← All five levels / Level 4
Specialisation
“I want to go deep in one science.”
One field, taken to its own literature — the long fiqh compendia, the tafsīr of al-Bayḍāwī, inheritance law, comparative jurisprudence.
What you can do after it: By the end you can work inside one science’s primary literature without a bridge text.
The books at this level
Read across, not down — these are studied alongside each other, not in sequence.
Al-Hidāya
Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī · d. 593 AH
The central work of Ḥanafī law, and the text the final years of every dār al-ʿulūm are built around. Every ruling with its proof, its objection, and its answer.
Planned Qur’anAnwār al-Tanzīl (al-Bayḍāwī)
al-Qāḍī al-Bayḍāwī · d. 685 AH
Tafsīr that assumes you already hold grammar, rhetoric and theology, and uses all three at once. The advanced commentary of the classical curriculum.
Planned FiqhAl-Sirājī fī al-Mīrāth
al-Sajāwandī · d. c. 600 AH
Inheritance law — the one Islamic science that is genuinely arithmetic. Shares, exclusions, and the calculations that resolve them.
Planned FiqhBidāyat al-Mujtahid
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · d. 595 AH
Comparative law: on each question, what every school held and precisely why they differed. The book that turns a student of one madhhab into a reader of all four.
Planned ArabicSharḥ Jāmī (al-Fawāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya)
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī · d. 898 AH
The commentary on al-Kāfiya, and the last grammar in the classical course. Famous for being hard, and for the fact that finishing it is what the tradition treats as knowing naḥw.
Planned FiqhAl-Tawḍīḥ wa-l-Talwīḥ
Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa, with al-Taftāzānī · d. 747 / 792 AH
Legal theory at its most demanding — a text and a commentary that disagree with each other, read together. The summit of uṣūl in the Dars-e-Nizāmī.
Planned ArabicMaqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī
Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥarīrī · d. 516 AH
Fifty short episodes written to show off everything Arabic can do — rare words, double meanings, whole passages that read the same in both directions. The traditional test of whether you truly have the language.
Planned