Abu Hanifah

Circa 699–767

Legal scholar

Sources

The Hanafi School . Though Abu Yusuf (732–798) and Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Shaybani (750–804) also played major roles, Abu Hanifah is considered the founder of the Hanafi school of law. Born in Kufah, Iraq, of non-Arabs who originated in Afghanistan, Abu Hanifah spent most of his life in his native city, traveling only to make a pilgrimage to Makkah in Arabia. Toward the end of his life, when the Abbasid dynasty came to power, he supported a revolt against the khalifah, was arrested, and sent in 763 to the brand-new capital, Baghdad, where he died after four and a half years in prison. Never holding a government office or a judgeship, Abu Hanifah represented the private cultivation the law in the center of the khilafah, Iraq, and specifically the tradition of the most urbane and sophisticated Iraqi city, Kufah, which had not yet been supplanted by Baghdad. Still concerned with the political issues that had concerned Muslims under the discredited Umayyad government, Abu Hanifah held a point of view that was at once rationalist, determinist, and politically quietist, while not favorable to the new Abbasid khilafah. Abu Hanifah’s quietism was expressed in ideological terms in the assertion that ordinary Muslims ought not to judge the faith of other Muslims, for God will judge all on the last day. Because it suggested that one should suspend one’s judgment with the regard to the belief or disbelief of the rulers, this position ultimately fit with the Abbasids’ desire to quiet the opposition they were facing, but in Abu Hanifah’s lifetime, it did not lead to any cooperation with them.

Followers . Abu Hanifah’s student Abu Yusuf continued to develop his teacher’s stances, but—unlike Abu Hanifah, who maintained his independence from the state—Abu Yusuf accepted the position of supreme judge in the khilafah from Khalifah Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786–809). This appointment constituted a major change of direction because it associated the Iraqi legal school, the proto-Hanafis, with the state, a link that on the whole continued in many places in later history. The other main founder of the Hanafi school, al-Shaybani (750–805), a student of both Abu Hanifah and Abu Yusuf, also accepted a judgeship from Khalifah al-Rashid, but none of the main Hanafi legal scholars after them ever held the position of supreme judge, and few were judges at all.

Legacy . Abu Hanifah wrote down little if anything, and only a few works attributed to Abu Yusuf survive. Al-Shaybani produced most of the earliest extant texts of the Hanafi school. Indeed, writings attributed to al-Shaybani constitute the first comprehensive, systematic expression of Muslim law, already in a highly sophisticated form. Without abandoning the rationalist tradition of Abu Hanifah and Abu Yusuf, al-Shaybani relied more than they on the traditions of the Prophet and thus helped to win acceptance for the Iraqi school from its more traditionist rivals. Positions attributed to all three scholars were handed down and together formed the raw material from which the Hanafi legal system was built. This school prevailed in most of Muslim Asia, especially among Turkish populations, and later was the official school of the Muslim empires in Turkey and India.

Legacy . Although Abu Hanifah’s role in founding the school that is named after him is thus somewhat indirect, he nevertheless held pride of place as the founder, as he was much better known to the masses than either Abu Yusuf or al-Shaybani. As the teacher of both men, Abu Hanifah provided a blanket of unity that covered all the Hanafi school and its considerable inner diversity. Also, certain principles that he established are still basic to the school. The most notable of these, perhaps, was his use of reasoning to elaborate the law from its basic sources, the Qur’an and the Sunnah. Although Abu Yusuf tended to cite the Sunnah a little more than Abu Hanifah, and al-Shaybani made vastly more use of it (especially in the form of hadith reports) than either of his predecessors, the principle of the use of reason laid down by Abu Hanifah was never shaken.

Sources

Shibli Nu’mani, Imam Abu Hanifah: Life and Work: English Translation of Allamah Shibli Nu‘imami’s “Sirat-i-Nu’man,”, translated by M. Hadi Hussain (Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1977).

Joseph Schacht, “Abu Hanifa al-Nu’man,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, CD-ROM version (Leiden: Brill, 1999).