In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

Foreword to the Fifth Edition

All praise is due to Allah, the Originator and Restorer, who prescribed His rulings in line with the welfare of His servants. May blessings and peace be upon the possessor of sound speech, who conveyed the law of his Lord with concise yet comprehensive words, and upon his family and Companions who bore the Sharia and delivered it with fidelity and precision.

To proceed:

I praise and thank Allah, Exalted is He, for the ease and facilitation He granted in producing this comprehensive and beneficial commentary, which brings together both the old and the new sciences in an expansive, accessible style and a detailed arrangement so that every reader may benefit: it does not rise so high as to perplex the beginner, nor descend below the level of the advanced. For that reason—and all praise belongs to Allah—it has been well received by readers of every class, who welcomed it eagerly from the moment it appeared until the copies of its earlier editions were exhausted in an exceedingly short time.

Requests for it then continued insistently, which encouraged us to reprint it and meet the needs of those who sought it, but in a form better than the first, with fuller and more complete verification. I pray to Allah, Exalted is He, that in this edition I have hit the mark and drawn nearer to perfection than in the previous one.

It is inevitable that, in later periods, a person will find opportunities to correct slips that escaped him in earlier days, so long as he still has a hand that can reach a book or a mind that can guide him to what is right.

The eminent scholar and master of prose in his era, ʿAbd al-Rahim ibn ʿAli al-Baysani, known as al-Qadi al-Fadil (d. 596 AH), wrote to his deputy in the chancery, the famous litterateur al-Imad al-Isfahani (d. 597 AH), saying:

"I have observed that no one writes a book on any given day except that, on the morrow, he says: ‘If only this could be changed…’"