Nūr al-Dīn al-Sālimī is generally known as an Omani historian. However, al-Sālimī was an outstanding jurist who formulated over 1,500 maxims (qawāʿid), making him a thinker of great importance for Islamic jurisprudence. In Oman, he is believed to have been the most important Ibāḍī jurist after Ibn Baraka (d. 972). What was his method for deriving legal and ethical maxims? Al-Sālimī asks several questions: (1) what is particular and general, and how can a generalization be derived from specific cases? (2) what factors are necessary for a phenomenon to occur? (3) is every fact unique, and should it be treated separately? We maintain that al-Sālimī’s heuristic was based on induction and consisted of analysing individual facts from fiqh al-ʿibādāt (rules governing the relationship between man and God) in order to formulate generalizations that could be applied in fiqh al-muʿāmalāt (rules governing relations between humans).