A Critical Edition of “Umdat al-Nazir ‘ala al-Ashbah wa'l-Naza'ir

This book presents a critical edition of the twelfth/eighteenth century manuscript on the subject of legal maxims ‘Umdat al-Nazir 'ala al-Ashbah wa'l-Naza'ir’. It was composed by a distinguished Hanifite jurist Abu ‘l-Su'ud al-Husayni and is a commentary on an earlier seminal text al-Ashbah wa'l-Naza'ir’ authored by Ibn Nujaym in the tenth/sixteenth century. The volume is divided into three main parts the first of which provides an historical and theoretical introduction to the genre of al-qawa'id al-fiqhiyyah (legal maxims). The second part introduces the two texts and their authors, discusses their literary legacy within the Hanafi School of law and covers issues of editing, authenticity and provenance. Finally, the third part of the book consists of four edited chapters of the ‘Umdat al-Nazir 'ala al-Ashbah wa'l-Naza'ir’. The first of these is the author’s introduction to his work followed by three chapters, one for each of the first three qawa'id. The work is important as a commentary on one of the most significant legal texts which revived interest in the subject within the Hanafi School of law after a stagnation period of five centuries.It is also the most copious of all the forty-four commentaries on Ibn Nujaym’s book and it is a combination of the commentaries of at least three well known Hanafite scholars. Because Abu'l-Su'ud synthesizes the most authoritative opinions from these commentaries, ‘Umdat al-Nazir serves as a definitive summation of the discourse on legal maxims within the school.