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The four schools of Sunni Islam are each named after a classical jurist (who had no idea his rulings would be so imitated - the concept of taqlid, "blind imitation", arose later on).

The Sunni schools are the Shafi'i ( Malaysia), Hanafi ( Indian subcontinent, West Africa, Egypt), Maliki ( North Africa and West Africa), and HanbaliHanbali is one of the four schools ( Maddhabs) of Fiqh or religious law within Sunni Islam. It is considered to be the most conservative of the four schools. The school was started by the students of Imam Hanbal. Hanbali is predominant among Muslims in th ( ArabiaArabia is a peninsula in Southwest Asia at the junction of Africa and Asia. It lies north of Ethiopia and northern Somalia; south of Israel, the disputed Palestinian territories, and Jordan; and southwest of Iran. The coastal limits of Arabia comprise: on).

These four schools share most of their rulings, but differ on the particular hadithThe Hadith (, pl. Ahadith is a body of laws, legends and stories about Muhammad's way of life, (Arabic, Sunnah which includes his biography or the sira) and the sayings themselves where he elaborated on his choices or offered advice; many parts of the Hads they accept as authentically given by MuhammadMuhammad ( Arabic also transliterated Mohammad Mohammed and formerly Mahomet following Latin spelling) was the founder of Islam, and is revered by Muslims as the final prophet of God. According to his traditional Muslim biographies (called sirah in Arabic and the weight they give to analogy or reason ( qiyasIn Islamic jurisprudence, Qiyas is the process of analogical reasoning from a known injunction ( nass) to a new injunction. It is one of the four undisputed sources of Islamic law, the others being Qu'ranic interpretation, the Sunnah, and ijma (Consensus)) in deciding difficulties.

The Jaferi school ( IranIran ( Persian: ) is a Middle Eastern country located in southwestern Asia that until 1935 was referred to in the West as Persia''. It borders Pakistan (909km of border) and Afghanistan (936km) to the east, Turkmenistan (1000km) to the northeast, the Casp and IraqThe Republic of Iraq is a Middle Eastern country in southwestern Asia encompassing the ancient region of Mesopotamia. It shares borders with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to the south, Turkey to the north, Syria to the north-west, Jordan to the west and Iran to) is more associated with Shia Islam. The fatwas, or time and space bound rulings of early jurists, are taken rather more seriously in this school, due to the more hierarchical structure of Shia Islam, which is ruled by the imams. But they are also more flexible, in that the imams have considerable power to consider the context of a decision, which has been lacking in Sunni Islam historically.

Each school reflects a unique al-urf or culture, that being the one that the classical jurists themselves lived in, when rulings were made. Some suggest that the discipline of isnah which developed to validate hadith made it relatively easy to record and validate also the rulings of jurists, making them far easier to imitate ( taqlid) than to challenge in new contexts. The effect is, the schools have been more or less frozen for centuries, and reflect a culture that simply no longer exists.

Early shariah had a much more flexible character, and many modern Muslim scholars believe that it should be renewed, and the classical jurists should lose their special status. This would require formulating a new fiqh suitable for the modern world, e.g. as proposed by advocates of the Islamization of knowledge, and would deal with the modern context.

This modernization is opposed by most ulema who spend much time memorizing the traditional schools of classical jurists, and who typically lack the power or infrastructure to research or to reliably enforce rulings that go beyond the traditional norms. They often accuse those who seek to reform fiqh of seeking simply to replace Islam with a more secular form of democracy and law.

See also: shariah, qiyas, hadith, al-urf, taqlid, ijtihad