1 A Note on the Translations
All translations, except if stated otherwise, are my own. Hence, all mistakes are also entirely mine. The translation of legal Arabic into English necessarily means a loss of accuracy since many terms or references do not have a direct English equivalent. To compensate for the loss of accuracy, I have added Arabic transliterations for many important technical legal terms and have used footnotes to explain any references an author makes to the Quran, the Sunna, or other fiqh books. For better readability, I have excluded eulogies, like ṣalla Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam for the Prophet or ʿazza wa-jall for God, from the translations.
2 The Transliteration of Arabic Names
Arabic transliteration follows the standard established by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES). Arabic words frequently used in English, like Quran, caliph, or sultan, are not transliterated. Likewise, the names of commonly known cities, such as Riyadh, Mecca, Medina, Dammam, or Jeddah, are not given in transliteration.
When referring to contemporary Saudi authors, I use the common naming system in Saudi Arabia, which includes the first name, the father’s first name, and the family name (first name – father’s name – last name). Saudi jurists are often members of large scholarly families. To know the father’s name makes it easier to identify the author properly. When I cite non-Saudi writings, I only state the author’s first and family name since legal publications outside of Saudi Arabia usually do not include the name of the author’s father.
When it comes to premodern scholars, I refer to the name under which they are commonly known in contemporary Islamic jurisprudence, even if that name differs from their given name. For instance, I refer to Ibn al-Qayyim (“the son of the principal”1 ) instead of giving his full name, Shams al-Dīn Abī ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad bin Abī Bakr al-Zurʿī al-Dimashqī. For contemporary Arab authors who write in English, I use the transliteration they have chosen for their names.
3 The Two Calendars
For reasons of readability, I have deliberately refrained from using the Islamic Hijrī calendar throughout the text, even though it is the official calendar of the Saudi judiciary and Saudi legal writings generally only refer to Hijrī dates. Whenever an author provided a specific date in the Hijrī calendar, I converted it into the Gregorian calendar. However, whenever an author referred to a Hijrī year without specifying a day or a month, I estimated the Gregorian year based on the context. In the bibliography, I listed the year of publication in both calendars since this makes it easier to find and identify Arabic legal literature.
His contemporaries, however, called him Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya in order to indicate that his father was the principal of the Ḥanbalī college al-Jawziyya in Damascus. See Catharina Bori and Livnat Holtzman, “A Scholar in the Shadow,” Oriente Moderno 90 (1): 13, n. 1. We will discuss Ibn al-Qayyim’s life and work in more detail in the first chapter.