Disagreements of the Jurists

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al-Qadi al-Nu'man. Disagreements of the Jurists

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كتاب اختلاف أصول المذاهب

للقاضي النعمان

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Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān’s Works on Law and Legal Theory

Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān devoted a great deal of energy to the composition of legal works. His earliest such work was entitled Kitāb al-Īḍāḥ; al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān compiled it while working under al-Mahdī, that is, between 313/925 and 323/934. Containing 3,000 folios, it was a comprehensive collection of oral reports attributed to the Imams, arranged by legal topic, that drew on Zaydi and Imami Shiʿi sources. The extant section of this work, a substantial fragment from the chapter on ritual prayer, was examined by Wilferd Madelung, who discussed the sources on which al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān drew, identifying over twenty works devoted to Shiʿi law and to reports from the Imams and other ʿAlids. Most of these works were compiled in Kufa in southern Iraq in the third/ninth century, by authors who belonged to the Zaydi, Imami, and similar subsects of Shiʿism and who related material mainly from Kufan transmitters. It thus contrasts with the canonical collections of the Twelver Shiʿah such as al-Kāfī by Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī (d. 329/941) and Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh by Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī (d. 381/991), which rely heavily on transmitters from Qum instead. Overall, the material that al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān used in compiling this work suggests that it represents a compromise between the Zaydi and Imami traditions of Shiʿism. One may generalize this characterization to Ismaʿili law in general.7 The extant fragment of Kitāb al-Īḍāḥ has recently been published.8 This work was designed to serve as a comprehensive source of oral reports for use in determining the rulings on the points of law, parallel to the six books of the Sunnis: the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870), the Ṣaḥīḥ of Muslim (d. 261/851), the Sunan of Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī (d. 275/889), the Sunan of Ibn Mājah (d. 273/886), al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ of al-Tirmidhī (d. 279/892), and the Sunan of al-Nasāʾī (d. 303/915). It was a fundamental part of al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān’s project to establish the foundations of Ismaʿili law and to put it on a par with Sunni Islamic law. It was exactly contemporary with the first main canonical collection of oral reports of the Twelver Shiʿi, al-Kāfī by Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī (d. 329/941), which served a similar purpose.

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