وتقدم المرام من دليل القضاء العلمي

Bulugh al-Maram min Adillat al-Ahkam

One of the most celebrated and widely studied collections of Aḥādīth al-Aḥkām, compiled by the great ḥadīth master Imām Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (773–852 AH), author of Fatḥ al-Bārī. Ibn Ḥajar completed the work in 828 AH, gathering into a compact volume the principal Prophetic traditions upon which the juristic rulings of Islam are based.

The work contains approximately 1,596 narrations, arranged according to the familiar chapters of Fiqh, beginning with purification and prayer and proceeding through Zakāh, fasting, Ḥajj, transactions, marriage, criminal law, judiciary and other legal subjects. This systematic arrangement allows the student to study the textual evidence alongside the corresponding chapters of Fiqh and has made Bulūgh al-Marām particularly popular as a teaching and memorisation text.

One of Ibn Ḥajar's great achievements in the work is the amount of ḥadīth scholarship compressed into a remarkably concise format. He normally identifies the principal source or sources of each narration—such as al-Bukhārī, Muslim, the compilers of the Sunan, Aḥmad and others—and frequently adds brief observations concerning its authenticity, variant routes, hidden defects or the judgments of earlier ḥadīth critics. He also brings together different narrations relevant to the same legal question, enabling the reader to see the principal transmitted evidence surrounding an issue.

Although Ibn Ḥajar himself was a Shāfiʿī jurist, Bulūgh al-Marām is not a manual restricted to the evidences of the Shāfiʿī school. Its selection of narrations makes it highly suitable for comparative Fiqh and Fiqh al-Ḥadīth, and it has consequently been studied by scholars of different legal traditions. Its influence can also be seen in the numerous commentaries written upon it, most famously al-Amīr al-Ṣanʿānī's Subul al-Salām.

This Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah edition has been corrected and annotated by the Egyptian ḥadīth scholar Shaykh Muḥammad Ḥāmid al-Fiqī (d. 1378 AH). His annotations provide useful assistance with the text while retaining the compact character that has made Bulūgh al-Marām so useful to students.

The current Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, Beirut two-colour edition is a single hardback volume of 320 pages, measuring 17 × 24 cm, and is listed as the 12th edition, 2024.