Fiqh Made Easy occupies a distinctive place among modern English-language works of Islamic jurisprudence in that its origin was pedagogical rather than academic. Dr. Salih Ibn Ghanim Al-Sadlan, a professor at the College of Shari'ah, Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, composed the work in Arabic, under the title Taysir al-Fiqh, with a specific and urgent audience in mind: the Muslim populations of the Central Asian and Caucasus republics that had, until 1991, formed part of the Soviet Union. Decades of state suppression of religious instruction had left these communities with limited access to basic teaching in Islamic law, and Al-Sadlan prepared the book so that it could be translated into their languages as a foundational primer.

That original purpose shaped the book's method throughout. Al-Sadlan, who has never restricted his own scholarship to a single madhhab, chose in this work to present the fiqh positions that command broad agreement across the schools of Islamic law, stating his conclusions directly rather than reconstructing the juridical arguments and textual evidence behind them. As the translator notes, this left the author with the difficult task of presenting his conclusions without stating his evidence or reasoning. Where genuine differences of scholarly opinion exist, the book generally sets them aside as matters for specialized study rather than for an introductory reference.

The English translation was undertaken by Jamal al-Din M. Zarabozo, working from Boulder, Colorado, and completed in December 1999. Zarabozo has noted that he does not agree with every conclusion Al-Sadlan reaches in the book, and he preserves that scholarly distance in his introduction rather than smoothing it over, a choice consistent with the book's own stated aim of encouraging tolerance for legitimate differences of fiqh opinion among Muslims rather than treating any single position as beyond question.

Composed originally in 1415 A.H. (1994 to 1995 C.E.), the book has since found use well beyond its original Central Asian audience, serving as an introductory textbook in weekend and full-time Islamic schools, a primer for new Muslims, and a teaching resource for workshops on Islamic law conducted in English.