text: The word risāla in Arabic means a "message" or "letter". Shafi'i's treatise received its name owing to a traditional, though unverified, story that Shafi'i composed the work in response to a request from a leading traditionist in Basra, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān bin Mahdī; the story goes that Ibn Mahdī wanted Shafi'i to explain the legal significance of the Quran and the sunna, and the Risāla was Shafi'i's response.
  In this work, al-Shafi'i is said to have outlined four sources of Islamic law, though this division based on four has been attributed to later commentators on the work rather than to Shafi'i himself.
  Contents
  Introduction
  On al-Bayān (Perspicuous Declaration)
  On Legal Knowledge
  On the Book of God
  On the Obligation of Man to Accept the Authority of the Prophet
  On the Abrogation of Divine Legislation
  On Duties
  On the Nature of God's Orders of Prohibition and the Prophet's Orders of Prohibition
  On Traditions
  On Single-Individual Traditions
  On Consensus (Ijmā‘)
  On Analogy (Qiyās)
  On Personal Reasoning (Ijtihād)
  On Juristic Preference (Istiḥsān)
  On Disagreement (Ikhtilaf)
  The above list of contents follows Khadduri's translation. However, Khadduri rearranged the treatise in two places. Khadduri's chapters 8 and 3 (in that order) both follow Shafi'i's chapter on Traditions in the original. Khadduri rearranged those chapters because they did "not appear to fit into the logical order of the book." Therefore, if one wishes to read Khadduri's translation while following Shafi'i's original arrangement, one can read the chapters in the following order: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 8, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.