HANBALI, RITE. - One of the four great schools or rites or juridical systems of orthodox Islam, going back to the jurist and theologian Ahmad b. Hanbal (780-855 A.D.). This doctor lived in Baghdad under the first 'Abbāsid caliphs and distinguished himself by his thorough study of the historical-normative tradition (hadīṭ), attributed to Muhammad and his companions, on which he collected an imposing corpus of about 30,000 items (Musnad).
Both in juridical and in theological elaboration Ibn Hanbal adopted a rigidly conservative attitude, founded on the positive data of revelation and tradition, and utterly averse to any intervention of personal judgment (ra'j), which had instead been accepted in varying measure by the earlier Ḥanafite and Ṣāb'ite rites. In theology he thus found himself strenuously opposing the doctrines of the Mu'tazilites, which aimed at a rational interpretation of the controversial points of revelation (man's free will, the relation between the person of God and His attributes, the creation of the Qur'an in time); and when the favor of certain caliphs attempted to impose Mu'tazilism as the doctrine of the State, Ibn Hanbal's resistance brought upon him persecutions and trials from which only the advent of new sovereigns devoted to traditional orthodoxy served to free him. Surrounded by a halo of sanctity also for this courageous resistance to political persecution, Ibn Hanbal died in Baghdad and was buried there.
His system, literalist, rigorist and conservative, has remained in the minority in number of followers compared with the other three orthodox ones, but it marks in the religious and social history of Islam a highly characteristic trait, through the tenacious intransigence of its doctrines and the personalities of its upholders, from the founder to the great Ḥanbalite doctors of medieval and modern times. Among these stand out the Syrian Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), a most prolific polemicist, theologian and moralist; and, in more recent times, the founder of the Wahhabite movement of Arabia, Muḥammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (18th century). This great revival of puritanism, which has led to the State and the dynasty today dominant in Arabia, has in fact its roots in the Ḥanbalite system, which is still the official doctrine, in law and theology, in Sa'ūdi Arabia. Ḥanbalism is moreover followed by the Sunnites of 'Omān, of the Pirate Coast, of al-Aḥsā, and has nuclei of followers in 'Irāq, in Syria and Palestine. In Muslim India too, the so-called Ahl al-ḥadīṭ (the people of
ḥadīṭ, which is moreover the historical name the Ḥanbalites have given themselves since the most ancient period) follow the Ḥ. rite; they are called by some European authors "Indian Wahhabites". The total number of present-day Ḥanbalites may be estimated at about 3 million.
Recent studies have brought into relief, in contrast with the moral rigorism and the strict conservatism of the Ḥanbalite system, certain aspects of surprising balance and concreteness together in its theology, as in the problem of man's will in relation to divine omnipotence, in which, albeit by a different path and with other aims, the Ḥanbalite position comes to be not very far from that of the Mu'tazilites, their fiercest adversaries of the period of the origins, long since extinct.
For the bibl. v. ISLĀM. Francesco Gabrieli