Sheikh Ibn Baz

Sheikh Ibn Baz: a life in dates

• Full name: Abu Abdullah Abd al-Aziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Baz (عبد العزيز بن عبد الله بن باز).
• Birth: on 12 Dhu al-Hijjah 1330 AH, corresponding to 22 November 1912, in Riyadh, into a family of scholars.
• Childhood: his father died when he was too young to remember him. He memorised the Quran before puberty and learned to read and write.
• Blindness: an eye disease weakened his sight in 1346. He lost it completely at the start of Muharram 1350, at around twenty.
• Judiciary: judge in the al-Kharj region from Jumada al-Akhirah 1357 to the end of 1371, more than fourteen years.
• Teaching: Riyadh Scientific Institute from 1372, then the Faculty of Sharia from 1373, in fiqh, creed and hadith, for nine years.
• Islamic University of Madinah: vice-president from 1381 to 1390, then president until 1395. Throughout those years he taught at the Prophet's Mosque ﷺ, between maghrib and isha.
• National offices: head of the General Presidency of Scholarly Research and Ifta from 1395, with ministerial rank. President of the Council of Senior Scholars from 1389. Grand Mufti of the Kingdom from 1413, that is 1992.
• Death: on 27 Muharram 1420, corresponding to 13 May 1999, at the age of eighty-six.

Seventy years without reading a line

He told it himself, in a biographical note he dictated. He could see when he began his studies. An illness weakened his sight in 1346, and it went entirely at the start of Muharram 1350, when he was about twenty. He added a prayer: that what had been taken from him be returned in the form of insight.

One has to grasp what that meant for everything that followed. Everything he studied after that date, he heard. Everything he taught, he taught from memory. Everything he wrote, he dictated. Legal opinions, lessons, letters, answers to radio listeners, correspondence with institutions across the world: close to seventy years of intellectual output without ever rereading a page.

Those who knew him stress two qualities that follow directly from this. A memory for texts and chains of transmission that allowed him to grade the authenticity of a hadith on the spot, to a degree few scholars of his century reached. And a way of answering, short and clear, shaped by decades of oral replies to concrete questions.

Authority exercised long before the title

The office of Grand Mufti of the Kingdom had been created in 1953 for Sheikh Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al al-Sheikh. On his death in 1389 the post fell vacant. It stayed vacant for twenty-four years.

Throughout those twenty-four years, it was Ibn Baz who presided over the Council of Senior Scholars, headed the Presidency of Ifta, chaired the founding council of the Muslim World League and the Fiqh Academy. His opinions were sought from across the Muslim world, his answers broadcast on the radio, his letters addressed to governments and private individuals alike. When the title of Grand Mufti was finally conferred on him in 1413, it merely ratified a reality long established.

The path that led him there was that of a man of the field. More than fourteen years on the bench in the al-Kharj region, judging real cases between real people. Nine years of teaching in Riyadh. Fourteen years in Madinah, running the young university while holding a circle at the Prophet's Mosque ﷺ. It was there that he counted among his students a young jurist from al-Qasim, Sheikh Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymin, who would later be buried beside him in Makkah.

A body of work made of answers

Here is what you need to understand before buying, or you will be looking for a book that does not exist.

Ibn Baz wrote few treatises in the classical sense. Some forty titles are attributed to him as such, most of them short, along with dozens of epistles. The substance of his work lies elsewhere: in the thousands of answers given orally or by letter over half a century, collected afterwards and arranged by subject in his great compilation of fatwas and articles, which runs to more than thirty volumes.

The unit of this work, then, is not the book but the question. And that changes how one buys. The great compilation is organised by discipline: creed, purification, prayer, zakat, fasting, pilgrimage, transactions, family. The volumes are sold separately. A reader interested in the rules of pilgrimage has no reason to acquire all thirty volumes: what he needs is the one dealing with hajj, and perhaps the Sheikh's specific treatise on the subject.

His works

مجموع فتاوى ومقالات متنوعة

The great compilation of his opinions, letters and articles, arranged by subject in many volumes. The reference work for finding his position on a specific question. Bought volume by volume as needed.

التحقيق والإيضاح لكثير من مسائل الحج والعمرة والزيارة

His treatise on hajj, umrah and the visit to Madinah. A short work, widely distributed before the pilgrimage season, and one of his rare texts built as a continuous exposition.

الدروس المهمة لعامة الأمة

A booklet of a few dozen pages summarising what every Muslim ought to know: the pillars of faith, the conditions and rules of prayer, the main prohibitions. The shortest and most printed of his writings.

العقيدة الصحيحة وما يضادها

An epistle on correct belief and what contradicts it. Brief text, plain language, one of his most studied titles in beginners' curricula.

الفوائد الجلية في المباحث الفرضية

His treatise on inheritance law, one of the first works he cites when listing his own writings. A technical work for students of fiqh.

فتاوى نور على الدرب

The collection of his answers given on the radio programme of the same name, transcribed and arranged. Oral register, concrete questions, direct replies.

To these should be added his epistles on calling to Islam, on the conduct of the scholar, on various questions of creed and fiqh, as well as his commentaries on classical texts drawn from his teaching circles.

Buy Sheikh Ibn Baz's books in Arabic

Every book sold by My Maktaba is in Arabic, in its original edition, and every one is new. For each of the Sheikh's titles, the listing states the publisher, year, number of volumes, format and whether the text is vocalised.

For a reader learning Arabic, this author offers a rare advantage. His language is that of the spoken answer: short sentences, predictable structure, the everyday religious vocabulary that recurs constantly. Start with الدروس المهمة, which you will finish in a few sittings, then move on to the volume of the great compilation that matches your subject of the moment. You will progress in Arabic and in fiqh in one and the same movement.