Umdat al-Salik wa Uddat al-Nasik

Umdat al-Salik wa Uddat al-Nasik
Author(s)	Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri
Translator	Nuh Ha Mim Keller
Language	Arabic
Subject(s)	Shafi'i Fiqh
Publisher	Amana publications.
Pages	1232
ISBN	ISBN 978-0915957729

'Umdat as-Salik wa 'Uddat an-Nasik (Reliance of the Traveller and Tools of the Worshipper, also commonly known by its shorter title Reliance of the Traveller) is a classical manual of fiqh for the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence. The author of the main text is 14th-century scholar Shihabuddin Abu al-'Abbas Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri (AH 702-769 / AD 1302–1367). Al-Misri who based his work on the previous Shafi'i works of Imam Nawawi and Imam Abu Ishaq as-Shirazi. Ibn Naqib follows the order of Shirazi's al-Muhadhdhab (The Rarefaction) and the conclusions of Nawawi's Minhaj at-Talibin (The Seeker's Road). This work consists of the soundest positions of the Shafi'i school.

Keller translation

The book was translated by the American Muslim scholar Nuh Ha Mim Keller in 1991 and became the first translation of a standard Islamic legal reference in a European language to be certified by Al-Azhar.

Nuh included three introductory sections before the main work to form a user's guide to fiqh, as well as eight major appendices after the main work that consist of various topics, ranging from personal ethics and character to Islamic spirituality, for example traditional Islamic Sufism, and tenets of faith, and other famous classical Islamic texts such as Al-Ghazzali's Ihya' 'ulum al-din and Nawawi's Riyadh as-Saaliheen. There is also a biographical section that lets the readers know who the figures mentioned throughout the book's legal texts are.

Certain sections of the book were left untranslated (although the original Arabic text is retained), as Nuh considered them irrelevant to modern societies. These parts include a section on slavery, describing the rights and duties of slaves and their masters, as well as some smaller sections such as, for example, a discussion on fixing utensils using gold.

References

• Nuh Ha Mim Keller (ed., trans.), Reliance of the Traveller: Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, Amana Publications, revised edition 1997, ISBN 0915957729.

See also

• List of Sunni books