The Inheritance and Dowries of Divorced Women in Īḍāḥ al-Ghāmiḍ by the Eminent Scholar Aḥmad al-Khālidī (d. 880 AH): A Critical Study and Edition

Abstract

This study aims to edit and examine the chapter entitled “Inheritance and Dowries of Divorced Women” from the book Clarification of the Ambiguous: Unveiling the Meanings of Miftāḥ al-Fā’iḍ in the Science of Inheritance by the jurist Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Khālidī al-Ānsī (d. 880 AH). Its significance lies in producing a critically edited text of this chapter, which addresses the inheritance and dowry of a divorced woman when it is unknown which of the deceased’s wives was divorced, as well as analyzing the author’s unified mathematical method, known as the “Transformation Method,” for dealing with such uncertainty. The study adopts the established method of scholarly textual editing alongside the analytical method. The text was collated against two manuscript copies, and the author’s distinction between known and unknown divorce was analyzed, along with the extension of the same method to dowries and subsequently to marriage contracted during a fatal illness. The study reached several findings, most notably that al-Khālidī applied a single mathematical method based on enumerating the possible “cases” to multiple jurisprudential issues whenever they shared the structural feature of uncertainty regarding identification; that his two parallel approaches—the method of the experts in inheritance law and the method of the jurists—differ in their enumeration of cases and consequently yield different results, except when the number of affected wives equals half the total number of wives; and that, according to the method of the experts in inheritance law, a wife’s share of her dowry follows a consistent rule: the dowry minus a fraction equal to one divided by twice the number of wives. The study recommends continuing the critical editing of the remaining chapters of the manuscript and conducting a comparative study between the Transformation Method in this chapter and its counterpart in the chapter on estates, in order to determine the extent to which the author consistently applies this mathematical methodology throughout the book.