Kifayat al-Muntahi

Kifayat al-Muntahi fi Sharh Bidayat al-Mubtadi is the large commentary that al-Marghinani promised at the start of Bidayat al-Mubtadi; he began it, and when close to finishing found some prolixity in it and feared the book would be neglected, so he turned to al-Hidaya. ^{1 2 3}

The editor notes that al-Marghinani refers to Kifayat al-Muntahi in more than twenty places in al-Hidaya, when sending the reader to a fuller account, further branches and parallels, or the views of the masters; for example, in the Book of Pre-emption he says he discussed the matter at length there, at the end of the Book of the Missing Person that he explained it more fully there, and on usurpation that the masters' views on it were many and he recorded them there. ³

The editor reports Tashkopruzade in Miftah al-Sa'ada putting it at about eighty volumes; al-Ayni in al-Binaya saying it was lost, not found in Iraq, Syria or Egypt, and that it was said to exist in India; and Hajji Khalifa noting that no one in the Ottoman lands had seen it. ⁴ The editor obtained copies of fragments catalogued as parts of it, which turned out to be from al-Khwarazmi's al-Kifaya, a commentary on al-Hidaya, and he found nothing of it. ⁴