أصول الفقه

Islamic law is not a list of rules but a theory of interpretation. This cycle takes its mechanism apart.

Course objectives

Distinguish fiqh from its uṣūl: the rule and the method that produces it.
Analyse the categories of normative language: ʿāmm, khāṣṣ, muṭlaq, muqayyad, amr, nahy.
Follow a complete analogical argument (qiyās), from cause to conclusion.
Situate Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's Maḥṣūl and its reception in the Islamic West.

Syllabus

Qurʾān, sunna, consensus, analogy: the question of authority and that of proof, carefully distinguished.

General and particular, absolute and restricted, imperative and prohibitive: the share of grammar in the elaboration of the norm.

Determining the efficient cause, classical objections, textbook cases. Legal reasoning as a discipline of rigour.

Study of selected passages from Ibn al-ʿArabī's commentary, in the recent edition and translation.

Continue with a course

How a theological school born in the East became, in the Maghreb, the official doctrine of an empire — and what it actually said.

Entering grammar not as one enters a textbook, but as one enters a science of language built twelve centuries ago.

A practical workshop: reading a Maghrebi hand, dating a copy, collating witnesses, establishing a text.

Lectures, seminars, manuscript expertise, research supervision: let us take the time to talk it through.