Ṭabaqāt al-Fuqahāʾ: Classifying the Jurists of the Ḥanafī Madhhab

A student opening al-Hidāyah for the first time soon meets a curious habit of the Ḥanafī tradition: its books are forever ranking themselves. A position is ẓāhir al-riwāyah (the apparent transmission), another is al-muftā bihi (the view adopted for fatwā), a third is marked wa huwa aṣaḥḥ (and this is the sounder). Behind this constant grading of opinions lies an older and more interesting question. If the rulings of a madhhab are graded, what about the men who produced them? Were all the jurists of the school doing the same kind of work, or did each generation perform a different task within a single, centuries-long collective project? The literature that answers it is the genre of ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ, the "ranks of the jurists". Its most influential Ḥanafī example is a short treatise by an Ottoman chief muftī, one that has shaped how the school understands its own past ever since.

Why the jurists were ranked

To rank the jurists is not to grade their intelligence. It is to map the division of labour inside a living legal tradition. A madhhab is not a finished code handed down complete from its founder. It is a structure built in stages: a founder lays the foundations, his immediate companions raise the walls, later masters fit out the rooms for cases the founder never faced, and later scholars still catalogue, weigh and tidy what has built up. Each of these tasks demands a different competence. The man who founds the principles of legal theory (uṣūl) is doing something categorically distinct from the man who decides, three centuries later, which of two transmitted reports to print in his primer. A typology of ranks is simply an honest account of that difference.

The stakes were practical, and pressed on three kinds of reader. The muftī had to know whose opinion he was permitted to follow and whose weighing of the evidence bound him, for a fatwā is only as authoritative as the jurist whose view it carries. The student needed to know why his teachers held some books as gospel and others with caution, and why a later author might prefer one report to another yet never overturn the founder's principles. And the author of a matn (a concise base-text) or a sharḥ (a commentary on it) needed the limits of his own licence: what he might do with the inherited material, and what lay beyond his station.

Authority inside a madhhab is therefore layered: at the top, the power to legislate from the sources; at the bottom, the duty to transmit faithfully what others have settled. Naming the competences that lie between is the work of the ṭabaqāt literature.

Ibn Kamāl Pāshā and the seven ranks

The scholar who gave the Ḥanafīs their classic scheme was ʿAllāmah Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Sulaymān b. Kamāl Pāshā, known in Turkish as Kemalpaşazâde and in Arabic as Ibn Kamāl Pāshā. He belonged to the high Ottoman establishment. His grandfather Kamāl Pāshā had been an amīr (a commander) of the state; he himself rose through the learned hierarchy to become Shaykh al-Islām, the chief muftī of Constantinople, an office he was appointed to in 932/1526 and held until his death in 940/1534 under Sulṭān Sulaymān the Magnificent. He was Ḥanafī in law, the official school of the empire, and Māturīdī in creed, and he was prolific across the disciplines.

His treatise on the ranks of the jurists circulated under several titles, because he did not name it at the outset. Manuscripts call it variously Risālah fī Ṭabaqāt al-Mujtahidīn, Risālah fī Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanafiyyah and simply Ṭabaqāt al-Fuqahāʾ. The last is the most fitting, for the work itself opens by announcing that the jurists, not only the mujtahids, fall into seven classes, and four of its seven ranks are not mujtahids at all.

One point governs all that follows, and the whole later discussion turns on it: Ibn Kamāl ranks juristic activity, not men. His categories name what a jurist characteristically did in building the school, not how gifted he was in the abstract. A scholar of the first order whose lasting work was the weighing of reports belongs among those who weigh reports, whatever his raw power. Read as a league table of genius, the scheme is simply misread, and that is how its critics read it. Because it sorts functions and not persons, one man may fill several at once: he might settle cases the founder never addressed, elaborate ambiguous ones by takhrīj, and weigh rival reports by tarjīḥ across a single career. His rank names his dominant work, not the ceiling of his ability.¹

Ibn Kamāl did not invent ranking from nothing. Earlier uṣūl writing had already sorted jurists across the schools into broad classes: the fully independent mujtahid (mujtahid muṭlaq mustaqill); the affiliated mujtahid, equipped like the first but holding to an earlier imam's method (mujtahid muntasib); the restricted mujtahid tied to a single school; and beneath them the plain imitator (muqallid). ʿAllāmah Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245), a Shāfiʿī, gave it classic form. Ibn Kamāl's own contribution, so far as the later literature shows, was to fit a graded, seven-tier scheme to the internal history of the Ḥanafīs in particular. The distinction is older than him; the Ḥanafī architecture is his.

Before we take each rank in turn, the whole scheme can be seen at a glance. The decisive line falls between the third rank and the fourth, where ijtihād gives way to taqlīd:

Rank one: al-mujtahidūn fī al-sharʿ

The mujtahids in the revealed law (al-sharʿ) founded the principles of uṣūl and drew the branch-rulings (furūʿ) straight from the four proofs, the Book, the Sunnah, consensus and analogy, imitating no one in either. The four founders of the schools stand here, Imām Abū Ḥanīfah (d. 150/767), Imām Mālik (d. 179/795), Imām al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) and Imām Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), with any who walked their road. Theirs was to build a method of reasoning from the ground up. It is the one rank that owes taqlīd to no one; everything beneath depends, in some degree, on what it laid down.

Rank two: al-mujtahidūn fī al-madhhab

The mujtahids within the madhhab, Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798), Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/805) and the rest of Imām Abū Ḥanīfah's companions, drew rulings from the same four proofs and sometimes parted from their teacher in a branch-ruling, but never abandoned his uṣūl. They reasoned freely inside the frame he had built: loyal in principle, independent in detail.

Rank three: al-mujtahidūn fī al-masāʾil

The third rank exercises ijtihād only in cases (masāʾil) on which the founder left nothing. It may not oppose him in uṣūl or furūʿ; where he is silent it derives a ruling on his principles. Ibn Kamāl names a distinguished line: al-Khaṣṣāf (d. 261/874), Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933), Abū al-Ḥasan al-Karkhī (d. 340/952), Shams al-Aʾimmah al-Ḥalwānī² (d. 448/1056, with variant dates reported), Shams al-Aʾimmah al-Sarakhsī (d. c. 483 to 490 AH / c. 1090 to 1096 CE), Fakhr al-Islām al-Bazdawī (d. 482/1089) and Fakhr al-Dīn Qāḍīkhān (d. 592/1196). Rank two could differ with the founder; this rank only fills his silences.

Rank four: aṣḥāb al-takhrīj

With the fourth rank we cross from mujtahid to muqallid. These are the men of takhrīj, the "extraction" of doctrine, and Ibn Kamāl's exemplar is the great Abū Bakr al-Jaṣṣāṣ al-Rāzī (d. 370/981), author of Aḥkām al-Qurʾān. Such a man cannot perform ijtihād at all, Ibn Kamāl says; but by his command of the uṣūl and his grasp of the school's method he can take an undetailed or ambiguous statement of the masters and elaborate it, settling the ambiguity by his own reasoning and by analogy on its like. Inherited work, not foundational, and yet the engine that turned the school's terse transmissions into a body of answered cases.

Rank five: aṣḥāb al-tarjīḥ

The fifth rank performs tarjīḥ, the giving of preponderance to one transmitted report over another. Its exemplars are Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037) and Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), the author of al-Hidāyah. Where rank four resolves ambiguity, rank five weighs competing transmissions and declares which should stand.

Soundness of transmission, clarity, accord with qiyās, ease upon the people: these are what tarjīḥ weighs with. This is the rank, more than any other, whose membership his critics would contest.³

Rank six: aṣḥāb al-tamyīz

The sixth rank are the muqallids capable of tamyīz, "distinguishing": they can tell the strongest position from the strong and the weak, and sort ẓāhir al-riwāyah from ẓāhir al-madhhab and the rare report. Their representatives are the authors of the four reliable base-texts (al-mutūn al-arbaʿah): Kanz al-Daqāʾiq of Abū al-Barakāt al-Nasafī (d. 710/1310), al-Mukhtār of Majd al-Dīn al-Mawṣilī (d. 683/1284), al-Wiqāyah of Burhān al-Sharīʿah Maḥmūd al-Maḥbūbī, and Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn of Ibn al-Sāʿātī (d. 694/1295).⁴ Their discipline is editorial, not evaluative: they keep rejected opinions and weak transmissions out of their books, so that whatever a reader meets in the four mutūn can be trusted as sound.

Rank seven: the pure muqallids

The seventh and lowest rank are the plain imitators, who can do none of this. Ibn Kamāl scorns them: they tell neither lean from fat nor left from right, but gather whatever they find "like a man collecting firewood in the dark" (ḥāṭib layl), and woe, he says, to anyone who follows them. The figure is harsh by design. Such a man cannot be trusted to transmit the school at all, for he cannot tell which of his own materials is sound. The treatise's editor protests, fairly, that fencing real competence off at a fixed generation is doubtful, since the door does not close on a date; the warning has its point all the same.

What the ranks operate on

The ranks make full sense only against the material they work on. Ḥanafī transmitted doctrine is itself sorted into three tiers, onto which the operations of ranks four, five and six map directly. ʿAllāmah Ibn ʿĀbidīn states the division most clearly in his Sharḥ ʿUqūd Rasm al-Muftī.

The first and highest tier is masāʾil al-uṣūl, the foundational cases, also called ẓāhir al-riwāyah, "the apparent transmission". These are the rulings transmitted from the school's three masters, Imām Abū Ḥanīfah, Abū Yūsuf and al-Shaybānī, as recorded in the six books of al-Shaybānī: al-Mabsūṭ (also called al-Aṣl), al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr, al-Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr, al-Siyar al-Ṣaghīr, al-Siyar al-Kabīr and al-Ziyādāt. They are called "apparent" because they reached the school from al-Shaybānī through chains of reliable narrators, so that they are firmly established from him, whether by mass transmission (tawātur) or by widespread fame (shuhrah). This tier carries the highest authority within the school.

The second tier is al-nawādir, the "rare cases", also called ghayr ẓāhir al-riwāyah. These too are transmitted from the same masters, but not in the six books; they survive in al-Shaybānī's other works (such as al-Kaysāniyyāt, al-Hārūniyyāt, al-Jurjāniyyāt and al-Raqqiyyāt), in works by others (such as al-Mujarrad of al-Ḥasan b. Ziyād and the Amālī of Abū Yūsuf), or through isolated narrations. They are "rare" precisely because they lack the manifest, sound transmission of the first tier, and they rank below it accordingly.

The third tier is al-nawāzil, also called al-fatāwā wa-l-wāqiʿāt: the rulings that the later mujtahids derived for novel cases on which they found no transmission from the earlier masters. The first compilation of this genre was the Nawāzil of Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī (d. 373/983). This is the lowest of the three tiers in authority, and the muftī prefers the higher tier to the lower whenever they conflict.

Now the lower ranks snap into focus. Takhrīj (rank four) mostly generates the second and third tiers: when al-Jaṣṣāṣ resolves an ambiguous statement of the masters and extends it, the answer flows into the nawādir and the nawāzil. Tarjīḥ (rank five) weighs the transmitted reports against one another and tells the muftī which narration to act on. Tamyīz (rank six) is the final sift: the authors of the mutūn grade the whole accumulated mass and admit into their compendia only what survives. Generating, weighing, filtering, three operations on one growing body of doctrine.

The position of al-Qudūrī and al-Marghīnānī

The fifth rank, and the placing of al-Qudūrī and al-Marghīnānī in it, is where the whole later controversy caught fire. In Ḥanafī usage tarjīḥ is precise: not the founding of law nor the derivation of fresh rulings, but the weighing of transmitted reports to pronounce which is to be preferred. Its practitioner orders what the school has handed down; he does not add to its foundations.

By that definition the placement holds. Al-Qudūrī's Mukhtaṣar and al-Marghīnānī's al-Hidāyah are saturated with just this weighing of reports; that is what their lasting work was, and so it is the rank they take. To call al-Marghīnānī's dominant role tarjīḥ says nothing of whether he was abler than a man set above him.

To a reader who takes the seven ranks for a ladder of personal eminence, putting the author of al-Hidāyah in the fifth class, below third-rank men like Qāḍīkhān, looks like an insult to one of the school's brightest lights. But that reader and Ibn Kamāl are not measuring the same thing.

From typology to practice

Whatever else it was, the seven-rank scheme was not a mere historical curiosity. It governed the everyday work of issuing fatwā, and the surest way to see this is through the muftī's procedure, the rasm al-muftī, as ʿAllāmah Ibn ʿĀbidīn set it out in his Sharḥ ʿUqūd Rasm al-Muftī.

The governing rule is simple to state and consequential in effect. The muftī is obliged to follow the opinion to which the qualified experts have given preponderance; and where they have not preferred its opposite, he defaults to ẓāhir al-riwāyah. It is not permissible, Ibn ʿĀbidīn writes, for a man to act for himself or to issue fatwā to others on the non-preferred view, save in a few special places. The procedure is hierarchical all the way down: when no settled preference exists among the three masters, the muftī takes the opinion of Imām Abū Ḥanīfah, then Abū Yūsuf, then al-Shaybānī, then Zufar and al-Ḥasan b. Ziyād. This is why Qāḍīkhān's classic formulation of the muftī's task insists that even an accomplished mujtahid inclines to the school's manifest transmissions where the companions agreed, "because the presumption is that the truth is with our companions".

Here is where the typology earns its keep. Ibn ʿĀbidīn does not reproduce Ibn Kamāl's seven ranks for completeness; he inserts them at a precise point in his argument. Commenting on his own phrase that the muftī follows the preponderance "of its experts", he explains that one may not rest content with the tarjīḥ of just any scholar who happens to weigh in. To know whose weighing binds him, the muqallid muftī must know the standing of the jurist whose opinion he transmits: not his name and town, which avail nothing, but his rank among the ranks of the jurists.

So the ranks are the muftī's instrument for telling whose judgement counts. The tarjīḥ that binds him is the work of the higher functional ranks; the four mutūn of rank six have already done his filtering, so a muftī who leans on them stands on safe ground; the imitators of rank seven are not to be followed at all.

Reception and acceptance

Ibn Kamāl's scheme was received into the mainstream of Ḥanafī learning with remarkable speed, and a chain of later authorities transmitted and endorsed it. The Ottoman biographer ʿAllāmah ʿAlī b. Amr Allāh, known as Qīnālī-zāda (d. 979/1571), incorporated it into his Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanafiyyah. ʿAllāmah Taqī al-Dīn al-Tamīmī al-Dārī (d. 1010/1601) reproduced it in his al-Ṭabaqāt al-saniyyah and praised it as "a very fine classification", a verdict that would later draw the critics' fire. The treatise also passed into the work of the Egyptian Ḥanafī ʿUmar b. ʿUmar (d. 1079/1668) and others of his generation.

The decisive moment for the scheme's authority, however, was its adoption by ʿAllāmah Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1252/1836), the most influential Ḥanafī of the modern age. He set the seven ranks out twice: in the introduction to his great gloss Radd al-Muḥtār, where he notes that "the learned Ibn Kamāl Pāshā clarified them in one of his treatises", and again, with the fuller argument we have just examined, in his Sharḥ ʿUqūd Rasm al-Muftī. (His teacher al-Ḥaṣkafī had referred to "seven well-known ranks" but mislabelled them as ranks of mujtahid; Ibn ʿĀbidīn quietly corrects this, since four of the seven are muqallids.) Once Ibn ʿĀbidīn had made the typology the framework for his account of iftāʾ, it became, in effect, the standard reference for the whole later school.

The line does not end in the nineteenth century. The framework continues into living scholarship, most prominently in Mufti Muḥammad Taqī ʿUthmānī's Uṣūl al-Iftāʾ wa-Ādābuhu, a modern manual of the principles and etiquette of issuing fatwā that is built squarely on Ibn ʿĀbidīn's ʿUqūd Rasm al-Muftī. The work treats the ranks of the jurists, of both the Ḥanafī and the Shāfiʿī schools, as the foundation of its account of who may issue fatwā and on whose authority. Ibn Kamāl's seven tiers thus remain, four and a half centuries on, a working part of how the school trains its muftīs.

Criticism of Ibn Kamāl

Acceptance was not unanimous. The fullest attack came from a distant quarter of the Ḥanafī world: ʿAllāmah Shihāb al-Dīn Hārūn b. Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Marjānī (d. 1306/1889), the jurist, historian and theologian of Kazan. In his Nāẓūrat al-Ḥaqq, a work whose principal subject is the obligation of the evening prayer in high latitudes, al-Marjānī added a long discussion taking Ibn Kamāl's typology apart. His objections fall into two kinds.

The first concerns the ordering of the ranks. ʿAllāmah al-Marjānī protests that Abū Yūsuf, al-Shaybānī and Zufar have been demoted to a second rank, beneath the founding imams of the other schools, on the slender ground that they "imitate Imām Abū Ḥanīfah in the principles". Their standing in jurisprudence, he insists, if it is not loftier than that of Imām Mālik and Imām al-Shāfiʿī, is certainly not beneath it; how then can the latter be counted among the absolute mujtahids of rank one while these "lions of the thickets of fiqh" are relegated to rank two? He levels a parallel charge over rank four: to count al-Jaṣṣāṣ al-Rāzī among muqallids "who cannot do ijtihād at all" is "a grave injustice to him", since the very men Ibn Kamāl ranks as mujtahids from Shams al-Aʾimmah onward are, in al-Marjānī's words, all dependents (ʿiyāl) upon al-Jaṣṣāṣ.

The second kind of objection concerns the placement of individuals, and it bears directly on our case of al-Qudūrī and al-Marghīnānī.

A generation later this critique was taken up by ʿAllāmah Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1371/1952), the Ḥanafī who had served as deputy to the last Ottoman Shaykh al-Islām before his exile to Egypt. At the end of his biography of Abū Yūsuf, Ḥusn al-Taqāḍī, he reproduced al-Marjānī's critique in full, and added his own complaint that lowering Abū Yūsuf and his peers to the rank of mujtahid within the madhhab "debases their station ... in the eyes of one who knows the worth of men". His stated motive was protective.

In fairness, these are serious scholars with a serious point, and on the second rank it carries real force. Abū Yūsuf was the supreme judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) of the Abbasid state, the first to hold that office; and Imām Muḥammad al-Shaybānī is the jurist from whom Imām al-Shāfiʿī, himself an eponym of the first rank, is said to have carried off a camel-load of books and drawn much of his fiqh. A man under whom a rank-one imam studied sits uneasily a rank beneath him, and there is a real case, at least by personal stature, for setting Abū Yūsuf and al-Shaybānī beside Imām Mālik and the rest. Even so, neither critic raises a typology of his own. Al-Marjānī borrows the standard uṣūl division of mujtahids from earlier writers and then dismantles Ibn Kamāl's scheme without putting anything in its place; al-Kawtharī simply transmits him. The critique tells us where Ibn Kamāl went wrong, never how the ranks should instead be drawn.

Competing understandings of juristic rank

The quarrel is more interesting than a dispute over names, because the two sides weigh different things. The critics rank a jurist by his greatest capability and his highest known activity, with a flavour of chronological precedence: al-Qudūrī preceded Shams al-Aʾimmah and so should not sit below him; al-Marghīnānī was the foremost of his age and so deserves the name of mujtahid. Ibn Kamāl ranks him by his dominant role in forming the school's law. One classification is biographical, sorting persons by eminence; the other functional, sorting contributions by type.

Here the critics blur a real distinction: between types of ijtihād and rankings of individual mujtahids. Ibn Kamāl's seven are types of activity with exemplars beneath each. Read instead as one queue of great men, in which rank five "below" rank three is a slight, they become what they were never meant to be. Much of ʿAllāmah al-Marjānī's heat comes of this slip. He hears "rank five" as "fifth-best"; Ibn Kamāl means "the rank whose work is tarjīḥ".

There is a gentler way to put the divide. The critics write with a modern sensibility, attentive to the individual scholar and jealous for his honour, asking "how good was he?" Ibn Kamāl takes the pre-modern long view of a tradition built over centuries, asking "what did this stage accomplish?" Neither question is illegitimate, and the answers cannot help diverging.

Laknawī's alternative presentation

A more constructive response came from the great Indian Ḥanafī ʿAllāmah ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī (d. 1304/1886), who did what the critics did not: he offered alternative presentations of his own. In his al-Nāfiʿ al-kabīr, the introduction to al-Shaybānī's al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr, he sets out a five-level scheme, which he takes from ʿAllāmah al-Kafawī's Katāʾib Aʿlām al-Akhyār. The five-fold version drops Ibn Kamāl's first rank (the absolute mujtahids, the four imams) and his seventh (the indiscriminate muqallids), keeping the productive middle. It relabels the first two surviving levels, calling them the rank of "the early ones of our companions" (ṭabaqat al-mutaqaddimīn min aṣḥābinā) and "the great ones of the later jurists" (ṭabaqat akābir al-mutaʾakhkhirīn); but the descriptions beneath the new labels follow Ibn Kamāl almost word for word, and the lower three levels keep his names of takhrīj, tarjīḥ and tamyīz outright. The architecture is identical; what changes is the principle of naming. The new labels borrow the Ḥanafī school's own periodisation of its history, which separates the early jurists (al-mutaqaddimūn) from the later ones (al-mutaʾakhkhirūn) at about Shams al-Aʾimmah al-Ḥalwānī (d. 448/1056). Where Ibn Kamāl had named his middle ranks by what their members did, al-Kafawī and al-Laknawī name them by the age in which they worked.

ʿAllāmah al-Laknawī then relates Ibn Kamāl's seven-fold scheme in full and criticises both it and those who merely echoed it without thought, observing that it contains "hidden subtle considerations" arising from its placing of a higher-ranking jurist in a lower rank. At this point he quotes al-Marjānī. A later Ḥanafī, ʿAllāmah ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Rāfiʿī, is reported to have thought that al-Laknawī went too far in reproducing al-Marjānī's strictures, though this judgement could not be confirmed against an original and should be treated with reserve.

In his biographical dictionary al-Fawāʾid al-Bahiyyah he offers a third arrangement, a six-fold scheme that drops only the first rank, the absolute mujtahid, and keeps the rest in order, "a famous division", he says, "in which are hidden subtle considerations" he had set out in al-Nāfiʿ al-kabīr. The striking thing about all three is how conservative they are: five levels or six, he trims Ibn Kamāl's scheme at the ends but keeps its logic. Even its most engaged critic found the functional core too useful to discard.

A wider lens: the parallel Shāfiʿī ranks

Ibn Kamāl was working within a far older uṣūl tradition of ranking jurists. The Shāfiʿīs had their own scheme, set out by Imām al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) in the introduction to al-Majmūʿ after ʿAllāmah Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, with five levels. At the summit, the independent absolute mujtahid (al-mujtahid al-muṭlaq al-mustaqill), bound to no school, a rank Imām al-Nawawī argues had long ceased to exist. Then four grades of affiliated jurist (al-muntasib): the mujtahid with the master's full equipment who keeps to his imam's method; the restricted mujtahid of the school, the aṣḥāb al-wujūh, who prove its principles and extend them; the jurist who falls short of these but knows the doctrine and can perform tarjīḥ, the type of al-Rāfiʿī and Imām al-Nawawī himself; and the faithful memoriser who transmits the school but cannot establish its proofs. The resemblance to Ibn Kamāl is plain, a founder at the top, the men of tarjīḥ in the middle, the transmitter at the foot. The Ḥanafī seven and the Shāfiʿī five are two dialects of one grammar of juristic authority.

Conclusion

Ibn Kamāl Pāshā's small treatise did something durable. It gave the Ḥanafī school a vocabulary for talking about its own internal history, a way of naming the distinct kinds of work that successive generations of its jurists performed, and through Ibn ʿĀbidīn it became the framework within which the school understood the very procedure of issuing fatwā. That is why it was copied, endorsed, refashioned and attacked for four centuries, and why the debate around it endured: a tool this consequential is worth fighting over.

It endured, too, on a real ambiguity no argument quite dissolves, between ranking a jurist's function and ranking his person. Ibn Kamāl meant the first; his critics heard the second; and each had something to answer to, for these men were at once eminent persons and the bearers of particular functions.

For the student the lesson is a reading instruction. When you open al-Hidāyah and find its author among the aṣḥāb al-tarjīḥ, do not read a verdict on al-Marghīnānī's genius. Read a description of what al-Hidāyah is: a supreme weighing and ordering of the school's inherited doctrine, the work of a master at the height of tarjīḥ. Held that way, the ranks illuminate the books you study instead of distorting them, which is just what their author intended.

Bibliography

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Nāẓūrat al-Ḥaqq fī Farḍiyyat al-ʿIshāʾ wa-in lam Yaghib al-Shafaq, Shihāb al-Dīn Hārūn al-Marjānī. Kazan.

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Footnotes

1. That the seven ranks classify juristic functions rather than persons, so that a single jurist may occupy more than one of them, is drawn out in the secondary literature. For a survey that gathers the Ḥanafī and Shāfiʿī material along its several axes (by era, by function and by capacity), see Mufti Saifur Raḥmān Nawhamī, "The Classes of Fuqahāʾ", uloom.com, https://www.uloom.com/stable/140813501. ↩

2. The nisba is to ḥalwāʾ (sweets), hence al-Ḥalwānī with a fatḥah, the form given in the biographical literature (al-Samʿānī, al-Ansāb; al-Dhahabī). It is often miswritten al-Ḥulwānī, a form that properly belongs to the Iraqi town of Ḥulwān and to the earlier traditionist al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-Ḥulwānī (d. 242/857). ↩

3. Ibn Kamāl Pāshā, Ṭabaqāt al-Fuqahāʾ (Dirāsah wa-Taḥqīq), ed. Ṣalāḥ Abū al-Ḥājj (Markaz Anwār al-ʿUlamāʾ), the matn, al-ṭabaqah al-khāmisah. Al-Qudūrī's kunyah is Abū al-Ḥusayn (Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Jaʿfar b. Ḥamdān al-Baghdādī), and is so given in al-Kawtharī's reproduction of this passage; some printed copies carry the slip «أبي الحسن» (Abū al-Ḥasan), but «أبي الحُسَيْن» is the correct reading and is the one adopted above. The same matn is reproduced in al-Kawtharī's Ḥusn al-Taqāḍī and quoted by Ibn ʿĀbidīn in Sharḥ ʿUqūd Rasm al-Muftī. On al-Qudūrī's life and rank see further Imām al-Qudūrī; for the death-date roster of the figures named across the ranks see the Ḥanafī scholars of the past. ↩

4. The matn of al-Wiqāyah (in full Wiqāyat al-Riwāyah fī Masāʾil al-Hidāyah) was composed by the grandfather, Burhān al-Sharīʿah Maḥmūd al-Maḥbūbī (d. 673/1274); his grandson Ṣadr al-Sharīʿah al-Thānī ʿUbayd Allāh b. Masʿūd (d. 747/1346) wrote the famous Sharḥ al-Wiqāyah and abridged the matn as al-Niqāyah. It is therefore the grandfather, not Ṣadr al-Sharīʿah, who is the author counted in the sixth rank. ↩