The Prophet's legal acts (tasarrufāt) and the theory of khabar in al-Qarāfī's legal thought

This study examines Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī's (d. 684/1285) views on the Prophet Muḥammad's actions, legal capacities, and his theory of report (khabar) within the framework of ḥadīth methodology. Born and educated in Egypt, al-Qarāfī was a prominent scholar of the Mālikī school and made profound contributions to Islamic legal thought. The first chapter explores the intellectual and political conditions of the 7th/13th century, the period in which al-Qarāfī lived, and investigates the role of his teachers and scholarly milieu in shaping his intellectual formation. The study then evaluates al-Qarāfī's scholarly persona within the framework of his engagement with fiqh, uṣūl al-fiqh, kalām, and the rational sciences, demonstrating how his approach to ḥadīth methodology emerged from this broader intellectual background. Subsequently, the research analyzes al-Qarāfī's method of classifying and interpreting the Prophet's actions. Al-Qarāfī does not reduce the Prophet's statements, actions, and tacit approvals to a single category; rather, he classifies them according to distinct functions such as promulgation (tablīgh), legal opinion (fatwā), judicial authority (qaḍāʾ), and political leadership (imāma), and discusses the binding force of each category. This classification plays a significant role in determining the scholarly and practical value of ḥadīth and provides later uṣūl scholars with a solid methodological framework. Al-Qarāfī's works reveal a distinctly comparative method in addressing legal-theoretical questions. This study reflects that method by approaching the issues from multiple angles in a manner consistent with al-Qarāfī's own scholarly style. The subsequent section presents a detailed analysis of al-Qarāfī's theory of reports. In addition to the well-known distinction between mutawātir and āḥād reports, the study examines the "solitary report" (khabar al-munfarid), a category introduced by al-Qarāfī. The differences in the epistemic and probative force among these three types, the practical-legal value of report-based knowledge, and the criteria he uses in assessing the reliability of transmitters are discussed extensively. Al-Qarāfī studies the relationship between the truth-value of a report and its capacity to yield knowledge through the principles of uṣūl al-fiqh, logic, and linguistic inquiry, and in doing so frequently criticizes Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), whose work he commented upon. Rather than merely transmitting al-Qarāfī's ideas, this study seeks to reconstruct his uṣūl thought through an interpretive and analytical approach. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the examination of the classical ḥadīth methodological tradition within a broader theoretical framework in contemporary scholarship.