A nice hand-drawn overlay of the geographical distribution of schools of Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh) from Wikipedia. This kind of map will, eventually, become a layer that you will be able to drop into your own analysis. For example, what is the rate of women’s secondary education in the Islamic world? How does that map to these schools of interpretation? And so on.

Note especially the discontinuous distribution of the Shafi (Shāfi‘ī) school, the second largest by number of adherents, presumably due to its prevelance in populous Indonesia. It’s the most ‘maritime’ of all of the schools, with adherents in east Africa, Yemen, parts of south Asia and all of southeast Asia. In the past, it had followers in the Hijaz, the coastal Red Sea communities in western Saudi Arabia, and I wonder if the hard line dividing eastern and western Yemen in the map reflects ground truth. (The eastern Yemeni region of Hadhramaut was a source of Muslim traders and preachers pivotal for the conversion of southeast Asia.)

Actually, it would also be cool to see this over time, because I have to suspect that the distribution was continuous at one point from the Horn of Africa up through the Red Sea into the eastern Mediterranean, including the Levant, Syria and what is now Jordan. It’s not indicated on the map, but Kurds are Shafi too. The eastern Mediterranean is marked on this map as “Hanafi with Shafi rites.”

So, some time in the future, we’ll be able to overlay a map of late medieval maritime trade routes with the spread of the Shafi school of Islamic jurisprudence and I bet they’ll fit together nicely.