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Abu Hanifa al-Nu'man
son of Thabit, theologian and religious lawyer, the eponym of the
school of the Hanafi/Sunni. He was one
of the students of Imam Ja'far Ibn Mohammad
Al-Sadiq (a.s.), Shi'as 6th infallible Imam and grand
grandson of Prophet of Islam (s.a.w.), who was the first to open an
Islamic university in the mosque of his grand father, the messenger
of Allah (s.a.w.) and under him studied no less than 4000
jurisprudents and specialist in Hadith (Prophetic tradition). Imam
Abu Hanifa died in 767 AD/150AH at the age of 70, and was therefore
born about the year 699/80. His grandfather Zuta is said to have
been brought as a slave from Kabul (Afghanistan) to Kufa, and let
free by a member of the Arabian tribe of Taym-Allah son of Tha'laba.
Abu Hanifa is occasionally callled al-Taymi. Very little is known of
his life, except that he lived in Kufa as a manufacturer and
merchant of a kind of silk material. It is certian that he attended
the lecture meetings of Hammad son of Abi Sulayman (d. 120 AH) who
taught religous law in Kufa, and perhaps on the occasion of Hajj,
those of 'Ata' son of Abi Rabah (d. 114 or 115 AH) in Mecca. The
long lists, given by his later biographers, of authorities from whom
he is supposed to have "heard" Traditions [Hadith], are to
be treated with caution. Afterh the death of Hammad, Abu Hanifa
became the formost authority on questions of religious law in Kufa
and the main representative of the Kufian school of law.
Abu Hanifa was never a Qazi. He
died in the prison of the 2nd Abbassid Khalifa, al-Mansur, in
Baghdad, where he lies buried. A dome was built over his tomb in 459
AH/1066 AD. The quarter around the mausoleum is still called al-A’zamiyya,
al-Imam al-A’zam being Abu Hanifa’s customary epithet. The truth
about his imprisonment is probably that he compromised himself by
unguarded remarks at the time of the rising of the ‘Alids al-Nafs
al-Zakiyya and his brother Ibrahim, in 145 AH, and was transported
to Baghdad and imprisoned there.
Abu Hanifa did not himself compose
any works on religious law, but discussed his opinions with and
dictated them to his disciples. Some of the works of these last are
therefore the main sources for Abu Hanifa’s doctrine, particularly
the Ikhtilaf Abi Hanifa wa’bn Abi Layla and the al-Radd ‘ala
Siyar al-Awza’i by Abu Yusuf, and the al-Hujaj and the version of
Malik’s Muwatta’ by al-Shaybani. The comparison of Abu
Hanifa’s successors with his predecessors enables us to assess his
achievement in developing Mohammad legal thought and doctrine.
Abu Hanifa seems to have played the
role of a theoretical systematizer who achieved a considerable
progress in technical legal thought. Abu Hanifa’s doctrine is as a
rule systematically consistent. His legal thought is not only more
broadly based and more thoroughly applied than that of his older
contemporaries, but technically more highly developed, more
circumspect, and more refined. Abu Hanifa used his personal judgment
(ra’y) and conclusions by analogy (qiyaas) to the extent customary
in the schools of religious law in his time. He was inclined to
abandon the traditional doctrine for the sake of “isolated”
traditions from the Prophet, traditions related by single
individuals in any one generations, such as began to become current
in Islamic religious science during the lifetime of Abu Hanifa, in
the first half of the second century A.H.
As a theologian, too, Abu Hanifa
has exercised a considerable influence. He is the eponym of a
popular tradition of dogmatic theology that lays particular stress
on the ideas of the community of the Muslims, of its unifying
principle, the Sunna, of the majority of the faithful who follow the
middle of the road and avoid extremes, and that relies on scripture
rather than on rational proofs.
Another title that was ascribed to
Abu Hanifa is the Fiqh al-Akbar. But the so-called Fiqh al-Akbar II
and the Wasiyyat Abi Hanifa are not by Abu Hanifa.
The later enemies of Abu Hanifa, in
order to discredit him, taxed him not only with extravagant opinions
derived from the principles of the Murji’a [place of reference]
but with all kinds of heretical doctrines that he could not possibly
have held. For example, they ascribed to him the doctrine that Hell
was not eternal; or the opinion that it was lawful to revolt against
a government.
Under the growing pressure of
traditions his followers, starting with Yusuf, the son of Abu Yusuf,
collected the traditions from the Prophet that Abu Hanifa had used
in his legal reasoning. With the growth of spurious information,
typical of a certain aspect of Islamic law, the number of these
Traditions grew, too until Abu ‘l-Mu’ayyad Mohammad b. Mahmud
al-Khwarizimi (d. 655 AH/1257 AD) collected fifteen different
versions into one work (Jami’ Masanid Abu Hanifa, Hyderabad 1332
AD]. We are still able to distinguish and to compare the several
versions, but none of them is an authentic work of Abu Hanifa. |
