Fiqh us Sunnah by As-Sayyid Sabiq | Set of 5 Books

Fiqh us Sunnah - Set of 5 Books

by As-Sayyid Sabiq (Author)

Muhammad Sa'eed Dabas (Translator)

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There are very few scholars whom people recognize instantly the moment you mention a book written by him. Or it can be the other way round. You mention the book and instantly the name of the author comes to your mind.

With Sayyid Sabiq we have a case of an author and a book: Mention the book and the author is immediately recognized, and mention the author and the name of the book is spontaneously given. The book is Fiqh As-Sunnah, a treasure of knowledge that every Muslim needs.

The book, the first to be written by Sayyid Sabiq, was started in the forties. Some twenty years later the author visited some of the Islamic republics in the old Soviet Union and he was informed that his book was studied there. It was a big surprise to him that his book found its way to those remote places, writhing under the Communist regime. In his book the author was phenomenally successful in providing a complete manual of Fiqh, or Islamic law, i.e. Shariah, in a highly readable and simple language.

Thus a discipline that required going through tens of books by scholars belonging to different schools of thought, and written several centuries earlier, was placed at the fingertip of any one who needed it. Readers who wished to learn about Islamic Fiqh but had no previous training were able to refer to it, as did students of Islamic universities who needed a summary that served as a bridge to a more detailed and in-depth study. Both groups found in it an indispensable work that saved them time and effort. Today the book remains an essential reading for anyone who wishes to learn what Islam requires of the individual and the community in matters of faith, worship, family matters and business transactions.

Although the author wrote several books after that, none had the same impact as Fiqh As-Sunnah. In 1994 the book earned him the coveted King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies. As the prize earned him a good sum of money and as he intended the book to be purely for the service of Islam, he used the monetary value of the prize for the establishment of a subsidiary institute of Al-Azhar in his home village. There are many such institutes of Al-Azhar, the world’s oldest Islamic university, in many cities and towns in Egypt. Sayyid Sabiq was the initiator of another such institute in his home village.

That village is called Istanha, in the Nile Delta in Egypt, where he was born in 1915. He memorized the Qur’an at the age of 9, and then he studied in a nearby institute of Al-Azhar, before moving on to another institute in Cairo. Subsequently he studied in the Shariah Faculty of Al-Azhar where he graduated and pursued higher studies.

Sayyid Sabiq was teaching at Al-Azhar, but he also held different posts in its administration. Later he taught for many years at the Umm Al-Qura Islamic University in Makkah. He spent his last years in Egypt, his home country, where he was decorated with a Note of Honor in 1992.