in his scholarly endeavors was to respond to the situational aspects of the daily lives of ordinary believers in modem times. Besides his numerous academic works in the field of Islamic jurisprudence,٢٦ it was a search for an expansive methodology in the derivation of fresh rulings (furil ) in applied law that led him to embark on a cre‌ ative examination of traditional sources of Islamic law. Without such an extended methodology that would aim at restoring diminished confidence in the substantial role of human reasoning, it was impossible to formulate fresh judicial decisions that were needed to guide the community that was being modernized at an ever-increasing pace. The key to this intellectual search lay in approaching the Islamic revelatory sources, like the Quran and the traditions ascribed to the Prophet and the Imams, with a view toward decoding the principles (u ul)
deduced judgments (al:zkam) of the paradigm cases in the juridical corpus.
In this connection, al-KhTI I was reflecting the impact of Shaykh Murta<;la al-An ari (d. ١٨٦٤), whose methodology in deducing fresh rulings, as expounded in al-Rasail (The Treatises), had revised earlier works and defined practical ways to solve con‌ temporary problems.٢٧ The teachers whose graduate lectures (bahth al-kharij) al-Khui had attended were also the founders Qf independent schools in legal theory, already foreshadowed in al-An aris
developed al-An ari
al-Khui edited and published in two volumes, under the titleAjwad al-taqrzrat (Out‌ standing Lectures),٢٨ became the foundation of his own original research in the field of legal principles. In the years that followed, he published several important vol‌ umes critically evaluating the works of his teachers and other scholars in the field and asserting his independent methodology in formulating new judicial decisions.
The most problematic area in the methodology was the verification of transmitted
sciences (al- ulum al-naqliyya) as far as evidential evaluation (l:zujjiya) was concerned. The reason for this was that the admission of any tradition (l:zadrth) as evidence for a judicial decision depended on its being established as authentic. Accordingly, the method of ascertaining the authenticity of a tradition (hadrth), through investigating the "chain of transmission" (isnad) that was appended to each report, and through examining its internal consistency, was an indispensable part of the juristic process. The discipline that prepared a mujtahid to methodically investigate this type of docu‌ mentary evidence in support of a judicial decision is known as ilrn al-rijal-that is, "scrutiny of the transmitters" who appear in the chains of transmission that originate from the Prophet and the Imams. Investigation of the biographies of the individual transmitters provided information about their veracity and the authenticity, or lack of it, of what they related in the form of the traditions from the Prophet and the Imams.
Al-Khuis monumental, multivolume study known as Mujam rijal al-l:zadfth (Biographical Dictionary of the Narrators of the Traditions) is a unique contribu‌ tion in the field of ilm al-rijal.٢٩ In this work he proposed a new method of ascer‌ taining the reliability of traditions that were questioned, for instance, for lack of corroboration or were vitiated because of a missing link in the chain of transmis‌ sion. The intellectual process of authentication is admittedly based on a juristic pre‌ sumption about the transmitters good intention, as long as the substance of the report does not contradict the ethos of Islamic revelation. Al-Khui identifies this method of establishing the admissibility of a tradition as a proof of the derivation