he sought to preserve Islamic scholarly institutions while also advocating for the engagement of Islamic scholarship with the challenges of modernity.

His major historical work, Al-Fikr as-Sami fi Tarikh al-Fiqh al-Islami (The Elevated Thought in the History of Islamic Jurisprudence), is a comprehensive history of Islamic legal thought from its origins in the Quran and Sunnah through its development in the four major legal schools and their subsequent histories up to the author's own time. The work runs to four volumes in modern editions.

Al-Fikr as-Sami occupies a distinctive position in Islamic intellectual history as one of the few classical-style scholarly works to address the historical development of fiqh as a historical question rather than simply as a tradition to be transmitted. Al-Hajwi examined how Islamic law developed, why the various legal schools emerged when and where they did, and how the fiqh tradition had changed across centuries — questions that required both deep legal knowledge and historical perspective.

He died in Rabat in 1376 AH (1956 CE), shortly after Moroccan independence, having witnessed both the threat to traditional Islamic scholarship posed by colonial rule and the beginnings of its institutional recovery.