al-Fatawa al-Kubra li-Ibn Taymiyya
- Author died
- 728 AH
- Editions
- Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah
al-Fatawa al-Kubra (The Major Legal Rulings) is a major multi-volume collection of legal responsa and treatises by the Hanbali jurist and theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728 AH / 1328 CE), arranged systematically according to the standard chapters of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).
Origins and Compilation
The core of the collection stems from the legal rulings and treatises that Ibn Taymiyya composed during his residency in Egypt between 705 AH and 712 AH, most of which were authored while he was imprisoned there. In his didactic poem al-Kafiya al-Shafiya, his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya described these Egyptian responses as spanning six voluminous tomes, whereas Ibn Rajab recorded them as comprising seven volumes.
As noted by Ibn Abd al-Hadi, several disciples of Ibn Taymiyya gathered a substantial portion of his substantive legal verdicts (al-fatawa al-furu'iyya) and arranged them topically across jurisprudence headings in multiple volumes, entitling the compilation al-Fatawa al-Misriyya (The Egyptian Fatwas), which was also named by some as al-Durar al-Madiyya min Fatawa Ibn Taymiyya (The Radiant Pearls from the Fatwas of Ibn Taymiyya). A selection of the text was later abridged by his student Badr al-Din Muhammad ibn Ali al-Ba'li (d. 777 or 778 AH) under the title al-Qawa'id al-Nuraniyya fi Ikhtisar al-Durar al-Madiyya, commonly printed as Mukhtasar al-Fatawa al-Misriyya.
Structure and Contents
The collection was first published in print in five volumes under the title Majmu'at al-Fatawa al-Kubra by Faraj Allah al-Kurdi in Cairo (1329 AH), without explicitly identifying the original compiler. Textual comparison between this printed edition and al-Ba'li's Mukhtasar indicates that the first volume, portions of the second volume, and the fourth volume up to page 297 contain the original core of al-Fatawa al-Misriyya, while the remainder incorporates supplementary treatises and legal selections gathered from other writings of Ibn Taymiyya.
Among the materials incorporated into the published five-volume collection is Ibn Taymiyya's major theological work al-Tis'iniyya, which forms part of the fifth volume, as well as al-Ba'li's compilation of Ibn Taymiyya's legal preferences, al-Ikhtiyarat al-Fiqhiyya.
Publications
Following the early Cairo edition (1329 AH), al-Fatawa al-Kubra was issued in several later printings:
- An edition introduced and annotated by the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Hasanayn Muhammad Makhluf, published by Dar al-Ma'rifa in Beirut (1386 AH / 1403 AH).
- An edition edited by Muhammad Abd al-Qadir Ata and Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Ata, published by Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya in Beirut (1408 AH / 1987 CE).
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