القواعد الأصولية
al-Qawāʿid al-Uṣūliyya
Topic
The general rules of juristic deduction, whether linguistic or contextual, by which rulings are drawn from the Quran and the hadith.
What it means
Al-qawāʿid al-uṣūliyya belong to uṣūl al-fiqh, the principles of jurisprudence. They govern how a jurist reads a text and draws a ruling from it. Some are linguistic, such as the rules on whether a command indicates obligation or a prohibition indicates that an act is forbidden, and on how general and specific wording interact. Others are contextual and attend to the circumstances, purpose and place of a text among other texts. Al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla is the early work most often cited as the foundation of the discipline.
Often misunderstood as
They are confused with the legal maxims, whereas the uṣūlī rules concern how texts are read and the fiqhī maxims concern the content of the law.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 54, listed as AL QAWĀ'ID AL UṢŪLIYYAH. The definition is restated here.