Mujam al-Mustalahat wa al-Alfaz al-Fiqhiyya
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- Editions
- Dar Al-Fadilah
Mujam al-Mustalahat wa al-Alfaz al-Fiqhiyya (Dictionary of Jurisprudential Terms and Expressions) is an Islamic legal reference work compiled by the Egyptian scholar and Al-Azhar University lecturer Mahmud Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Munim, dedicated to defining terms across Islamic jurisprudence and legal theory (usul al-fiqh) .
Background and Purpose
The author completed the compilation on 22 Ramadan 1419 AH (9 January 1999 CE) while serving as a lecturer in usul al-fiqh at the Faculty of Sharia and Law at Al-Azhar University in Cairo . In the preface, Abd al-Munim noted that earlier classical glossaries were largely sectarian—focusing on specific legal manuals, such as al-Fayyumi's al-Misbah al-Munir for Shafi'i legal terms or Ibn Muflih's and al-Ba'li's glossaries for Hanbali texts—while many modern specialized dictionaries lacked comprehensiveness, modified established juristic phrasing in ways that obscured meaning, or omitted source citations . He sought to assemble terms dispersed across rare lexicographical treatises, Quranic exegesis, hadith commentaries, and legal manuals into a single accessible compendium .
Structure and Methodology
The dictionary is organized strictly alphabetically by word entry rather than by morphological trilateral root, omitting only initial prefixes such as the definite article al- and familial honorifics like ab or umm, following the organizational model of works like al-Munawi's al-Tawqif ala Muhimmat al-Ta'arif and the Kuwaiti al-Mawsu'ah al-Fiqhiyyah . Words appear under singular, dual, or plural forms depending on their most frequent usage in legal literature .
For each term, the work typically details:
- Linguistic and technical definitions: Tracing the linguistic root meaning and illustrating how the technical juristic sense derives from it .
- Madhhab-specific definitions: Attributing technical variations to their respective schools using primary reference texts—such as al-Nawawi's al-Majmu' for Shafi'i definitions, Sharh Fath al-Qadir for Hanafi definitions, Ahmad al-Dardir's al-Sharh al-Saghir for Maliki definitions, and Ibn Qudamah's al-Mughni for Hanbali definitions .
- Semantic distinctions: Highlighting distinctions between closely related concepts (e.g., theft, breach of trust, usurpation, and grave-robbing) as well as antonyms .
- Evidentiary support: Providing textual evidence from the Quran, Hadith, Arabic poetry, prose, and proverbs to contextualize meanings .
Publication
The work was published in Cairo by Dar al-Fadilah in three volumes in 1419 AH (1999 CE) .
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