Reconstructing Mālikī Legal Thought Integration of Uṣul and Furu' in al-Fakihani's Riyāḍ al-Afhām

Ibrahim Sizgen (Hatay Mustafa Kemal University)
Memet Zeki Uyanık (Mersin Üniversitesi)

Al-Manahij : Jurnal Kajian Hukum Islam
Vol. 20 No. 2 (2026)

Al-Fākihānī, a 14th-century Mālikī scholar from Alexandria, holds a significant place in the history of Islamic jurisprudence for his work, Riyāḍ al-Afhām fī Sharḥ ʿUmdat al-Aḥkām. This work not only represents a commentary on legal hadiths but also showcases the architecture of Mālikī legal reasoning, which interconnects textual authority, the theory of uṣūl al-fiqh, and the formation of applied jurisprudential norms. Diverging from previous studies that tend to position al-Fākihānī merely as a hadith commentator or a passive transmitter of school doctrine, this study offers a distinct perspective by reading him as an epistemic actor who reconstructs the relationship between legal theory and jurisprudential practice through mechanisms of intra-school ijtihād, tarjīḥ, internal critique and the principle of murāʿāt al-khilāf. Utilizing a qualitative library-based method and a textual-legal analytical approach toward Riyāḍ al-Afhām and Mālikī jurisprudential literature, this study finds that al-Fākihānī does not merely reproduce school authority. Instead, he actively selects, tests, and validates legal opinions by combining textual evidence, rational argumentation, and an awareness of the plurality of legal opinions. The primary merit of this research lies in its ability to demonstrate that murāʿāt al-khilāf, which is frequently positioned as a secondary principle, functions precisely as a crucial methodological instrument in maintaining the flexibility, coherence and adaptive capacity of Mālikī law. These findings offer a conceptual contribution to global Islamic legal studies by challenging the assumption that classical jurisprudence is static and imitative; conversely, the Mālikī tradition demonstrates internal mechanisms for critique, negotiation and legal renewal. Consequently, this study shapes the development of contemporary discourses on the codification of Islamic law, school pluralism, and the reconstruction of Islamic legal epistemology rooted in the classical tradition, which remain relevant to the problems of modern legal normativity.