The Safawi Collection (Nomocanon, 'Collection from the Canon Law')

al-Majmūʿ al-Ṣafawī (Kitāb al-Qawānīn; the Great Nomocanon) · Al-Safi Abu al-Fadaʾil Majid ibn al-ʿAssal, d. c. 1265 · completed September 1238 · canon law · HOLLIS:990044123410203941

Arabic untranslated · English only through the Ethiopic daughter version. No published English translation of this text was located in the catalogues and series checked. Where only a non-English rendering or a translation of a daughter version exists, it is recorded below and does not close the gap. Treat this as a gap candidate, not as proof that no translation exists; the evidence names every source checked.

Why this is in the register

English access is indirect, and one step removed: the Arabic original has never been translated, but its Ethiopic daughter version has — Paulos Tzadua's English translation of the Geʿez Fetha Nagast (ed. Peter L. Strauss, Addis Ababa, Haile Sellassie I University, 1968; reprinted Carolina Academic Press, 2009) is the standard English route into this material. HOLLIS holds the 1968 printing as 990044123410203941 (https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990044123410203941) and a 2009 record ('The Fetha nagast = The Law of the kings', c2009). Both list al-Safi Ibn al-ʿAssal as the author and describe the work as 'originally written in Arabic by the Coptic Egyptian writer Abu-l Fada'il Ibn al-'Assal': https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Fetha%20nagast&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 . What remains untranslated is the Arabic itself: the two Arabic recensions, al-Safi's own preface on rendering the canons into Arabic, and his patristic and conciliar citations in their Arabic wording. The only Latin rendering that faces the Arabic (rather than the Geʿez) is the Corpus iuris Abessinorum, 'textum aethiopicum arabicumque ... cum versione latina' (Berlin 1889), which HOLLIS also holds. The Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia entry (CE:2075a-2079b) records al-Safi's four canonical works of 1238-1243 and states that the Nomocanon 'remains today the basis of ecclesiastical law for the Coptic church of Egypt, and even more so, for the church of Ethiopia (where it is entitled Fetha Nagast)': https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/collection/cce/id/1688 .

The Coptic Church's most influential legal compilation, still the base of Coptic and Ethiopian canon law and of the 18th-century Maronite reform. The register records it as needing English because only the daughter version has been rendered: Fetha Nagast English access is doubly indirect (Geʿez from Arabic, English from Geʿez), so the Arabic recensions A and B, al-Safi's preface, and the Arabic wording of his sources remain untranslated. The e-text linked is the English Fetha Nagast, not the Arabic.

Existing translations recorded

Electronic text

Scanned witnesses

Edition / series
The Fetha Nagast — The Law of the Kings (Ethiopic recension, translated from Geʿez) · Addis Ababa, Faculty of Law, Haile Sellassie I University 1968; reprinted Carolina Academic Press 2009 · Paulos Tzadua; ed. Peter L. Strauss · 1968 language: en · daughter version — the Geʿez Fetha Nagast is an adaptation of al-Safi's Arabic Nomocanon, so this English text renders the daughter version, not the Arabic

Source and licence
archive.org · PDF scan · unknown fetha-nagast-english-translation

Scan search: not checked. Not searched in the scan pass: this dossier was outside the 121-work scan target set.

Harvard Hollis

Sources checked

Cite: Tergwame, “The Safawi Collection (Nomocanon, 'Collection from the Canon Law')” (coptic gap dossier), 2026. https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/copto-arabic-safi-ibn-al-assal-nomocanon