LEGAL MAXIMS AND OTHER GENRES OF LITERATURE 95

in the 1870s, which contains ninety-nine legal maxims, was mainly derived from Al-Ashbāh Wa'l-Naẓā'ir of Ibn Nujaym.

Despite the general tendency in legal maxims to be inter-scholastic, jurists and schools are not unanimous on all of them, but the differences between schools in this area are not very wide. The Ja'fari school of Shī'a has its own collection of legal maxims, yet, notwithstanding some differences of style, the thematic arrangement of the Shī'ī collection resembles closely to those of their Sunni counterparts. The first Shī'ī work on maxims was that of 'Allama Ibn Mutahhar al-Ḥilli (d. 771/1369), entitled Al-Qawā'id, followed by al-Shahīd al-Awwal Shams al-Din al-'Āmili's (d. 782/1389) Al-Qawā'id wa'l-Fawā'id, which compiled over 300 maxims, and many more works that elaborated and enhanced the earlier ones. The more recent work of Muhammad al-Ḥusayn Kāshif al-Ghiṭā', bearing the title Taḥrīr al-Mujalla, is an abridgment and commentary on the Ottoman Mejelle. In this work, the author has commented on the first 99 articles of the Mejelle, out of which he selected 45 as being the most important in the range, and the rest he found to be overlapping and convergent or obscure, but he added 82 others to make up a total 127 maxims of current application and relevance, especially to transactions and contracts. Al-Ghiṭā' went on to say, however, that "if we were to recount all the maxims that are referred to in the various chapters of fiqh, we can add up to five hundred or more."³⁷

The Discordances (al-Furuq)

Other developments of interest in the fiqh literature that relate to the qawāʿid are the discordances (al-furūq), which occur in almost the opposite direction to that of al-ashbāh wa'-naẓā'ir. As the word indicates, the furūq highlights differences between seemingly similar concepts, or those which have an aspect in common. The attempt to highlight such differences in the substantive juris corpus of fiqh was also extended to the maxims, in that the furūq literature specified the differences between some of the maxims that resembled one another, but could subtly be distinguished in some respect. The Māliki jurist Shihāb al-Dīn Ahmad b. Idrīs al-Qarafi's (d. 682/1281) Kitāb al-Furūq has discussed 548 maxims, and 274 differences