ABU HANĪFA, AL-NU'MĀN IBN THĀBIT. - Muslim traditionist and jurisconsult, founder of one of the four principal juridical systems or rites (madhhab) currently in force in Islam. Of Afghan origin, born at Kūfa in Iraq in 670 A.D., he spent almost his entire life there, devoted to study and oral teaching, providing for his own sustenance through the cloth trade. Very old, according to traditions that cannot be verified with exactness, he is said to have tenaciously refused the office of judge offered to him by the 'Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr, and for this refusal to have been imprisoned and flogged, dying in prison from the maltreatment he suffered (767 A.D.).
Of his own work there remains only a short treatise on dogmatics entitled al-Fiqh al-akbar (The Greatest Religious Knowledge), important for its great antiquity, but of contested authenticity. A.'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 ash-Shaibānī. Characteristic of the work of Ḥanafite exegesis and juridical elaboration (so called precisely from its founder A. H.) is a less rigorous adherence to Medinese tradition (such as would instead be represented shortly afterward by the Mālikite school), and a greater part conceded to the personal criterion (ra'). This attitude, partly explicable by the lesser practical possibility of having at hand a large
ABŪ ḤANĪFA - ABŪ 'L KHAIR IBN aṭ-ṬAYYIB
body of tradition or hadīth, which was instead at the disposal of the Mālikite school of Medina, has been misunderstood by European historians in the sense of a greater intentional "liberalism" of interpretation and construction on the part of the Ḥanafite school. In reality this school too took the greatest account of the normative value of the word and action of the Prophet and his circle, only filling in the gaps that the tradition of which it was aware presented, and resolving contradictions and discrepancies, with a somewhat broader use of interpretive criteria, thereby standing in clear contrast to the Ḥanbalite juridical school alone, which was strictly founded on the literal interpretation of tradition.
Arising in Baghdād through the work of the two aforementioned jurists, disciples of A. H., and soon spread with the favor of the 'Abbāsid caliphs in Mesopotamia and Persia, the Ḥanafite school ended by prevailing absolutely in Central Asia. It was therefore adopted by those Islamized Turco-Tatar populations, and among these by those Ottoman Turks, who were to found the last great Muslim state, toward the end of the Middle Ages, between Asia and Europe.
The Ottoman Empire spread the Ḥanafite rite with official status in all the provinces of its dominion, while nevertheless admitting alongside it the other rites followed by the indigenous population (e.g. the Mālikite in North Africa). But with the disappearance of this dominion, the various regions formerly subject to the Ottoman Empire, and among these Libya, have resumed the practically exclusive use of their own rites, while in Turkey itself the secularizing laws of the Kemalist state have confined the use of Ḥanafite Muslim law to the private individual practices of worship alone. A similar abrogation has been carried out by the Soviet Union for the Turco-Tatar populations included within its territory. So that the Muslim countries where the Ḥanafite school is currently recognized and practiced are the Ḥijāz, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Afghānistān, India and partially Egypt; Bosnia, Bulgaria and Romania too, for the Muslim part of their population, follow the Ḥanafite system with certain limitations.
Alongside the practice of Ḥanafite law there goes, in dogmatics, the profession of the theological doctrines of al-Ash'arī (which are moreover common also to the followers of other juridical schools), and for the Turco-Tatar Ḥanafite Muslims, of those of al-Māturīdī, very close to the Ash'arite ones.
Bibliography
Francesco Gabrieli