From Personal Legal Opinion to National Civil Code

The four schools of Sunni fiqh that still structure the discipline today, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali, each trace to a founding jurist working in the eighth and ninth centuries and spread geographically according to which empires and dynasties patronised which school, so that the Hanafi school became dominant across the former Ottoman lands and Hanafi faqihs the ordinary jurists of that vast region, while the Maliki school became similarly dominant across North and West Africa under different rulers, a distribution that still roughly maps onto where each school predominates today.

The nineteenth century Ottoman Empire took the unusual step of codifying a large part of Hanafi fiqh into the Mecelle, a formal civil code completed in 1876 that reduced centuries of scattered faqih opinion on contracts and civil obligations into fixed, numbered articles a court could simply apply, a model of turning classical fiqh into state statute that a number of Muslim-majority countries later adopted in their own family and civil law codes, changing the faqih's practical role in those countries from an independent interpreter of the sources into, more often, an expert consulted on the interpretation of an already-codified law.