The analysis of divine law in the Islamic context took place primarily in the literary genre known as furū‘ al-fiqh (branches of jurisprudence). Works of furū‘ can be classified in two categories, mukhtaṣars or epitomes of the law and mabsūṭs or expansums. When writing my Ph.D. thesis on the Fatāwā ‘Alamgīrī, I was directed to the Mukhtaṣar of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037) as a text containing a succinct exposition of the Ḥanafī laws of marriage. I found the text to be very concise and clear in elucidating the major issues around marriage as a contract. The style was one of offering the rules rather than discussing points of disagreement. Yet I did not return to the Mukhtaṣar after the initial analysis of marriage laws. In his later work on form and content of furū‘ texts, my supervisor, the late Norman Calder, describes this particular mukhtaṣar (also called matn or text) as ‘the finest of the Ḥanafī mukhtaṣars’ which was ‘for centuries a teaching tool, a point of reference and a focus of commentary, due to its reliability as an expression of the basic norms of the Ḥanafī tradition’.