**ABU HANIFA**, an-Nu'mān Ibn Thābit. – Traditionist and Muslim jurist, founder of one of the four principal systems or rites (*madhhab*) of law currently in force in Islam. Of Afghan origin, he was born in Kūfa in Iraq in 670 AD, where he spent almost his entire life, dedicated to study and oral teaching, supporting himself through the trade of fabrics. According to traditions that cannot be verified with certainty, he would have been very old when he steadfastly refused the position of judge offered to him by the 'Abbasid caliph al-Manṣūr, and would have been imprisoned and flogged for this refusal, dying in prison from the ill-treatment he suffered (767 AD).
Only a small treatise on dogmatics survives from him, entitled *al-Fiqh al-akbar* (The Greatest Knowledge of Religion), important for its great antiquity but of contested authenticity. Abu Hanifa’s teaching in the field in which he is chiefly known, that of law, has come down to us only through the writings of his immediate disciples Abū Yūsuf and Muḥammad al-Shaybānī. A characteristic of the Hanafite school of legal exegesis and elaboration (so called precisely from its founder Abu Hanifa) is a less rigorous adherence to the Medinese tradition (which would instead be represented shortly afterward by the Mālikite school), and a greater reliance on personal judgment (*raʾy*). This attitude, partly explainable by the lesser practical availability of a wide body of tradition or *ḥadīth* material, which instead was at the disposal of the Mālikite school of Medina, has been misunderstood by European historians as indicating a greater intention of liberalism in interpretation and construction on the part of the Hanafite school. In reality, this school also greatly valued the normative force of the words and actions of the Prophet and his circle, merely supplementing the gaps it found in the tradition it knew and resolving contradictions and discrepancies with a rather broader use of interpretive criteria, thus clearly opposing the only legal school that was strictly based on the literal interpretation of tradition, namely the Ḥanbalite school.
The Hanafite school, propagated in Baghdad by the two aforementioned jurists who were Abu Hanifa’s disciples, soon spread with the favor of the 'Abbasid caliphs into Mesopotamia and Persia, eventually prevailing absolutely in Central Asia. It was thus adopted by those Islamized Turkic-Tatar peoples, including the Ottoman Turks, who were to found the last great Muslim state at the end of the Middle Ages, spanning Asia and Europe.
The Ottoman Empire officially spread the Hanafite rite throughout all the provinces of its dominion, though it allowed the concurrent existence alongside it of other rites followed by the indigenous population (e.g., the Mālikite rite in North Africa). However, with the decline of this empire, the various regions once subject to Ottoman rule, including Libya, resumed the practical exclusive use of their own rites, while in Turkey itself the secularizing laws of the Kemalist state confined the use of Hanafite Muslim law to private individual acts of worship. A similar abrogation was carried out by the Soviet Union for the Turkic-Tatar populations within its territory. Thus, the Muslim countries where the Hanafite school is currently recognized and practiced are the Hejaz, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, India, and partially Egypt; Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Romania also follow the Hanafite system, with some limitations, in the Muslim parts of their populations.
In dogmatics, the practice of Hanafite law is accompanied by adherence to the theological doctrines of al-Ashʿarī (which are also common to followers of other legal schools), and for the Turkic-Tatar Hanafite Muslims, by those of al-Māturīdī, which are closely related to the Ashʿarite doctrines.