HANBALITA, RITO. — One of the four great schools, or rites, or juridical systems of orthodox Islam, deriving from the jurist and theologian Ahmad b. Hanbal (780–855 A.D.). This doctor lived in Baghdad under the first 'Abbāsid caliphs and distinguished himself through his profound study of the historical and normative tradition (hadīṭ), attributed to Muhammad and his companions, on the basis of which he assembled an imposing corpus of approximately 30,000 items (Musnad).
In both his juridical and theological elaboration, Ibn Hanbal adopted a rigorously conservative attitude, founded on the positive data of revelation and tradition, and as far as possible remote from any intervention by personal judgment (ra'j), which had instead been accepted to varying degrees by the earlier ḥanafita and ṣāb'ita 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 (human free will, the relationship between the person of God and his attributes, the creation of the Corano in time); and when the favor of certain caliphs attempted to impose mu'tazilism as a state doctrine, Ibn Hanbal’s resistance brought persecutions and ordeals upon him, from which only the accession of new rulers devoted to traditional orthodoxy succeeded in freeing him. Surrounded by an aureole of sanctity also because of this courageous resistance to political persecution, Ibn Hanbal died in Baghdad and was buried there.
His system, literalist, rigorist, and conservative, has remained a minority in terms of the number of its followers compared with the other three orthodox schools, but it marks a highly characteristic feature in the religious and social history of Islam, owing to the tenacious intransigence of its doctrines and the personalities of its advocates, from its founder to the great ḥanbalite doctors of medieval and modern times. Among these, the Syrian Ibn Tajmijah (1263–1328) stands out, a most prolific polemicist, theologian, and moralist; and, in more recent times, the founder of Arabia’s Wahhabite movement, Muḥammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (18th century). This great revival of puritanism, which has led to the state and dynasty currently dominant in Arabia, in fact has its roots in the ḥanbalite system, which remains the official doctrine, in law and theology, in Sa'ūdian Arabia. Ḥanbalism is also followed by the Sunnis of 'Omān, the Pirate Coast, and al-Aḥsā, and has groups of adherents in 'Irāq, Syria, and Palestine. In Muslim India as well, the so-called Ahl al-ḥadīṭ follow r. ḥ. (and people of
ḥadīṭ, which is moreover the historical designation adopted by the ḥanbalites since the earliest period), called “Indian wahhabites” by certain European authors. The total number of present-day ḥanbalites may be estimated at about 3 million.
Recent studies have highlighted, in contrast with the moral rigorism and strict conservatism of the ḥanbalite system, certain aspects of a surprising balance and practicality in its theology, as in the problem of human will in relation to divine omnipotence, where, albeit by a different path and with other aims, the ḥanbalite position proves not to be very far from that of the mu'tazilites, their fiercest adversaries in the period of the origins, who have long since become extinct.
For the bibliography, V. ISLĀM. Francesco Gabrieli