The light of the day · Thursday 1 October
Cordoba's caliph read the books before he shelved them
Al-Hakam II, who ruled Cordoba from 961 to 976, was a collector on a state scale. He sent agents to Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus with orders to buy or copy anything worth having, paid scribes in several cities to work for him, and according to the sources built a library whose catalogue alone ran to 44 volumes. The figure usually given for the collection is 400,000 volumes, which comes from later writers and may be generous, but no one disputes it was the largest in Europe. Marginal notes in his own hand survive in some manuscripts. After his death much of it was dispersed or burned during the civil wars that broke the caliphate apart.
Al-Hakam II · Cordoba, died 976 CE
Thursday 1 October 2026 · 18 Rabi ath-Thani 1448 AH
The word · Law and life
قِياس
Qiyas
Analogy: extending a known ruling to a new case that shares the same underlying reason.
The classic example is extending the prohibition of wine to every intoxicant, because the reason behind the ruling is intoxication rather than grapes. It has four parts: the original case, the new case, the ruling, and the 'illah or effective cause, and identifying the 'illah is the difficult part. All four Sunni schools accept qiyas as a source; the Zahiri school rejected it and worked from the texts alone.
The Path · chapter 3 of 71
حواء
Hawwa: Garden of Jannah
Hawwa created from Adam’s rib. Together in the Garden until the slip.
Islam does not blame the woman for the fall, the Qur'an's address is dual throughout
The library
The whole library, free
No ads, no account, no tracking. Every room on the phone, under the thumb.