Tuhfat al-Sail fi Bayan ma fi Umdat al-Ahkam min al-Masail
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- Dar al-Imam al-Shafi'i
Tuhfat al-Sail fi Bayan ma fi Umdat al-Ahkam min al-Masail (Arabic: تحفة السائل في بيان ما في عمدة الأحكام من المسائل, lit. 'The Inquirer's Gift in Explaining the Legal Issues in Umdat al-Ahkam') is a legal commentary by Abu Bakr al-Hammadi on the hadith collection Umdat al-Ahkam by Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi .
Origin and Scope
Al-Hammadi composed the work while teaching Umdat al-Ahkam, which he praised as one of the finest concise legal primers owing to its restriction to legal hadiths agreed upon by al-Bukhari and Muslim . Recognizing that numerous scholars had produced brief, medium, and expansive commentaries on the text, he sought to contribute an explanation focusing specifically on practical juristic rulings .
Method and Contents
In his introduction, the author states that his primary method is to restrict the discussion to the legal issues and rules extracted directly from each prophetic tradition (al-masail al-mustafada min al-hadith) . On rare occasions, he addresses lexical definitions, supplementary scholarly benefits, or inadvertent errors occurring in al-Maqdisi's original text .
The commentary opens with the Book of Purification (Kitab al-Taharah), beginning with the well-known hadith of intention: إنما الأعمال بالنيات ("Actions are judged only by intentions") . In expounding upon the hadiths, al-Hammadi incorporates classical legal analysis and discussions from leading jurists and theologians, including citations from Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Shafi'i, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Mahdi .
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