Tahrir al-Nuqul fi Nafaqat al-Furu wa al-Usul
- Author died
- 1252 AH
- Editions
- T Istanbul
Tahrir al-Nuqul fi Nafaqat al-Furu wa al-Usul (The Editing of Transmissions Regarding the Maintenance of Descendants and Ascendants) is a legal treatise on Hanafi jurisprudence by the Damascene jurist Ibn Abidin (d. 1252 AH / 1836 CE), dedicated to establishing a systematic governing principle for familial maintenance obligations.
Purpose and Composition
Ibn Abidin wrote the epistle to resolve longstanding ambiguities surrounding the financial maintenance (nafaqa) owed between ascendants (usul), descendants (furu), and collateral kin within prohibited degrees of marriage (arham muharrama). In his introduction, he noted that although the subsidiary rulings were dispersed across authoritative Hanafi manuals, classical jurists had not articulated a comprehensive, unifying principle (dabit jami) to delineate them, leaving contemporary muftis and jurists vulnerable to confusion and misguidance when issuing legal responses.
He later integrated references to the treatise into his major legal commentaries, including Radd al-Muhtar ala al-Durr al-Mukhtar and Minhat al-Khaliq ala al-Bahr al-Ra'iq, describing its overarching framework as an unprecedented, rational systematization (taqsim aqli) of the school's transmitted positions that reconciles every branch case without leaving exceptions.
Structure and Contents
The work is organized into three chapters followed by a conclusion:
- First Chapter (al-Fasl al-Awwal): Surveys the established texts and transmitted statements of the Hanafi school on familial maintenance, drawing from compendia such as Multaqa al-Abhur, al-Ikhtiyar, Mukhtasar al-Nuqaya, Tanwir al-Absar, al-Dhakhira, and Bada'i al-Sana'i. It outlines the legal taxonomy of kinship into birth kinship (qarabah al-wiladah) and collateral relationship, clarifying that maintenance obligations are tied either to direct parent-child lineage or to uterine kin within prohibited degrees of marriage.
- Second Chapter (al-Fasl al-Thani): Analyzes the apparent contradictions and legal problems (ishkalat) in the transmitted rules. It examines the interplay between proximity (qurb), direct lineage (juz'iyya), and inheritance eligibility (irth), reconciling anomalies where inheritance ratios are considered despite lineage proximity, or where proximity overrides inheritance shares in various combinations of surviving relatives.
- Third Chapter (al-Fasl al-Thalith): Formulates the universal governing rule, classifying family structures based on the presence of individual or multiple relatives across descendants, ascendants, and collaterals, and mapping each subsidiary case to its root legal rationale, followed by further legal clarifications.
Transmission and Publication
The treatise is preserved in manuscript collections such as the Zahiriyya Library in Damascus and Dar al-Kutub in Cairo. It was printed in Cairo (1301 AH / 1884 CE) and Istanbul (1325 AH / 1907 CE), and has also been published as the twelfth epistle in Ibn Abidin's collected treatises (Majmu'at Rasa'il Ibn Abidin).
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