HANBALITE RITE. — One of the four great schools or rites or juridical systems of orthodox Islam, dating back to the jurist and theologian Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (780–855 A.D.). This scholar lived in Baghdad under the first ‘Abbasid caliphs and distinguished himself by his thorough study of the historical-normative tradition (ḥadīt), attributed to Muḥammad and his companions, on which he compiled an imposing corpus of some 30,000 numbered traditions (Musnad).
In both juridical and theological elaboration, Ibn Ḥanbal adopted a rigidly conservative stance, based on the positive data of revelation and tradition, and as far removed as possible from any intervention of personal judgment (ra’), which had instead been accepted to varying degrees by the preceding Ḥanafite and Shāfi‘ite rites. Theologically, he thus found himself strenuously opposing the doctrines of the Mu‘tazilites, who aimed at a rational interpretation of controversial points of revelation (free will of man, the relationship between the person of God and His attributes, the temporal creation of the Qur’ān); and when the favor of some caliphs attempted to impose Mu‘tazilism as the state doctrine, Ibn Ḥanbal’s resistance brought him persecution and trials from which he was only delivered by the advent of new sovereigns devoted to traditional orthodoxy. Surrounded by an aura of sanctity even for this courageous resistance to political persecution, Ibn Ḥanbal died in Baghdad and was buried there.
His system, literalist, rigorist, and conservative, has remained in the minority in terms of the number of its adherents compared to the other three orthodox schools, but it marks a highly distinctive feature in the religious and social history of Islam, due to the tenacious intransigence of its doctrines and the personalities of its proponents, from the founder to the great Hanbalite doctors of the medieval and modern periods. Among these stand out the Syrian Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), a prolific polemicist, theologian, and moralist; and, in more recent times, the founder of the Wahhābite movement in Arabia, Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (18th century). This great revision of puritanism, which led to the state and dynasty now dominant in Arabia, indeed has its roots in the Hanbalite system, which is still the official doctrine in law and theology in Saudi Arabia. The Hanbalite rite is also followed by the Sunnites of ‘Omān, the Pirate Coast, al-Aḥsā’, and has groups of adherents in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Even among Indian Muslims, the so-called Ahl al-ḥadīt (People of the Tradition)—which is moreover the historical self-designation adopted by the Hanbalites from the earliest period—follow the Hanbalite rite, and are referred to by some European authors as “Indian Wahhābites.” The total number of Hanbalites today can be estimated at around three million.
Recent studies have highlighted, in contrast to the moral rigorism and strict conservatism of the Hanbalite system, certain aspects of surprising balance and concreteness in its theology, such as in the problem of human will in relation to divine omnipotence, in which, albeit by a different path and with different aims, the Hanbalite position comes to be not very distant from that of the Mu‘tazilites, their fiercest opponents of the early period, now long extinct.
For the bibliography, V. ISLAM.