This is currently the best print for Zad al-Mustaqni’. It is the critical edition by the Imam of al-Masjid al-Nabawi, Sh. ‘Abdul Muhsin al-Qasim (h).
It is available for free in al-Masjid al-Nabawi, or for around 12 riyals in some bookstores in Madinah.
This is a pocket sized edition. It is highly advised that students of Hanbali Fiqh always keep a copy of this with them and just read through the different chapters regularly. This goes without saying for those who are memorising Zad. It is very important for the student to regularly refresh his/her memory by reading through the text as the Fiqh issues are in the thousands, which makes them very easy to forget. The simplest way to remember them is by reading through just the text regularly. Sh. ‘Abdus Salam al-Shuway’ir (h) has said that a student of Fiqh should revise every chapter of Fiqh cover to cover every year without a miss; this is the bare minimum. This is where abridged texts like Zad become very useful.
Some scholars have said that if a student of knowledge leaves off revising a particular science for anything more than three months then he turns into a layman in that science.
As for the text itself then it needs no introduction for the Hanbalis and in the future we can speak more about it, InshaAllah. But for now… The scholars have said that it is from the best abridged texts of our school and certainly the most memorized. It stands out through its author who was one of the greatest Imams of the later day Hanbalis, Sh. Musa al-Hajjawi (r), and also because of the fact that it is a distillation of Ibn Qudama’s (r) masterpiece al-Muqni’, which is the most important Hanbali text of that generation of Hanbali scholars.
It is also worth mentioning that Zad goes against the Mu’tamad of the Madhhab in close to 100 issues, which is more than any other abridged text in the Madhhab (issues where authors opt for an opinion other than the Mu’tamad are termed as “Mukhalafat”).
However, this isn’t much given the sheer number of explicit and implicit legal issues that has been condensed within this text; around 6000 legal issues. So, to be fair, this could be the reason why the “Mukhalafat” of this text are more apparent than other texts. Sh. al-Qu’aymi (h) says that there is a positive side to this for students of Zad as it trains them to refer to major books like al-Muntaha and al-Iqna’ as they attempt to confirm the Mu’tamad position.
It has more Fiqhi issues for each chapter than other abridged works as we mentioned before, but if there is one thing this text lacks then it would be its lack of order in certain areas of some chapters. But through regular reading with a focused mind it becomes a nonissue over time.
Furthermore, both the Mukhalafat and the lack of order is made up for through its commentary al-Rawd al-Murbi’, which is another unrivaled book within the school. You can read more about al-Rawd by
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