Mawsuat Ahkam al-Salawat al-Khams
- Author died
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- Editions
- Dār al-Lu’lu’ah lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzī‘
Mawsuat Ahkam al-Salawat al-Khams (Encyclopedia of the Rulings of the Five Obligatory Prayers) is an extensive legal compendium on comparative Islamic jurisprudence authored by the contemporary Saudi scholar Dabyan al-Dabyan (b. 1389 AH / 1969 CE), addressing the legal rulings, prophetic traditions, and detailed issues pertaining to the obligatory prayers .
Background and Structure
The work forms part of al-Dabyan’s broader, multi-decade encyclopedic writing endeavor, to which he devoted himself full-time in preference to regular teaching, preaching, and lecturing . After composing multi-volume encyclopedias on ritual purity (Mawsuat Ahkam al-Taharah) and financial transactions (al-Mu'amalat al-Maliyyah Asalah wa-Mu'asarah), he returned to the jurisprudence of ritual acts of worship (ibadat) to compile a comprehensive project on prayer (mashru' al-salah) .
Al-Dabyan organized the overall prayer project into two primary sections :
- The rulings of the obligatory prayers (ahkam al-salah al-maktubah).
- The rulings of supererogatory prayers (ahkam salat al-tatawwu').
Upon concluding the detailed section on the description of prayer (sifat al-salah), the completed volumes of the prayer series numbered ten volumes . At the suggestion of colleagues seeking an accessible version of that specific core discussion without requiring acquisition of the full multi-volume set, he also published the description of prayer separately under the title al-Jami' fi Ahkam Sifat al-Salah (The Comprehensive Guide to the Rulings on the Description of Prayer), retaining the identical issue sequences, hadith numbering, and citations from the parent work .
Method and Approach
The encyclopedia employs a rigorous comparative and evidential approach (fiqh muqaran). Al-Dabyan focuses on defining legal problems (tahrir al-masa'il), verifying opinions directly from their primary classical sources, evaluating hadiths and narrations to distinguish authentic transmissions from weak ones, and critically analyzing textual arguments and rational justifications .
Although raised and educated within the Hanbali legal tradition predominant in Buraydah in the Al-Qassim Region, his methodology is not limited to a single school of thought; rather, he documents and analyzes positions across the various Sunni legal schools (madhahib), assessing each argument and endorsing the stance that is most firmly grounded in textual evidence and sound reasoning .
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