Mastering the Hanafi School: Did Fiqh Freeze?
This is the ninth and last in a series on mastering the Hanafi school, drawn from a seminar delivered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani and Shaykh Talal al-Azem. The full seminar is available here.
A person may rightfully ask what the history of the Hanafi school means for us today. Did Islamic jurisprudence freeze with the likes of Ibn Abidin? The answer is a resounding no.
The school carries within it an audit of its own trail, and that record is what empowers every generation after it to take up the totality of that inheritance and put it to use for the needs of their own day.
A Living Chain of Scholarship
This continued after Ibn Abidin. His own son wrote a number of texts, and he became a co-author of a major late Ottoman work on the fiqh of human interactions (muʿamalat): the Majalla. These authors were keenly aware of the needs of their age, and they began writing a new text that codified the Hanafi school for it.
Scholars kept producing works throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, even as colonialism and imperial powers dismantled many of the school’s institutions, in places such as India and the Levant. These scholars took it upon themselves to build new institutions that preserved and built upon the Hanafi school’s long chain.
These ages saw scholars such as Mustafa Zarqa in the Middle East, and, in our own time, Mufti Taqi Usmani in the subcontinent—just some of the most well-known names. Thousands of scholars within the Hanafi school may not be household names, yet they continue to write, teach, and train–forming men and women of learning both spiritually and in mastery of the school’s particulars.
It is this very faithfulness to tradition that makes new answers possible in our own age, answers that scholars several hundred years ago may never have imagined. Even so, scholars like Abu Hanifa were known for conceiving of questions and offering answers to them well ahead of their time, owing to their intelligence and foresight.
The Seven Ranks of Jurists
Ibn Kamal Pasha (Allah have mercy on him), one of the most well-known Ottoman scholars of the 16th century, ranked jurists according to seven levels. [Ibn Kamal Pasha, Tabaqat al-Fuqahaʾ]
One: Absolute mujtahids. Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Shafiʿi, Imam Malik, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Allah have mercy on them), and many others. These scholars derived rulings directly from the sources of law.
Two: Mujtahids within the school. Abu Yusuf, Muhammad al-Shaybani, and other companions of Abu Hanifa (Allah have mercy on them). These scholars had the capacity for independent legal reasoning, but worked within the general approach of their own master.
Three: Mujtahids on unaddressed cases. Sarakhsi, Bazdawi, Qadi Khan, and others (Allah have mercy on them). Coming a generation or two later, these scholars addressed cases that had not previously been discussed, using the same tools and operating within the framework of legal theory and reasoning that had, by then, begun to take shape as a written and taught tradition.
Four: Mujtahids of takhrij. Al-Razi and others. This is the lowest level of independent legal reasoning. These scholars returned to the founders’ opinions and deduced what they would say about a new issue, in light of their reasoning on related matters. In short, this level’s role was to produce answers. Scholars at this level will never be absent from humanity until the very end.
Five: Ashab al-tarjih. Al-Quduri and al-Marghinani (Allah have mercy on them). Their dominant contribution was weighing the various opinions and identifying the preponderant one.
Some 19th- and 20th-century thinkers held that Imam Quduri could not rise above this level, but this is incorrect—there are instances where he engaged in higher levels of jurisprudence. Still, his lasting imprint on the school lay in helping it identify and transmit the most dominant position.
Six: Ashab al-Mutun al-Muʿtabara. The authors of Kanz al-Daqaʾiq, al-Mukhtar, al-Wiqaya, and al-Majmaʿ. This rank underscores the need to begin with core texts. These scholars drew on all the scholarship before them and authored core texts to train a new generation of jurists, connecting them back to the foundational scholars.
Seven: Pure muqallids—those who gather knowledge like a night-wood collector, unable to produce what the ranks above them can. They cannot arrive at an opinion independently, or even choose one opinion over another, but they can be trained to read books and identify what the school holds on a given question.
The vast majority of humanity falls into this seventh category, judges and muftis included. In later centuries, the judiciary followed a particular school of jurisprudence, a practice meant to ensure consistency with the tradition.
Stage seven is where we all begin.
Related Articles
Mastering the Hanafi School: Knowledge That Remains—why many seekers never reach the fruits of learning, and what mastery actually requires. First in the series.
Mastering the Hanafi School: Keys to Mastery—Real mastery rests on three habits: genuine preparation, full presence, and same-day review. Second in the series.
