Mukhtasar al-Sarim al-Maslul ala Shatim al-Rasul
- Author died
- 778 AH
- Editions
- Dār ʿAṭāʾāt al-ʿIlm
Mukhtasar al-Sarim al-Maslul ala Shatim al-Rasul (The Abridgment of the Drawn Sword Against the Reviler of the Messenger) is a legal treatise abridged by the Hanbali scholar Badr al-Din al-Baali (d. 778 AH / 1376 CE) from the expansive work of Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH / 1328 CE) concerning the rulings on blasphemy and insults against the Prophet Muhammad .
Origin and Purpose
The original treatise, al-Sarim al-Maslul ala Shatim al-Rasul, was authored by Ibn Taymiyyah in 693 AH in response to a specific incident involving the revilement of the Prophet . In that work, Ibn Taymiyyah extensively elaborated on juristic opinions, legal arguments, and textual evidences, frequently citing dozens of Quranic verses and hadiths for individual legal points . Badr al-Din al-Baali, a disciple of Ibn Taymiyyah's leading students such as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and Ibn Abd al-Hadi, abridged the work to distill its primary objectives, eliminate extensive digressions, and make its juristic deductions accessible to students of knowledge by condensing the evidence to select foundational proofs from the Quran and the Sunnah .
Contents and Structure
The abridgment preserves the foundational fourfold thematic division established in Ibn Taymiyyah's original text :
- The First Issue: The ruling that anyone who reviles the Prophet must be executed, whether the offender is a Muslim or a non-Muslim .
- The Second Issue: The determination that execution is mandatory and unavoidable even if the offender is a non-Muslim subject under treaty (dhimmi), precluding any option for unconditional release (mann) or ransom (mufadah) .
- The Third Issue: The legal ruling regarding the offender if they demonstrate repentance (tawbah), as well as the ruling if a non-Muslim embraces Islam after committing the revilement .
- The Fourth Issue: The precise legal and theological delineation of what constitutes revilement (sabb) versus what does not, and the distinction between revilement and general disbelief (kufr) .
Manuscript and Publication
The work is preserved in an autograph manuscript written in the hand of Badr al-Din al-Baali himself, occupying folios 1b to 20b (or folios 2 to 21a) of a composite volume containing several of his abridgments of Ibn Taymiyyah's works . This manuscript was previously owned by the scholar Sulayman ibn Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1233 AH), later transferred through the al-Assafi family library, and subsequently deposited in the library of Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh .
The text was edited by Ali ibn Muhammad al-Imran under the supervision of Bakr ibn Abd Allah Abu Zayd, with review by Muhammad Ajmal al-Islahi, and published jointly by Dar Ata'at al-Ilm and Dar Ibn Hazm .
Answer updated