Law

Behcet ül-Fetâvâ (Collection of Fatwas)

Manuscript in Ottoman Turkish
Copied by El Hac Mustafa bin Ismail, 1169 [1755/56]
268 leaves, 29 x 17.5 cm.

Ebu'l-Fazl Abdullah, died 1156 [1743]

The fatwas of Ebu'l-Fazl Abdullah, also called Abdullah Efendi, was Şeyh ul-Islam of Sultan Mahmud I, are important in that they made possible the reformist developments of the time. Among his fatwas, special mention should be made of his approval of the establishment of the first printing press of Ibrahim Müteferrika. This fatwa can be found on sheet 229b of the manuscript. The word Fatwa carries in it the meaning of consultation. Specifically it refers to an Islamic legal opinion issued by an expert scholar (Mufti) in...
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Kitāb al-Tawḍīḥ fī Ḥall Ghawāmiḍ al-Tanqīḥ [wa huwa Sharḥ al-Tanqīḥ] (Book of Elucidation on Solving the Ambiguities of the Revision [and this is the commentary on Tanqīḥ al-uṣūl by the same author])

Manuscript in Arabic
Copied by Muhammed el Hac Ilyas in Mahrusa [Istanbul], 867 [1462]
212 pp., 27 x 18 cm
unbound with remnants of original leather cover

ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Masʿūd al-Maḥbūbī, died 746 [1346/1347]

Sadr al-Shari'a, a Bukharan Hanafi theologian and jurist who lived in Bukhara and Herat in the post-Mongol period, attempted to synthesize the prevalent Ash'ari theological tradition with the Central Asian Hanafi juristic tradition. He focused in particular on the Hanafi Usul work of al-Pazdawi (d. 1089), on the one hand, and the two most influential theological works of the period, the al-Mukhtasar (The Abbreviated) of lbn al-Hajib (d. 1249) and al-Mahsul (The Harvest) of al-Razi, on the other. Many commentaries w...
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