Abu Hanifa

Abu Hanifa is Abu Hanifa al-Nu'man ibn Thabit, the Greatest Imam, born in A.H. 80 in Kufa. He was the scholar of Iraq and the formost representative and exemplar of the school of juridical opinion (ra'y). The Hanafi school, which he founded, has has decided court cases in the majority of Islamic lands for the greater part of Islam's history, including the Abbasid and Ottoman periods, and maintains its preeminence in Islamic courts today. Abu Hanifa was the first to analyse Islamic jurisprudence, divide it into subjects, distinguish its issues, and determine the range and criteria for analogical reasoning (qiyas) hterein. Shafi'i used to say of him, "In jurisprudence, all scholars are the children of Abu Hanifa." The Imam and his school have been misunderstood by some who have believed that the Imam's knowledge of hadith was largely limited to what was transmitted by the narrators of Kufa, especially through the Companion Ibn Mas'ud. In fact, the Imam was a hadith expert who had all the hadiths of the Companions of Mecca and Medina in addition to those of Kufa, and only lacked the relatively few channels of narrators who were in Damascus. His Musnad [Ascribed traditions] is comparable in size to the Muwatta' of Imam Malik and the Musand of Shafi'i which the later based their respective schools upon, and when one reads Muwatta' al-Imam Muhammad, Malik's work which Abu Hanifa's disciple Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani studied and annotated for three years under Imam Malik at Medina, one gains complete conviction from Muhammad's notes that virtually every hadith therein was familiar to Abu Hanifa before he arrived at the positions of his school, all of which is a persuasive case against the suggestions of the unlearned that Abu Hanifa did not know hadith. Nevertheless, the Imam was of an age that was plagued by hadith forgers, and he was moved by his extreme piety to reject any hadith that he was not reasonably sure was authentic, for which reason he applied a relatively selective range of hadith evidence in Sacred Law. His school, for example does not accept qualifications or modifications of any ruling established by Koranic verse (takhsis ayah) when such qualification comes through a hadith with but one, even if rigorously authenticated (sahih), channel of transmission, but only if it comes through a hadith with three separate channels of transmission. So despite Abu Hanifa's being a hadith specialist, his school reflects a legacy of extensive use of analogy and deduction from specific rulings and general principles established by primary texts acceptable to the Imam's rigorous standards, as well as the use of inference and juridical opinion as to what conforms to the human interests in general protected and furthered by Sacred Law. With his legal brilliance, he was equally well known for his piety and asceticism, and though he had wealth from a number of shops selling cloth, to which he made occasional rounds in superintending their managers, he devoted his fortune to helping students and researchers in Sacred Law, and many a scholar was to realize how much the Imam's financial help had meant when it was discontinued after his death. He shunned sleep at night, and some called him the Peg because of his perpetual standing for prayer therein, often reciting the entire Koran in his nightly rak'as, he performed the dawn prayer for forty years with the ablution (wudu) made for the nightfall prayer, would only sleep a short while between his noon and midafternoon prayers, and by the end of his life, had recited the Holy Koran seven thousand times in the palce where he died. He would never sit in the shade of a wall belonging to someone he had loaned money, saying, "Every loan that brings benefit is usury." He died in Baghdad in A.H. 150 at seventy years of age, leaving an intellectual and spiritual leagcy that few scholars have ever equalled.