Understanding Hanafi Usul: Nasafi’s Manar Explained
Understanding Hanafi Usul: Nasafi’s Manar Explained
The Divine has communicated the sacred law to us through revelation, the Quran and Sunnah. Words, as carriers of meaning, require understanding and, at times, interpretation. In the Islamic scholarly tradition, the principles and art of reliably understanding what God wants of humans is known as usul al-fiqh, or the foundations of jurisprudence. The science of usul al-fiqh is itself a foundational discipline, one which provides the intellectual and linguistic foundations for the whole process of deriving fiqh primarily from revelatory sources. Without this foundational knowledge, words can appear contradictory; individuals could make unfounded claims about what the Quran or Sunnah is saying; the particular rulings of fiqh become unrooted and seemingly arbitrary without their broader framework; and the very basis of the Islamic tradition and its approach to life can be put into question by proponents of modernism and other ideologies or blameworthy innovations. This is why the study of Islamic law and moral theology (fiqh), by itself, is never enough: the true student of the Islamic scholarly tradition cannot do without the foundational sciences, the primary of which is usul al-fiqh. In this course, we will study one of the classics of this discipline—namely, the Manar of Imam Abu al-Barakat al-Nasafi. The course will introduce students to the entire range of major questions in usul al-fiqh, with particular attention paid to the principles and tools of linguistic interpretation and hermeneutics.