This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Al-Shafi'i's treatise al-Risala set out, for the first time in a systematic way, a hierarchy of legal sources, the Quran, the Sunna of the Prophet transmitted through hadith, consensus, and analogical reasoning, a documented methodological innovation distinct from the substantive legal rulings that were his school's other, more familiar output. The treatise argued that a sound hadith from the Prophet overrides local custom or a jurist's own personal reasoning even when the two conflict.
That argument pulled Islamic jurisprudence generally toward treating transmitted prophetic reports as binding legal evidence, a documented shift every later Sunni school absorbed to some degree regardless of its own school affiliation, whether or not it ever formally called itself Shafi'i. Al-Risala's influence is recorded as extending well past the boundaries of the school its own author founded.
That a single treatise setting out a source hierarchy shaped how every later Sunni school, not only the one bearing its author's own name, came to weigh prophetic hadith against custom and personal reasoning marks al-Risala's influence as a documented case where a methodological argument outgrew the particular school its author built to carry it forward.