Ma’alim Al-Qurba

The Ma’àlim al-Qurba was written as a guide for the Muhtasib – the official responsible in medieval and later Islam for the enforcement of the law – in the performance of his duties. It provides a summary of the positive and negative injunctions contained in the standard codes of the shar’, together with regulations for the safeguarding of public morality, for assuring the purity of the faith and for protecting its adherents against trickery, charlatanry, fraud and extortion. The work contains copious extracts from earlier writers on the subject, but it possesses sufficient original material to provide, directly or indirectly, a lively picture of a Muslim town in the middle ages, with its workshops and markets, mosques and public baths, guilds and officials, and all the other crowded components of existence at such a time and place.