Ibrahim al-Halabi
His reputation as one of the most brilliant legists of his time chiefly rests on his work entitled Multaqā al-Abḥur, which became the standard handbook of the Ḥanafī school of Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire.
The Austrian diplomat and historian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) includes al-Ḥalabī in his top ten of "profound legists" of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman golden age.
These qualities earned it a reputation as a convenient reference-book among judges, and made it a standard textbook in the Ottoman madrasas from the reign of sultan Sulaymān II "the Magnificent" (r. 1520-1566), replacing al-Nasafī's Kanz al-Daqā’iq.
[26] The German-British scholar Joseph Schacht used the Multaqā as the primary source for the systematic section in his seminal Introduction to Islamic law (1964).
He describes the Multaqā as "one of the latest and most highly esteemed statements of the doctrine of the [Ḥanafī] school, which presents Islamic law in its final, fully developed form".
[27] The contents of the Multaqā are arranged according to the conventional divisions of a Ḥanafī lawbook, with the main subjects treated in 57 books (kitāb, listed below), and with further subdivisions into chapters (bāb) and sections (faṣl).
The nature of the many intertextual relationships can be illustrated with al-Ḥalabī's sources: al-Qudūrī's Mukhtaṣar, as its title indicates, is a "synopsis" of earlier works; al-Mawṣilī's Mukhtār is an anthology of fatwās, mainly those of Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 772), the founder of the Ḥanafī school; al-Nasafī's Kanz is an abridgement of his own Kitāb al-Wāfī, which in turn is modelled on al-Marghinānī's Hidāya; al-Maḥbūbī's Wiqāya is excerpted from al-Marghīnānī's Hidāya, which in turn is a commentary on its author's own popular textbook Bidāyat al-Mubtadi’, which used Qudūrī's Mukhtaṣar as one of its two main sources; finally, the Majma‛ of Ibn al-Sā‛ātī is based on two sources, al-Qudūrī's Mukhtaṣar and the Manẓūma by Najm al-Dīn Abū Ḥafṣ ‛Umar al-Nasafī (d.
This made the book into a sort of "one stop shop" for judges, obviating the need for them to enter the thicket of existing, usually much more voluminous works, and thus saving them a lot of time and effort.
Inevitably, having become the most popular handbook of Ḥanafī jurisprudence, al-Ḥalabī's work spawned its own plethora of commentaries, supercommentaries and glosses.
It is entitled Mevkufat,[38] and was prepared by Muḥammad Mawqūfātī (Mevkufati Mehmed Efendi), by order of Grand Vizier Muṣṭafā Pasha.
As Hammer-Purgstall remarked,[42]"a complete translation of [the Multaqā] will be perfectly adequate for a more thorough knowledge of Islamic civil legislation and Ottoman private law."
