Minhaj_Et-Talibin The Way of the Seekers

In the preface to his edition of the Path el Karib in 1894, Mr. L. W. C.
Van den Berg remarked that ” from year to year European control
over Moslem peoples is extending, so that it is unnecessary to insist
upon the importance of rendering the two works that form the basis of
the legal literature of the School of Shafii accessible, not only to a
small number of Arabic scholars, but also to magistrates and political
agents ” to whom that language is for the most part unfamihar. This
being as true now as it was twenty years ago it is thought advisable to
publish an English translation of the other and larger work referred to,
the Minhaj et Talibin, which ” occupies the first rank for deciding legal
cases.” In the preface to his edition of this treatise, published in 1882
at Batavia by the Government of the Netherlands Indies, Mr. Van den
Berg explained that the French version, of which this book is a ren
dering into English, was not a mere literal translation of the concise
Arabic text, which would have been unintelligible, but a paraphrase,
based partly upon the Moharrer and the Commentary of Mehalli, and
partly upon the two principal sixteenth-century commentaries on the
Minhaj et Talibin
—that is to say, the Tohfat-el-Mohtaj and the Nihayat
el Mdhtaj. It is not always possible to decide a question by reference
to the Minhaj alone ;
and in such a case a Muhammadan jurist^
—alim,
fakih, mufti or kadi, as it may be
—^has recourse principally to the
Tohja and the Nihaya, which Dr. Th. Juynboll, in his Handbuch des
islamischen Gesetzes, 1910, calls “the two standard works in the whole
modern Fikh-literature of the School of Shafii.” It is hoped, therefore,
that the present pubhcation may be of some practical utility in the
direction above indicated, and at the same time not without interest
to the student of comparative jurisprudence