Mawsuat al-Fiqh ala al-Madhahib al-Arbaa - Yaser al-Najjar
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Mawsuat al-Fiqh ala al-Madhahib al-Arbaa (Encyclopedia of Jurisprudence According to the Four Schools) is a contemporary comparative Islamic legal reference work compiled by the Egyptian scholar Abu Ammar Yasir ibn Ahmad ibn Badr al-Najjar al-Dimyati . The book compiles the rulings, internal variants, and scriptural evidences across the four Sunni legal schools: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali traditions .
Composition and Purpose
Yasir al-Najjar began writing the encyclopedia at the age of twenty-four in the Damietta Governorate of Egypt and completed it in Istanbul, Turkey, during the first ten days of Dhu al-Hijjah 1443 AH (30 June 2022 CE), shortly before turning forty . The composition required nearly sixteen years of research across multiple libraries .
The author stated that his primary objective was to facilitate the study of comparative jurisprudence (al-fiqh al-muqaran) for students of knowledge by overcoming the organizational difficulties, obscure phraseology, and presentation defects often encountered in traditional comparative texts .
Methodology and Structure
The work opens with biographical sketches of the four eponymous jurists—Abu Hanifa, Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal—followed by an introductory study examining the causes of legal disagreement among jurists (asbab ikhtilaf al-fuqaha) and the classical question of whether ultimate truth in legal deduction is singular or whether every qualified jurist who exercises legal reasoning (mujtahid) is considered correct .
For every legal issue (mas'ala), the author follows a structured method:
- Compiling the positions of the four madhhabs, drawing directly from the authoritative classical (mutaqaddimun) and later (muta'akhkhirun) literature within each school .
- Documenting the scriptural and rational evidences (adilla) relied upon by each school, whether from the Quran, the Sunnah, legal analogy (qiyas), or other juristic principles, noting both sound and weak proofs without omission .
- Detailing internal school variations, distinguishing between predominant (rajih), outweighed (marjuh), well-known (mashhur), and anomalous transmissions, as well as multiple reports narrated from a single imam and the particular choices made by their respective disciples .
- Identifying the officially relied-upon (al-mu'tamad) and accepted stance of each madhhab, while refraining from imposing personal juristic weighting (tarjih) between the schools themselves .
- Grading the hadith narrations cited in legal argumentation; for traditions outside Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the author adhered primarily to the authenticity evaluations of Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani to maintain uniform methodological standards and avoid turning the work into an overly expansive hadith critique .
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