Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani

Burhan al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Abi Bakr ibn Abd al-Jalil al-Farghani al-Marghinani was a twelfth-century Hanafi jurist of Transoxiana and the author of “al-Hidaya”. He was born in the Fergana Valley, in the village of Rishtan near the town of Marghinan (today's Margilan), into a family that produced many scholars and traced its descent to the caliph Abu Bakr. The nineteenth-century Indian scholar Abd al-Hayy al-Laknawi, in the biography prefaced to his edition of “al-Hidaya”, gives his birth as 8 Rajab 511 AH (5 November 1117); Uzbek sources also give 23 September 1123. The year 530 AH (1135) found in some reference works cannot be right, since several of his teachers had died by the early 1140s.

He received his first lessons at home, from his father Abu Bakr ibn Abd al-Jalil and his maternal grandfather Abu Hafs Umar al-Zandaramasi, a pupil of Shams al-A'imma al-Sarakhsi. He went on to study in Marghinan, Bukhara and Samarkand under the leading Hanafi authorities of the day, among them Najm al-Din Umar al-Nasafi, author of the creed known as “al-Aqa'id al-Nasafiyya”, al-Sadr al-Shahid Husam al-Din Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, Ziya al-Din Muhammad al-Bandaniji, Uthman ibn Ali al-Baykandi and Qiwam al-Din Ahmad ibn Abd al-Rashid al-Bukhari. Besides law he was learned in hadith, Qur'anic exegesis and Arabic language and literature, and the sources call him imam, hafiz and muhaqqiq.

In 544 AH (1149) al-Marghinani made the pilgrimage to Mecca and visited Medina. He later settled in Samarkand, the capital of the Western Qarakhanids, where he spent the rest of his life teaching and writing. Contemporaries such as the celebrated jurist Qadikhan praised his learning, and he appears in the sources with the title Shaykh al-Islam. Later Hanafis ranked him among the ashab al-tarjih, jurists able to choose the best-founded of the school's transmitted opinions, while al-Laknawi argued that he should rather be counted a mujtahid within the school.

Al-Marghinani first combined the questions treated in two classic Hanafi texts, the “Mukhtasar” of Abu al-Husayn al-Quduri and the “al-Jami al-saghir” of Muhammad al-Shaybani, into a concise handbook, “Bidayat al-mubtadi”. He began a vast commentary on it, “Kifayat al-muntahi”, but, finding that it had grown so long it would weary its readers, set it aside and wrote a second, shorter commentary: “al-Hidaya”. Tradition holds that he worked on it for thirteen years and fasted throughout. Its four volumes and fifty-seven books run from ritual worship to marriage, trade, endowments, inheritance, crime and the duties of the judge; each ruling is set out with its proofs and the views of the Hanafi masters are weighed against one another.

His other works include two collections of legal opinions on newly arising cases, “al-Tajnis wa-l-mazid” and “Mukhtarat al-nawazil”, and a book on inheritance shares, “Kitab fi-l-fara'id”. His “Nashr al-madhhab”, “al-Mazid fi furu al-Hanafiyya” and a commentary on al-Shaybani's “al-Jami al-kabir” are known only from references in later sources. Manuscripts of his works are kept at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences and in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. His pupils included his sons Jalal al-Din Muhammad and Nizam al-Din Umar, Shams al-A'imma al-Kardari, Jalal al-Din Mahmud al-Ustrushani and al-Zarnuji, author of the students' manual “Ta'lim al-muta'allim”.

Al-Marghinani died in Samarkand on 14 Dhu al-Hijja 593 AH (28 October 1197) and was buried in the city's Chokardiza cemetery. “Al-Hidaya” became one of the most authoritative manuals of the Hanafi school. More than sixty commentaries and abridgements were written on it, among them Akmal al-Din al-Babarti's “al-Inaya”, Badr al-Din al-Ayni's “al-Binaya” and Kamal al-Din ibn al-Humam's “Fath al-Qadir”, while Jamal al-Din al-Zayla'i checked its hadith one by one in “Nasb al-raya”. Courts in the Ottoman Empire, the Central Asian khanates and India relied on it, and in Uzbekistan it remained in use until the qadi courts were abolished in the 1920s.

In 1776 “al-Hidaya” was translated into Persian in Bengal, and in 1791 Charles Hamilton rendered that version into English, making the book one of the foundations of the Anglo-Muhammadan law of British India. A Russian translation made from the English under N. I. Grodekov appeared in Tashkent in 1893, and in the 2000s the work was also translated into Uzbek. Independent Uzbekistan marked the 800th anniversary of his death in 1997 and the 910th anniversary of his birth by the Islamic calendar in 2000; for the occasion a memorial complex with a symbolic tomb was built in the centre of Margilan, and the Uzbek post issued a stamp in his honour.