Thamarat al-Mirath is an Urdu handbook of Hanafi inheritance law that works every share out of a hundred, so that an estate can be divided with a calculator in two minutes and a whole munasakha solved in ten. It sets out the conditions of the fourteen heirs with their evidence, and works twenty-four cases through in full.
Thamarat al-Mirath was written because muftis the author met told him the same thing: the old way of calculating an inheritance is genuinely difficult, students dread it, and a munāsakha can take a very long time. He set out to find a way that does not need taṣḥīḥ, tadākhul or tabāyun at all.
The method is to work everything out of a hundred. A share becomes a percentage, a percentage can be typed into a calculator, and the estate and the property are divided by the same arithmetic. Because each generation is settled in full before the next is begun, a munāsakha is not one long calculation but a series of short ones, and the book claims ten minutes for the whole of it.
There are, it says, only four kinds of calculation in inheritance (the plain one, radd, ʿawl and munāsakha) and only fourteen people who take a share. The conditions of each of the fourteen are given at length, with the verse or hadith each rests on, and then twenty-four worked questions run the calculations through: seven of them on radd, four on ʿawl, and one on munāsakha, in the order in which they are actually needed rather than the order a textbook would use. The rulings hardly ever needed, such as the hermaphrodite, are left out on purpose, so that a student is not made anxious for nothing.
First published in May 2011 by Maktaba Thamir, Manchester.