[1] In the words of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, a nawāzil-collection "furnishes a body of jurisprudential doctrine close to practical and daily life and adopted to the human, social and economic realities of a local character, in such a way that, by means of this expedient, fiḳh [...] is able to evolve".
The plural form nawāzil is part of the title of several works dedicated to collecting records of such cases.
Nawāzil-collections were compiled either by individual experts or by groups of jurists practicing in maḥkamas, gathering material from earlier collections and/or their own legal practice; their primary audience were qāḍīs, who made practical reference to their precedents, but the texts might also be consumed by a wider reading public.
They are particularly associated with the Mālikī school of Islamic jurisprudence in the Maghrib, due to Mālik ibn Anas's commitment to referring to real cases rather than theorising.
Accordingly, nawāzil differ from fatāwā insofar as they do not report theoretical juridical consultations but rather historical cases and their handling by named jurists.