[1] Sufyan al-Thawri was born in Kufa in 719, and became the main scholar of fiqh of the city's hadith school.
[2] After al-Thawri's move to Basra later in his life, his jurisprudential thought (usul) became more closely aligned to that of the Umayyads and of al-Awza'i.
[1] He spent the last year of his life hiding after a dispute between him and the Abbasid Caliph Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi.
The Caliph had sent a letter to al-Thawri requesting him to accept the post of judge of Kufa on the condition that he did not make any judgment or ruling in opposition to the state policy.
The second of these reasons is that despite having created fairly extensive compilations of hadith and their interpretations, al-Thawri instructed his principal student, Ammar ibn Sayf, to destroy and burn all of his works.