Sufyan al-Thawri

Sufyan al-Thawri, born in Khorasan in 716 during the Umayyad Caliphate, was a Sunni Muslim scholar, jurist and ascetic who founded the Thawri school of Islamic jurisprudence, an early legal methodology that influenced the juridical thought of all four major Sunni schools even though it never achieved their lasting institutional prominence. He relocated to Kufa for his education and by 748 had moved to Basra, where he studied under some six hundred teachers. He consistently refused high government office offered to him by Umayyad authorities, was ranked among a group of scholars known as the Eight Ascetics, and spent his final year in hiding following a dispute with the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi. He died in Basra in 778.