al-Isal ila Fahm Kitab al-Khisal

Al-Isal ila Fahm Kitab al-Khisal ("Leading to the Understanding of the Book of Traits") is Ibn Hazm's great work of law, a commentary on his own short book of law and legal theory, al-Khisal al-Jami'a li-Jumal Shara'i' al-Islam. ¹ The editors of al-Muhalla quote al-Humaydi that in it he gave the views of the Companions, Followers and later imams on legal questions, the argument for and against each party, and the relevant hadiths, sound and unsound, with their chains, explaining all of it; and Abu Muhammad Abd Allah ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Arabi, that he read four volumes of it with Ibn Hazm in 456 AH and that it had twenty-four; al-Dhahabi says it ran to fifteen thousand leaves. ^{2 3}

The editors hold that al-Isal is the source of al-Muhalla, which became a refinement and selection from it; Ibn Hazm mentions it more than twenty times in al-Muhalla, saying for instance that he traced a hadith's routes and defects in al-Isal, and that al-Muhalla was written for the layman and the beginner and as a reminder for the scholar. ^{1 4} From al-Isal his son Abu Rafi' completed what was missing from al-Muhalla, and in the seventh century Ibn Khalil completed it from a copy of which, he says, a large part had reached him; a note by the copyist of manuscript (m) in 781 AH shows the book still existed then. ^{4 3}

The editors found only a fragment of sixty folios, badly effaced towards the end, which they publish with their introduction to al-Muhalla as "al-Jami' min al-Isal"; it mixes questions of legal theory, creed, manners, the lawful and unlawful, and history, and they think most of this Jami' comes from the text of al-Khisal itself, since one section ends "here ends the book al-Mujalla". ^{5 6} They note that part of it was published earlier in al-Dhakhira min al-Musannafat al-Saghira, edited by Abu Abd al-Rahman ibn Aqil al-Zahiri and Abd al-Halim Uways, under the titles "Jami' al-Mujalla" and "Jumal min al-Tarikh". ⁶

Among its contents are chapters refuting analogy, opinion, causal reasoning, juristic preference and imitation, in which Ibn Hazm argues from the verse commanding that disputes be referred to God and the Messenger (al-Nisa' 59) and from the hadith "leave me as long as I leave you" in Sahih Muslim that rulings come only from command and prohibition, and that what the law is silent on is pardoned and permitted; see analogy and juristic preference. ^{7 8 9 10}