Jurisprudence (fiqh) • 5 min
The Ethics of Scholarly Inquiry: Al-Subkī on Method, Debate and Disagreement | Blog
At the conclusion of his treatise on the status of the tarāwīḥ prayer as an established Prophetic practice—including the mode of performance and number of rakʿas—the prominent Shāfiʿī scholar Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355) takes an unexpected turn. Moving away from legal argumentation, he adopts a more reflective register: a meditation on the pursuit of knowledge itself. In doing so, he shifts from jurisprudential debate to offering thoughtful counsel for students and novice jurists on the ethics of research and the proper conduct of scholarly inquiry.[1] Al-Subkī’s counsel emerges from a concrete legal controversy, yet resonates far beyond it. Disputes over tarāwīḥ were never merely […]
