PROJECTS OF THE IUA

The project is for critical editions of the most ancient juridical texts, in Arabic, deriving from the founders of the four main juridical schools of Sunnite Islam, representing 90 % of Islam. The Zâhirite School, so-called from its devotion to the letter of the law, is included for the sake of its historical importance and doctrinal interest.

The critical edition of each text will be prefaced by a historical and doctrinal introduction, to put the intrinsic interest of the text in perspective and indicate its influence in past times and (potentially) in the world of today.

At the practical level, the project has several stages. The first is concerned with the Muwatta of Malik (179/795), a legal work in the Islamic sense of 'legal'. It was taken as basic by one of the four great schools of legal doctrine of Sunnite Islam, and the tenets of Malik and his followers are in turn basic for the Moslems of the Maghreb, of Central Africa and West Africa and for some part of the Moslem population of Egypt and the eastern coast of Arabia. This stage of the project falls into two halves:
1. The edition of Malik, in the oldest available tradition
2. The edition of the less widely known traditions, Hada thami, Qa anabi and Ibn Bukayr, which are indispensable to a good critical edition of the tradition as a whole.

The project was adopted by the UAI in Category C in 1990, on the initiative of the Académie du Royaume du Maroc.

Director : M. A. Sinaceur, 1990-1999, A.-M. Turki 1999-