Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law [Hardcover]

Nuh Ha MIM Keller (Editor, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1997

The new edition of the in-depth manual of Islamic law based on the Shafi'i school of thought, with a detalied index and commentary on specific rulings. 1,200 pages in an exceptional binding with Arabic and facing English text in two column format with occasional diagrams. 'Umdat al-Salik wa 'Uddat al-Nasik (Reliance of the Traveller and tools of the Worshipper) is a classic manual of fiqh. It represents the fiqh rulings according to the Shafi'I school of jurisprudence. The appendices form an integral part of the book and present original texts and translations from classic works by prominent scholars such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Qudamah, al-Nawawi, al-Qurturbi, al-Dhahabi, Ibn Hajar and other, on topics of Islamic law, faith, spirituality, Qur'anic exegesis and Hadith sciences. It has also biographical notes about every person mentioned (391 biographies) , bibliography of each work cited (136 works), and a detailed subject index (95 pages). Of the 136 works drawn upon in its commentary and appendices, 134 are in the original Arabic. The sections and paragraphs have been numbered to facilitate cross-reference.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Arabic (translation)
Original Language: Arabic

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1232 pages
• Publisher: Amana Corporation; Revised edition (July 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0915957728
• ISBN-13: 978-0915957729
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 2 x 6.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Law
  • #34 in Books > History > World > Religious > Islam

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 70 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheikh Nuh (the Translator) in his own words about his book March 31, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

I began translating Reliance of the Traveller in Jordan, out of personal need for a shari'a manual, to know and practice Islam in my own life. Making it available to others was an afterthought that came to me after I had set out to produce a work in which I could look up the questions that I needed to know without having to memorize it all. I had moved to Jordan in 1980, and lived near Amman in Suwaylih, with many students and teachers of the University of Jordan's shari'a college. That first year, I heard a lot of well-meaning religious advice that one might have preferred to know rather than be told, a perhaps not unfamiliar feeling to many new Muslims. During this period I began to translate the meanings of the Qur'an using other English translations, and then read through the Muhammad Muhsin Khan's interpretation of Sahih al-Bukhari, trying to record every Islamic ruling I could find in the hadith. In the end, I realized that there was a tremendous number of questions in my life that I did not have Islamic answers for.

At the end of summer 1981 I moved to Huwwara, a village in the north of Jordan, both to improve my spoken Arabic and to work on a master's degree in educational psychology while teaching English at the University of Yarmouk, in nearby Irbid. The move to the north led to my meeting people who knew traditional Islamic ulama in Damascus, among them, Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil al-Durubi, who I made the acquaintance of in his bookshop off the courtyard of the Darwishiyya mosque, where he was imam.

In Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil, I felt I had found someone who really knew Islam, and he was the one who eventually inspired me to try to translate a fiqh manual. I had been a commercial fisherman in the North Pacific for seven seasons, and I remembered a book the captain used to keep in the wheelhouse near the charts, a book of bearings, with the precise compass directions between one point of land and another in Alaskan waters. This was the sort of work I hoped to produce in shari'a, a book that I could open up and find accurate, substantive ethical knowledge to apply in my life.

Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil had such knowledge, and I came to produce a book that would try to represent his kind of traditional learning. In the following eleven years of my association with him, I never asked him a question that he didn't know the answer to, and I never asked him why he said so except that he would produce a text for it from a recognized shari'a work. It was something I had not been aware of before. When one meets a universsity professor of shari'a, one gets the impression of a senior student who is but more widely read than the students he teaches; but when one meets a traditional alim, one gets the impression of someone who knows the actual content of the shari'a by having learned and memorized, in a word, someone with 'ilm or "knowledge."

A second difference was one of attitude. Traditional sheikhs like Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil impressed me deeply as Muslims, men whose concept of spirituality was to learn the divine command, hold it absolutely sacred, and to do their utmost to live it, outwardly and inwardly. They had apparently taken this attitude from the living example of their own teachers, and so on, back to earliest times. For example, Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil was a genuinely humble man, not out of ignorance of his level of learning (which was arguably above that of a mufti), but rather because Allah had ordered him to be humble.

I once made a remark to him about someone who gave one of the notoriously lax fatwas of the present century, saying that one had to respect his opinion, since he was an alim. "An alim?" he said, looking incredulous. "The first thing an alim knows is that the next world is more important than this one." He was totally what he taught in this respect, and his approach of 'amal bi 'ilm, "living what one knows" was also something I later sought to preserve in my translation.

In autumn of 1982, I took the Shafi'i fiqh manual Kifayat al-akhyar (The sufficiency of the good) to Sheikh 'Abd al-Wakil and asked him what he thought of translating it. He said that it often mentioned several positions on an issue without telling which was the most reliable for fatwa. He suggested instead a copy of `Umdat al-salik (Reliance of the Traveller), and I bought it from him. Working through the translation, the knowledge-based shari'a approach captured my imagination, and I was to add several appendices on questions not treated in the text, including biographies of all the scholars mentioned, not only to help Muslims know their scholars, but also to clarify, by actual examples, the difference between the present level of Islamic scholarship and the past.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent at informing us "unbelievers" about what Islam is really all about. January 24, 2012

By Silverback

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Muhammad very famously said that [the essence of] "warfare is deception" and, yet, many of us gullible, fearful, and naive "unbelievers" take the easy way out, and allow ourselves to be deceived when we just take as true what Muslims, their leaders, and "spokesmen"--aided mightily, I might add, by the MSM, and our own officials, academics, and commentators, all unbelievers "travelling" that same broad, less frightening, river of "denial" --tell us, in smooth and calming words, is the truth about the nature of Islam, its world-view, practices, and ultimate goals.

Well, "Reliance of the Traveller" is an English translation of Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri's 14th century A.D. "Umdat al-Salik," a "Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law," and prescribed/proscribed thought and behavior for Muslims, that was approved in 1991, by the highest Muslim religious authorities at Egypt's Al-Azhar university, as "conforming to Sunni (90% of Muslims) Muslim's current day practice and belief," and "Traveller" tells Muslims in minute detail exactly how--in compliance with the dictates of all-encompassing Shari'a law--they should view things, think, and behave in virtually any situation.

Thus, if we really want to know the truth (and not be "deceived" and blindsided, and go down to defeat before we even know what hit us), "Traveller" is a text that all us "unbelievers"--under unremitting and increasing attack by Islam, Muslims and their Jihad, all over the world and here in the U.S.--should be familiar with, read, and understand.

To quote Sun Tzu, "Know yourself and know your enemy, and you can win a hundred battles."

146 of 184 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Non-Muslims should buy this May 19, 2010

By Jan McDaniel

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I give this product one star because I deeply disagree with its content, but urge non-Muslims to become familiar with it.

This book contains the legal rulings of the Shafii school of Islamic law. It contains a legal description of mainstream Islam, a codification of the culture of the Islamic Middle East.

It makes clear to me that there is an unbridgeable gap between the legal and cultural standards of Islam and America. That means that the more Islamic America becomes, the less American it is.

It shows me why a person can be a pious Muslim or a patriotic American but not both. A person who follows the interpretation of the Koran found in this book cannot share American attitudes toward women, sexual preferences, secular government, equality of opportunity for all regardless of religious belief, military defense of America against Muslim enemies and, above all, freedom of speech.

In short, Islamic law as described here does not pass Constitutional scrutiny. Islam, as described by this book, is a political system within a religion and should be considered a competitor of our liberal democratic system, not a component of it.