Islam: Chapter Three: The Law: Fiqh, Sharī‘a: 2. The Regulation of Personal Status

This is an excerpt from the *Hidāya*, a 12th-century Islamic legal treatise by the Central Asian jurist al-Marghinānī, representing the Ḥanafī school of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) — the dominant legal tradition of the Ottoman and Mughal empires and still prevalent across Turkey, South Asia, and Central Asia. The text presents rules governing marriage and divorce as part of the *mu'āmalāt* (laws of human relations), grounding each ruling in Quranic verses, hadith, and reasoned legal argument. On marriage, it specifies conditions for a valid contract (witnesses, consent, minimum dower), catalogs prohibited unions (with foster-relatives, two sisters simultaneously, one's own enslaved person), and addresses interfaith marriages, distinguishing permissible matches with "People of the Book" from prohibited ones with polytheists or Zoroastrians. A notably distinctive thread is the Ḥanafī position — contested against Mālik and al-Shāfi'ī — that an adult woman of sound mind may contract her own marriage without a guardian, though she may not be forced into it; this is framed as a minority but reasoned view within the broader jurisprudential debate. On divorce, the text outlines the "most laudable" method as a single repudiation during a ritually pure period, preserving the husband's ability to reverse it before the waiting period expires. Throughout, the text is structured as a comparative legal digest, explicitly recording where the Ḥanafī position diverges from rival schools and giving the reasoning on each side.

Islam: Chapter Three: The Law: Fiqh, Sharī‘a: 2. The Regulation of Personal Status

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