Written by a working master builder rather than a jurist, this is the most complete surviving manual of Islamic building law, compiling Maliki legal opinions alongside cases from the author's own career in Tunis. Its five parts cover walls and structures, the prevention of harm (darar) between neighbours, building defects, plantations and towers, and mills. Rather than prescribing a city plan, it resolves disputes case by case: rights to light and air, drainage and waste water, party walls, overlooking windows, projections into the street, and the ownership of cul-de-sacs. Urban form emerges as the cumulative product of these adjudications - the rule of no-harm producing narrow streets, blank facades, courtyard houses and semi-private dead-end alleys.
It shows that the dense 'organic' medina was not unplanned but code-governed, generated by an enforceable body of neighbour law administered through the qadi and the muhtasib. Rediscovered by scholars such as Besim Hakim in the 1980s, it reframed Islamic urbanism as a bottom-up regulatory system and became a reference point for form-based and incremental coding debates in contemporary planning.
See it on the timeline →