Al-Mughni by the Hanbali scholar Ibn Qudamah al-Maqdisi is regarded as one of the great works of comparative Islamic jurisprudence. A piece by Manzurul Haque on Prothom Alo's Islam page traces how the book came about, how it is built and why it still matters.
Ibn Qudamah's full name was Abu Muhammad Abdullah ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Qudamah al-Maqdisi. He was born in 1146 CE (541 AH) in the village of Jabbain near Nablus in Palestine, and studied with the leading scholars of Damascus and Baghdad, among them Abdul Qadir Jilani. His scholarship combined fiqh, hadith, legal theory (usul) and asceticism (zuhd).
According to the piece, his books form a complete curriculum. The first stage is Umdat al-Fiqh, which gives a single reliable ruling of the school without disputes or long proofs. The intermediate al-Muqni introduces the range of opinions within the school. Al-Kafi then teaches the evidence from the Quran, hadith and the Companions behind each ruling and the reasoning drawn from it. Only after these three does a student reach al-Mughni.
Al-Mughni is formally a commentary on Mukhtasar al-Khiraqi, the concise Hanbali text of Abu al-Qasim Umar ibn al-Husayn al-Khiraqi (d. 334 AH), which arranged about 2,300 legal questions. Its title means roughly 'the one that makes self-sufficient': the writer explains that it is so complete that a researcher who has read it rarely needs to depend on other books.
Its defining feature is comparison. Ibn Qudamah goes beyond the Hanbali school to present faithfully the views and proofs of Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam al-Shafi'i, Sufyan al-Thawri and other mujtahids, then gives his own conclusion, even when it departs from the Hanbali position. The Shafi'i scholar Izz al-Din ibn Abd al-Salam is quoted as saying he did not feel at ease issuing fatwas until he had a copy of al-Mughni.
The piece also compares it with the major works of other schools: al-Kasani's Bada'i al-Sana'i (Hanafi), Ibn Abd al-Barr's al-Istidhkar (Maliki), al-Nawawi's al-Majmu (Shafi'i) and Ibn Hazm's al-Muhalla (Zahiri). In the writer's view, Ibn Qudamah's comparative range is wider than al-Kasani's, al-Nawawi gives more attention to grading hadith chains, and unlike Ibn Hazm's combative style, Ibn Qudamah accepts analogy (qiyas) and treats opposing views with courtesy.
The writer concludes that al-Mughni belongs not only to the Hanbali school but to the whole Muslim ummah, and that the path Ibn Qudamah laid out, from one school's text to the heights of comparative law, has guided jurists in every age since.
Photo: أبو تائب / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0); the volumes of al-Mughni
Source: Prothom Alo
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