In this excerpt from the introduction toQuḍāt Qurṭuba, Khushanī (d. 361/971) praises the prince al-Ḥakam, who had asked him to compose this and other works on juridical matters, for his decision to encourage the publication of information on previous generations of judges, his care for genealogy, and his overall attention to the merits of historical knowledge. Khushanī details how he gathered information about Cordoban judges—namely, by approaching contemporaries who had memorized the actions and sayings of these judges—and then describes the nature of the information gathered. In her chapter in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Maribel Fierro usesKhushanī’s characterization of the judges as intelligent, fair, cautious, and attentive, among other praiseworthy traits, and his transparency regarding the sources of his information to establish Khushanī’s legitimacy as a source, to highlight the seriousness with which Khushanī approached his task, and to provide general information about what the learned people of Cordoba at the time of Khushanī’s writing thought of their previous judges.
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 primary sources and other material used in and related to the book.