al-Maqsad li-Talkhis ma fi al-Murshid
- Author died
- 926 AH
- Editions
- Dar al-Mushaf
al-Maqsad li-Talkhis ma fi al-Murshid (The Objective in Summarizing What Is in al-Murshid) is a treatise on the Quranic science of pausing and initiating recitation (waqf wa-ibtida'), composed by the Egyptian Shafi'i scholar and judge Zakariya al-Ansari (d. 926 AH / 1520 CE) .
Background and Methodology
The work is an abridgment of al-Murshid fi al-Waqf wa-l-Ibtida', a comprehensive manual on pauses by Abu Muhammad al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sa'id al-Omani (d. c. 400 AH) . In his introduction, al-Ansari notes that al-Omani aimed to include all pause transmissions recorded by scholars of the discipline . Al-Ansari sought to condense this material down to its essential points while adding two key features: identifying the place of revelation (makki or madani) for every surah and incorporating supplementary rulings, drawn primarily from the prominent Quran reader Abu 'Amr al-Dani .
Structure and Content
Al-Ansari begins the book by defining waqf both as the physical act of ceasing recitation to take breath and as the specific junctures designated by Quranic readers . He classifies Quranic pauses into several qualitative categories, including complete (tamm), sufficient (kafi), good (hasan), acceptable (salih), intelligible (mafhum), permissible (ja'iz), explanatory (bayan), and repugnant (qabih) .
Before proceeding through the text of the Quran, al-Ansari includes nine preliminary chapters addressing technical rules of phonology and orthography relevant to pausing:
- The connective alif (alif al-wasl) .
- The letter ya' in fixed and elided forms (al-ya'at) .
- The feminine ending ha' (ha' al-ta'nith) and variations in pausing upon it .
- Occurrences of feminine endings transcribed in the codices with ta' versus ha' .
- Supplementary pausal ha' letters appended to word endings (ha' al-sakt) .
- Pausing on the third-person pronominal suffix (ha' al-kinayah) .
- Pausing on the ends of vocalized words, whether nunated or unnunated, through vowellessness (sukun), slight vocalization (rawm), or lip-rounding (ishmam) .
- The particle kalla across its thirty-three occurrences in the second half of the Quran .
- Compounds and words written conjoined or separated in the Uthmanic orthography (al-maqtu' wa-l-mawsul) .
Following these introductory chapters, the book surveys the entire Quran surah by surah, beginning with Surat al-Fatiha and concluding with Surat al-Nas . For each surah, al-Ansari identifies whether it was revealed in Mecca or Medina, analyzes permissible and optimal pause points verse by verse, and frequently cites grammarians and Quranic scholars such as Ibn al-Anbari, Abu Hatim, and Abu 'Amr al-Dani to justify the grammatical and syntactic foundations of each pause .
Transmission and Publication
The treatise was widely circulated in manuscript form and preserved across numerous collections, including the libraries of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Zahiriyya in Damascus . Early print editions appeared in Bulaq in 1280 AH and 1282 AH, and in Cairo in 1305 AH . It was also published in Cairo in 1290 AH in the margins of Tanwir al-Miqbas min Tafsir Ibn 'Abbas, attributed to al-Fayruzabadi . In modern printing, it was edited by Sharif Abu al-'Ula al-'Adawi and published alongside al-Ushmuni's Manar al-Huda by Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyyah in Beirut (1422 AH / 2002 CE) .
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