[3] The biographer and historian Al-Dhahabi reports that Awzāʿī was from Sindh, and he was a mawali of ʾAwzā tribe in his early life.

[6] Very little of al-Awzāʿī's writings survive, but his style of Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) is preserved in Abu Yusuf's book Al-radd ʿala siyar al-Awzāʿī, in particular his reliance on the "living tradition," or the uninterrupted practice of Muslims handed down from preceding generations.

[8] Al-Awza'i differed with other schools of jurisprudence in holding that apostates from Islam ought not be executed unless their apostasy is part of a plot to take over the state.

[9] In the introduction to his work al-Jarh wa-l-Ta'dil, Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi preserves a corpus of ten letters attributed to al-Awza'i.

Among other things, he encouraged the Abbasids to ransom Muslims who were captured by the Byzantines in Erzurum, and to increase the wages of the Syrian soldiers in charge of protecting the Levantine coast.