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In addition to his views on ijtihād and tajdīd, al-Suyūṭī’s lasting influence in Islamic legal thought lies in the area of legal precepts (pithy maxims or questions that sum up areas of the law). Al-Suyūṭī’s al-Ashbāh wa-l-naẓāʾir stands as a core work in this genre of legal literature and is still a popular textbook for students at Egypt’s premier institution of religious learning, al-Azhar. Using the pragmatic theory of Grice and others, I argue that legal precepts fulfill a number of key discursive functions for the jurist. It is with al-Suyūṭī’s Ashbāh that he is most successful in asserting his authority as an aggregator, abstractor, and framer of the law. The power of framing lies in the ability to distill key universal principles from the vast corpus of Islamic substantive law and to assert that these principles represent the essence and spirit of the Sharīʿa.

The final chapter brings the discussion of al-Suyūṭī’s legal persona squarely into the modern era. The discussion explores how contemporary jurists in Egypt use the legacy of the great fifteenth-century scholar in their efforts to frame their identity and to assert authority as interpreters and spokesmen for the Sharīʿa in a political arena that is fraught with tension. In the midst of Mursī’s embattled presidency, leading scholars at Egypt’s state religious institutions rushed to news and social media outlets to affirm their status as representatives of “orthodoxy” and to distance themselves from more extreme salafī trends that threaten to change the way Islamic law is practiced in the modern Egyptian state. It is striking how closely the image of the moderate Sunni, Sufi-minded, theologically sound scholar grounded in the juristic tradition (according to the accepted legal schools) fits with the persona that al-Suyūṭī strove so tenaciously to construct.

This chapter focuses on intentional corporeal action that may lead to the fulfillment of religious goals. The main concern here is to provide a general picture of the range of observances and activities that go into the construction of saintly personas in Persianate Sufi literature. The materials covered indicate practices that Sufis thought enabled them to overcome perceived inherent weaknesses of their bodies and turn the higher potential invested in them into reality. The chapter is organized into three sections that aim to convey an umbrella picture of actions associated with the bodies of those who came to be regarded as great Sufi masters. The first section presents Persianate Sufi views on Islamic legal precepts that constitute the most universal Islamic injunctions concerning the body. The second section illustrates the idea of differentiated potential of human bodies and its actualization through examples that pertain to key moments in the lives of famous Sufi masters. The last section concentrates on zikr and samaʿ, rituals quintessentially associated with Sufi practice.