ABŪ HANĪFA, AN-NU'MĀN IBN THĀBIT. — Muslim traditionalist and jurist, founder of one of the four principal legal systems or rites (madhhab) currently in force in Islam. Of Afghan origin, b. at Kūfa in Iraq in 670 A.D., he spent almost his entire life there, devoted to study and oral teaching, providing for his livelihood through the cloth trade. At a very advanced age, according to traditions that cannot be verified with certainty, he is said to have steadfastly refused the office of judge offered to him by the 'Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr, and to have been imprisoned and flogged for this refusal, dying in prison from the ill-treatment he suffered (767 A.D.).
Only a short treatise on dogmatics by him has survived, entitled al-Fiqh al-abbar (The Supreme Religious Knowledge), important on account of its great antiquity, but of disputed authenticity. A.'s teaching in the field for which he is chiefly known, that of law, has reached us only through the writings of his immediate disciples Abū Yūsuf and Muḥammad ash-Shaibānī. The characteristic feature of the ḥanafite work of exegesis and legal elaboration (so called precisely from its schoolmaster A. H.) is a less rigorous adherence to the Medinese tradition (which would instead shortly thereafter be represented by the mālikite school), and a greater role granted to personal judgment (ra'). This attitude, partly explicable by the lesser practical possibility of having at one's disposal a broad
ABŪ ḤANĪFA - ABŪ 'I KHAIR IBN aṭ-ṬAYYIB
body of traditional material or hadīth, which was instead available to the mālikite school of Medina, has been misunderstood by European historians as indicating a greater intentional “liberalism” of interpretation and construction on the part of the ḥanafite school. In reality, this school too attached the greatest importance to the normative value of the word and action of the prophet and his circle, merely filling the gaps presented by the tradition known to it, and resolving contradictions and discrepancies through a somewhat broader use of interpretive criteria, thereby standing in marked opposition to the only ḥanbalite legal school, which was strictly founded on a literal interpretation of tradition.
Established at Baghdād by the two aforementioned jurists who were disciples of A. H., and soon spread with the favor of the 'Abbāsid caliphs in Mesopotamia and Persia, the ḥanafite school ultimately prevailed absolutely in Central Asia. It was then adopted by those Islamized Turco-Tatar peoples, and among them by the Osmanli 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 as the official one throughout all the provinces of its dominion, while allowing the other rites followed by the indigenous population to continue alongside it (e.g. the mālikite rite in North Africa). But with the disappearance of this dominion, the various regions formerly subject to the Ottoman Empire, including Libya, resumed the practically exclusive use of their own rites, while in Turkey itself the secularizing laws of the Kemalist state confined the use of ḥanafite Muslim law to individual private religious practices alone. The Soviet Union carried out a similar abrogation for the Turco-Tatar peoples included within its territory. Thus, the Muslim countries in which the ḥanafite school is currently recognized and practiced are the Hīgāz, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Afghānistan, India, and, in part, Egypt; Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Romania, for the Muslim portion of their populations, also follow the ḥanafite system with certain limitations.
The practice of ḥanafite law is accompanied in dogmatics by the profession of the theological doctrines of al-Ash'arī (which are, moreover, also common to the followers of other legal schools), and, among the Turco-Tatar ḥanafite Muslims, by those of al-Māturīdī, which are very close to the ash'arite doctrines.