The institution of judicial authority and judicial decisions of the first three centuries of the Hijri within the framework of Ahbâru'l-Kudât by Muhammed b. Halef Vekî

Ahbāru'l-Qudāt works are part of the Islamic Judicial Law literature and focus on judges according to the periods and regions in which they lived. These works also contain highly significant information as they convey the first three centuries' legal practices, particularly the Khulafā' al-Rāshidūn period. The initial legal practices of this period, during which the madhāhib had not yet fully formed, served as a precedent for later periods, and judicial rulings issued by judges influenced the doctrinal development of these madhāhib. This study uses content and discourse analysis methods to examine the judicial rulings recorded in Ahbāru'l-Qudāt works from the first three centuries of the Hijrī. The study sets the end of the third Hijrī century as the boundary, covering the first three phases of the history of fiqh, including the periods of the Khulafā' al-Rāshidūn, the Umayyads, and the early Abbasids. In this context, the first surviving work from the Ahbāru'l-Qudāt collection, Muhammad b. Khalaf Waqi's (d. 306/918) Ahbāru'l-Qudāt and Muhammad b. Yūsuf al-Kindī's (d. 350/961) work on the judges of Egypt, Ahbāru Kudātı Miṣr have been identified as the primary sources and thoroughly examined. This study analyzes judicial rulings within the framework of cities/regions and periods and classifies them according to fiqh topics. Furthermore, one of the study's objectives is to reveal the changes in the rulings over the historical process, to the extent that the data from the relevant works allow. The relationships between judges (horizontal) and between judges and their predecessors (vertical) have also been examined.