Mawsuat al-Ijma fi al-Fiqh al-Islami
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Mawsuat al-Ijma fi al-Fiqh al-Islami (موسوعة الإجماع في الفقه الإسلامي, "Encyclopedia of Consensus in Islamic Jurisprudence") is a multi-volume collaborative reference work on Islamic legal consensus, compiled as a coordinated series of doctoral dissertations by a group of researchers in the Department of Islamic Culture at the College of Education at King Saud University .
Origin and Scope
The project was established to comprehensively collect, verify, and critically analyze the numerous reports of scholarly consensus (ijma') scattered throughout classical Islamic legal literature and hadith commentaries . Because the vast body of consensus claims across all branches of Islamic jurisprudence exceeded the scope of an individual doctoral thesis, the work was divided among postgraduate scholars who each undertook specific legal chapters .
The contributors include:
- Usamah ibn Sa'id al-Qahtani, who prepared the volume on ritual purification (Masa'il al-Ijma fi al-Tahara) .
- Ali ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Khudayri, who authored the study on compensatory financial contracts (Uqud al-Mu'awadat al-Maliyyah) .
- Zafir ibn Hasan al-Amri, who addressed marital and family law (Abwab al-Nikah) .
- Aziz ibn Farhan al-Anazi, who examined donations and inheritance shares (Abwab al-Tabarru'at wa-l-Fara'id) .
Structure and Content
The encyclopedia opens with an extensive theoretical introduction addressing the legal and foundational doctrines of consensus in Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) . This introductory study explores:
- The linguistic and technical definitions of consensus .
- The rank of ijma' as the third source of Islamic law following the Quran and the Sunnah .
- Categories of consensus according to participants, explicit declaration versus tacit agreement (sukuti), and definitive (qat'i) versus presumptive (zanni) consensus .
- Terminology used by jurists to assert consensus and related expressions .
- The textual foundation (mustanad) of consensus .
- Subsidiary legal questions regarding consensus, including consensus formed after prior disagreement, consensus on the lowest common denominator, the legal effect of dissent by one or two scholars, the effect of divergence from the Zahiri school, and the weight given to theological innovators .
- Methodological variations among classical authorities in transmitting consensus .
The remaining sections follow the standard ordering of Islamic jurisprudence books (abwab al-fiqh), covering acts of worship, financial transactions, contracts (such as sales, leases, partnerships, loans, and agricultural agreements), marriage, judicial procedures and testimonies, and inheritance .
Methodology
The authors employ a dual inductive and deductive methodology :
- Inductive tracking: Systematically surveying authoritative classical references across legal schools—including works by Ibn al-Mundhir, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Abd al-Barr, Ibn Qudamah, al-Nawawi, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, and al-Shawkani—to extract every legal issue where an explicit or implied consensus was reported .
- Analytical verification: Scrutinizing each claim by comparing juristic viewpoints alongside their respective textual evidence, distinguishing true established consensus from asserted consensus where valid dissent existed, and establishing whether the consensus claim stands verified or refuted .
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