Appendix A - Contents of substantive legal works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Treatises on legal doctrine (fiqh) tend to differ from each other in terms of the organization of their subject-matter, although the chapters on rituals always occupy in these works first place and follow a fixed order (i.e., ablution, prayer, alms-tax, fasting and pilgrimage). The differences in the order of treatment of other legal spheres, at times great, can be attributed to the various ways the legal schools conceived of the logical and juristic connections between one area of fiqh and another, which is to say that the most significant organizational variations between and among fiqh works can be attributed to school affiliation and the particular commentarial and interpretive tradition in each of them. Organizational variation can also be easily detected in the diachronic developments within one and the same school. It must be said that the synchronic and diachronic variations in the organization of these works within and across the schools both remain a fertile subject of enquiry.
What follows is a schematic account of fiqh subject-matter as presented in the relatively later work al-Mīzān al-Kubrā by ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī (d. 973/1565), an Egyptian Shāfiʿite jurist who attempted to show that, despite the seemingly great differences among the major jurists of the four Sunnite schools, they all derived their doctrines legitimately from one and the same “font of Sharīʿa” (I, 7–8, 11, 47, 54).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sharī'aTheory, Practice, Transformations, pp. 551 - 555Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009