al-Istidhkar al-Jami' li-Madhahib Fuqaha' al-Amsar

Al-Istidhkar al-Jami' li-Madhahib Fuqaha' al-Amsar wa-Ulama' al-Aqtar fima Tadammanahu al-Muwatta' min Ma'ani al-Ra'y wa-l-Athar ("The Recollection, Comprehending the Schools of the Jurists of the Cities and the Scholars of the Lands on the Legal Reasoning and Reports Contained in the Muwatta'") is the commentary of Abu Umar Yusuf ibn Abd al-Barr al-Namari of al-Andalus (368–463 AH) on Malik's Muwatta'. ^{1 2} The museum's copy is Dr Abd al-Mu'ti Amin Qal'aji's edition in thirty volumes from five manuscripts, published in Cairo in 1414/1993. ^{1 3}

In his preface Ibn Abd al-Barr says that scholars asked him, in person and by letter from distant lands, to arrange his book al-Tamhid by the chapters and order of the Muwatta', remove its repeated supporting reports and chains, and complete the explanation of the connected and disconnected hadiths he had treated in al-Tamhid by explaining everything in the Muwatta' — the sayings of the Companions and Followers, and Malik's own view on which he built his school, chosen from the sayings of the early people of his city, who for him were the proof — giving with each saying the disputes of the jurists of the other cities over its meaning. ^{4 5 6} He says he limits himself here to telling passages and sufficient points of proof, "so that it may be easier for the memoriser to retain and the reader to understand". ⁶ For the Companions' names he refers to his separate book on them, and for the narrators of the Muwatta's hadiths to al-Tamhid. ⁶

The editor explains that al-Tamhid is arranged alphabetically by Malik's teachers and limited to the Muwatta's Prophetic hadiths, connected, broken or disconnected, while al-Istidhkar explains every chapter of the Muwatta', with its unattributed reports, Companion reports and Malik's sayings; hence it has chapters absent from al-Tamhid, such as the chapters on ablution after a man kisses his wife and on the bath when the two circumcised parts meet. ^{7 5}

Qal'aji sums up Ibn Abd al-Barr's handling of a chapter: he gives the chapter's hadith from the Muwatta' in Yahya ibn Yahya's transmission, then the Companions who also related it; sets out its chain in sufficient outline, referring to al-Tamhid for detail; notes the variant wordings of its transmitters; explains its words from Arabic usage; draws out its meanings; then gives the disagreement among Malik's followers, then the views of the jurists of the other cities, comparing and discussing their proofs, pointing out the weak and the anomalous, and concludes with his own preference. ^{8 9} He illustrates this with examples from the book: ablution after touching the private part, the night prayer of Ramadan and the hadith of the seven modes. ^{9 10 11 12}

The editor lists the terms of narrator criticism Ibn Abd al-Barr uses in the book, from "trustworthy and firm" and "a memoriser" to "not strong", "abandoned" and "his hadith is objectionable", and finds that they are mostly quoted from the masters of the field, without any new term of his own. ^{13 14 15} He notes that Ibn Abd al-Barr gave the book no introduction on hadith terminology, relying on the introduction to al-Tamhid, and quotes his remark that trustworthy narrators of disconnected reports, when asked, name trustworthy sources, and his statement that Malik's disconnected reports are stronger. ^{16 17}

Qal'aji considers al-Istidhkar a new kind of legal book, in which no hadith, report, saying or anecdote is given without a chain received by a recognised mode of transmission; he says it takes in more than sixty thousand hadiths although the Muwatta's do not reach two thousand, and that in each question, after setting out the jurists' views, its author arrives at one view that he prefers on the evidence. ¹⁸ He holds that Ibn Abd al-Barr was not a strict Maliki but an independent jurist with his own school of derivation and preference, opposed to the imitation then prevailing in al-Andalus, and he points to places where he differed from Malik, such as Malik's preference of Medina over Mecca and his saying that the hadith "whoever kills a foe has his spoils" reached him only for the day of Hunayn. ^{19 20 21} In his view Ibn Abd al-Barr's aim in setting out disagreement is consensus, since for him disagreement is no proof and the proof lies in consensus; one example is the jurists' agreement that the funeral prayer has four takbirs. ²² These descriptions and judgements are the editor's, attributed to him.

At the head of the edition the editor gathers sayings about the book, among them two verses of Abu Tahir al-Silafi urging that it be copied as sufficing for every compilation after the books of the Muwatta', al-Dhahabi's remark that in it he explained the Muwatta' as it stands and ordered its chapters, and Ibn Kathir's that among the best works on the Muwatta' are al-Tamhid and al-Istidhkar. ²³

The editor says he spent ten years copying and editing the book, his first contact with the Egyptian National Library manuscript coming at the end of 1982. ²⁴ He made it his base manuscript, siglum (k): no. 24 Hadith, two large volumes in an Andalusi hand of the seventh century AH, copied in 606 AH, once owned by Abd al-Halim ibn Abd al-Salam ibn Taymiyya, father of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, and later by the emir Sarghitmish, who endowed it for the students of his madrasa beside the mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun. ^{24 25} Among his other manuscripts is that of the Royal Library in Rabat, no. 9853, in an Andalusi hand of about the seventh century; he also used a copy of Ibn Zarqun's (d. 586 AH) Jawami' Anwar al-Muntaqa wa-l-Istidhkar in the Azhar Library. ²⁶ He collated the text with the Muwatta', al-Tamhid and other works, divided the book into 41,815 numbered paragraphs, traced its hadiths and gave notices of the jurists whose views it cites. ²⁷