أحكام القرآن
Aḥkām al-Qurʾān
Topic
The rulings and prescriptions taken directly from the text of the Quran, and the name of a genre of works that gather them.
What it means
In the sciences of the Quran, aḥkām (singular ḥukm) are the rulings that the text itself prescribes, such as those on prayer, fasting, marriage, inheritance and contracts. They stand apart from rulings that jurists reach by deduction from the hadith, consensus or analogy. Scholars collected the verses with legal content and arranged them by subject. Works titled Aḥkām al-Qurʾān were composed by jurists such as al-Jaṣṣāṣ and Ibn al-ʿArabī, and they remain a tool for students of fiqh and tafsīr.
Often misunderstood as
It is sometimes taken for a law code separate from the Quran, but the aḥkām are the legal content of the Quran itself.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 51, listed as AḤKĀM AL QUR'ĀN. The definition is restated here.