About this manual
Islamic Manual is an English adaptation of Nisab Ahle Khidmaat Sharia,
a Hanafi manual of practice. The English translation of that book is the only source of
rulings on this site. No ruling has been added to it, softened, or left out. Where
something is supplied that the book does not itself state, such as a modern equivalent
for a distance the book gives as a journey of so many days, the page says so plainly and
the addition is listed in
content/editorial-additions.md.
Why it is arranged differently
The book is arranged the way books of this kind have always been arranged: by part, and within a part by chapter. That is a fine way to read a book cover to cover and a poor way to answer a question. Someone who wants to know whether their wudu is still valid does not know which part to open.
So the 204 sections here are arranged by what a reader is trying to do: purification, prayer, Friday and Eid, fasting, zakat, hajj, family life, food, and death and burial; and within each, by the question being asked. Passages the book keeps apart are brought together where they answer the same question, and passages it runs together are separated where they answer different ones.
The restructuring is auditable. Every section records the exact passages of the original it
was built from, and the build fails if any passage of the book is left unaccounted for. The
mapping is published in
content/source-map.json, the accounting in
content/coverage-report.md, and anything the rewriting
could not resolve without guessing is listed in
content/review-flags.md with the original wording kept.
The three ways of reading
Every section is written three times over. Young is for roughly seven to twelve and for anyone new to the subject: short sentences, one idea at a time, a plain English word before every technical one. Adult is the full practical detail. Advanced is for students of knowledge: the technical vocabulary, the conditions and the qualifications, with references shown by default.
The ruling is identical in all three. Only the depth and the wording change. A Young page never leaves out a condition that would make the act invalid. It says it in simpler words. The build refuses to publish a section that is missing any of the three.
Where the references come from
Zujajah.org is the first reference on every page. It carries Zujājat al-Maṣābīḥ, the six canonical books, eleven further collections and the Qurʼan, and this site resolves every hadith and every verse against its data at build time. No zujajah.org link on this site was typed by a person; each one is constructed from the entry the resolver actually found.
A citation is marked verified only when the match is beyond doubt: the book named the
collection and the number, or the Arabic is character-for-character the same, or a verse
reference agrees with the verse it quotes. Anything weaker is shown as
pending verification and is deliberately not a link. Those are listed in
content/citation-review.md for a human to confirm.
The source policy
Only allow-listed sources may be cited, and the build fails on any citation outside the list. The list holds the classical Hanafi corpus: al-Hidāyah, Mukhtaṣar al-Qudūrī, Radd al-Muḥtār, al-Fatāwā al-Hindiyya, Badāʾiʿ aṣ-Ṣanāʾiʿ, al-Mabsūṭ, al-Baḥr ar-Rāʾiq, Nūr al-Īḍāḥ and Marāqī al-Falāḥ, Multaqā al-Abḥur, Sharḥ Maʿānī al-Āthār, together with Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn, Bahār-e-Sharīʿat, Fatāwā Raḍawiyya and Qānūn-e-Sharīʿat, and every collection hosted on Zujajah.org. See the full bibliography.
Arabic and transliteration
Every piece of Arabic on this site is shown three ways at once: the Arabic itself in a naskh face, the transliteration beneath it, and the English beneath that. Nothing is hidden behind a toggle, because a reader who cannot read the script still needs to say the words.
The transliteration uses one scheme throughout: long vowels ā ī ū; the emphatic letters ḥ ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ; ʿ for ʿayn and ʾ for hamza; th dh sh kh gh as digraphs; and the article assimilated where it is pronounced so (ash-shams, not al-shams). 190 terms are collected in the glossary.
Privacy
Your reading trail, your bookmarks, your search history and your preferences are held in your own browser and are never sent anywhere. What the server records about a search is the normalised query, the number of results, how long it took and which section was opened; never your address, never an identifier, never the raw text you typed. Page views are counted without cookies and without any attempt to recognise you from one visit to the next.
A learning aid, not a fatwa
This site sets out what one manual of Hanafi practice says. It cannot know your circumstances, and a ruling often turns on them. For a question about your own situation, and particularly for anything touching marriage, divorce, inheritance or an oath, ask a qualified scholar who can hear the details from you directly.
Who made this
The digitisation of the original work, its English translation, and the adaptation you are reading here are by Syed Mohiuddin Qadri (Abū ʿImād), under Madani Books.
The manual itself is Nisab Ahle Khidmaat Sharia by Qāḍī Ghulām Muḥiyuddīn (may Allah have mercy on him), whose heirs granted its publication rights to Jamia Nizamia. The hadith and Qurʼan data is that of Zujajah.org, also an undertaking of Syed Mohiuddin Qadri, initiated by the late Syed Jamalullah Qadri (Khusro). Fuller detail, and the attributions for every illustration, are on the credits page.
Contact
Corrections, questions and anything else about this site go to Madani Books:
If you find a ruling that does not match the printed manual, please say so: the whole design of this site is that every sentence can be traced back to the page it came from, and a mistake is worth knowing about.