Analysis of İbn Hazm's book: Al-Nubadh

This study is an analysis of al-Nubadh by Ibn Hazm Alî b. Ahmad b. Saîd b. Hazm al-Andalusī (death 456/1064) who was a significant representative of Zahiri School in his time. He wrote this book on Islamic legal methodology in order to make understandable some complicated theories which he covered in another methodology book, al-Ihkām. We examined al-Nubadh in comparison with al-Usul written by Sarakhsi and al-Mustasfa writen by Ghazali. This study consists of five main parts; an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. In introduction, we looked at importance of the subject, methodology and the scope of the topic. At the first section, we emphasized introduction of al-Nubadh which is the main matter of our study and gave a brief biography of Ibn Hazm and his studies. In the second part, we discussed Ijma, Sunnah, Naskh, Legal reasoning, and Ijtihad-Taqlid issues which are the subtitles of al-Nubadh,. In third part, we shortly discussed various matters that were investigated by the author. We compared opinions of Ibn Hazm in the second section with opinion of Sarakhsi and Ghazali. We did not make any comparison in the third section because of many brief various issues in a chapter. In the conclusion part, we made an overall assessment to examine the subjects that were addressed and the results about Ibn Hazm's views on Islamic legal theories. We evaluated differences and similarities between Ibn Hazm and the other two scholars Ghazali and Sarakhsî through their views on Islamic legal theories.