Abu al-Hasan 'Ali ibn Muhammad al-Bazdawi (Arabic: أبو الحسن علي بن محمد البَزدَوي) (c. 1010-1089 A.D.), known with the honorific title of Fakhr al-Islam (the pride of Islam), was a leading Hanafi scholar in the principles of Islamic jurisprudence. He is author of the acclaimed Kanz al-Wusul ila Ma'refat al-Usul (Arabic: کنز الوصول إلی معرفة الأصول, lit. 'The Treasure of Obtaining in Knowledge of Legal'), popularly known as Usul al-Bazdawi, a seminal work in Hanafi Usul al-Fiqh.
'Abd al-Qadir ibn Abi al-Wafa' al-Qurashi (d. 775/1373) has praised him in his Hanafi biographical dictionary, Al-Jawahir al-Mudiyya fi Tabaqat al-Hanafiyya (Arabic: الجواهر المضية في طبقات الحنفية).[1]
Works
His most famous book is Kanz al-Wusul ila Ma'refat al-Usul (Arabic: کنز الوصول إلی معرفة الأصول), popularly known as Usul al-Bazdawi, which is a seminal book in Hanafi Usul al-Fiqh and was a standard teaching text for centuries.[2]
In this work, he focuses on issues such as rules and methods of determining a variety of sources and methods for making the right decision and discourses on rules of working with texts, and so on. The Uzbek Academy of Sciences has more than a dozen copies of this work.
The book has generated numerous commentaries, the most popular of which being Kashf al-Asrar (Arabic: کشف الأسرار، شرح أصول البزدوي) by 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Bukhari (d. 730/1329).
^ abHanif, Sohail, 2019, "Al-Hadith al-Mashhur: A Hanafi Reference to Kufan Practice?", in Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice by Sohaira Siddiqui (ed.), Brill Publications, Leiden, 2019.
