In his treatise on Shāfiʿī law titled al-Muḥarrar, Rāfiʿī seeks to restate Shāfiʿī rulings in summary form. In this excerpt, he reviews and summarizes the opinions that he presented in his earlier work al-ʿAzīz (a commentary on Ghazālī’s legal treatise)on the issue of translation in early Islamic courts and presents a brief outline of requirements that must be met for a court translator to be acceptable: impartiality, independence, and observance of religious constraints (taklīf) and of regulations concerning the number of witnesses (ʿadad). In his chapter in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Mahmood Kooria uses this text, alongside Rāfiʿī’s ʿAzīz, to demonstrate a break in the Shāfiʿī conception of the status of non-Arabic speakers and translation in judicial proceedings, especially among Shāfiʿīs hailing from Persia.
This source is part of the Online Companion to the book Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, ed. Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale(ILSP/HUP 2017)—a collection of sources and other material used in and related to the book.