أصول فقه
Uṣūl Fiqh
Islamic jurisprudence: the method of deriving laws from the sources of Islam and of establishing their juristic validity
What it means
Uṣūl fiqh is the discipline of legal method. It teaches how a ruling is drawn from the Quran, the Sunnah and the other sources, how a command or prohibition is to be read, how an apparent conflict between texts is resolved, and who is qualified to exercise ijtihād. Ismail al Faruqi presents it as the means by which the validity of a law, both juristic and constitutional, is established. The field has its own literature, with chapters on language, on the weight of evidence and on the effect of general and specific wording. Students study it alongside fiqh, the rulings themselves.
Often misunderstood as
That Islamic law is a fixed list of rules, when it is a method of reasoning from sources.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 51, listed as UṢŪL FIQH. The definition is restated here.