Abdur Rahman bin Amr Al Awzaee (d. 156 Hijri) was the scholar of Fiqh for the people of Shãm and the first to author books in that country. He was born during the end of the period of the Companions and was from the students of Az-Zuhree and Yahya bin Abi Kathir. Both of them gave Al Awzaee a sahefah (scripture) containing hadiths and they both permitted him to narrate to the people from these scriptures.
Al Awzaee used to say: “We act upon these narrations, but we don’t narrate them”.
This is because Al Awzaee didn’t read these suhuf (scriptures) to them, thus it didn’t please him to narrate from them.
Al Awzaee had written vast amounts of hadith and sunan in his youth. He wrote fourteen books from his shaykh, Yahya bin Abi Kather then they were burnt. He had a school of thought in Fiqh, just like the four schools of thought and he has followers in Sham and Spain and then it became extinct.
ترجمة مختصرة لعبد الرحمن بن عمرو الأوزاعي رحمه الله تعالى (٨٨-١٥٦هـ) مأخوذ من كتاب ‘تاريخ تدوين السنة وشبهات المستشرقين’ ص ٨٧
(Translation by Ismaeel Beaumont, Rabi Al Akhir, 1435)
