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The Reliance of the Traveller: A Classical Manual of Islamic Sacred Law by Ahmad Ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 769/1368) in Arabic with Facing English Text, Commentary and Appendices. Edited and translated by NOAH HA MIM KELLER. Evanston: SUNNA BOOKS, 1993. Pp. xxii + 1232. $69.95.
This is a truly magnificent piece of work that will prove to be indispensable to the English-speaking Muslim and to any Western student of Islam, who is now relieved of wading through immense technical writings in Arabic to discover specific points about the law, beliefs, doctrines, rituals, ethics, and customary practices of Islam and Muslims. The translation is idiomatic and smooth, not literal and archaic, but the meaning of the original Arabic is always preserved. To those who are proficient in Arabic, the edited Arabic texts provide an opportunity to compare the Arabic and English legal and other technical terms, and to have complete and pointed texts, in view of the fact that texts are often unpointed, and the fact that the translator on occasion deleted from the translation bracketed materials that refer to rare or nonexistent matters.
Translations of Islamic legal texts have so far been either unsatisfactory, like the translations of Hanafi and Shii texts by British administrators in India and Palestine for purposes of the court systems there, or the retranslation from the French of some Maliki texts. This competent translation of a Shfii text, therefore, fulfills a real need. The author of the text, Ibn Naqib (d. 769/1368), closely followed the order and statements of the famous Shafi i jurisprudent Muhyi al-Din al-Nawawi...