Al-Bayān wa’l-taḥsīl (The Explanation and Elucidation) is a commentary on al-ʿUtbī’s (d. 254/868) Mustakhraja (Extractions) authored by Ibn Rushd al-Jadd (d. 520/1126). The excerpt begins:
From the Book of the Qibla (direction of prayer) from Ibn al-Qāsim’s [d. 191/806] audition (samāʿ) of Mālik. Saḥnūn [d. 240/854] said, Ibn al-Qāsim told me, I heard Mālik say, I do not think that anyone should perform ablution with what remains (faḍl) of the ablution of the Christian. As for the backwash remaining after he has drunk (bi-suʾrihi min al-shirāb), I think there is no objection. Ibn al-Qāsim said that he [Mālik] disapproved of it more than once. Saḥnūn said, if you are confident that he [the Christian] does not drink wine or eat pork, then there is no objection to performing ablutions with it, whether out of necessity or not.
Ibn Rushd's subsequent commentary illustrates the transformation of Mālikī masāʾil from a corpus of transmitted answers into the basis for a more systematic jurisprudence. Ibn Rushd does not simply preserve the varying opinions attributed to Mālik, Ibn al-Qāsim, Saḥnūn, and others; he reconstructs their underlying reasoning, distinguishes points of agreement from disagreement, traces differences to Egyptian and Medinan lines of transmission, and works out the practical consequences of each position. In doing so, al-Bayān wa’l-taḥṣīl exemplifies a crucial stage in the historical development of the Mālikī school: inherited masāʾil remained authoritative, but their effective use increasingly required jurists to understand the principles and relationships that structured them. Ibn Rushd explicitly associated such mastery of the masāʾil and their points of agreement and disagreement with juristic competence, while presenting his commentary as a resource through which qualified muftīs below the level of ijtihād could issue opinions on questions already encompassed by the school’s legal corpus. The excerpt thus reveals both the continuing authority of early Mālikī transmissions and the increasingly analytical methods through which later jurists organized, interpreted, and applied them.
For more context on this excerpt, see Janina Safran, “Revisiting al-ʿUtbī’s Mustakhraja: Ibn Rushd al-Jadd’s al-Bayān wa’l-taḥsīl,” Islamic Law Blog, July 30, 2026.