The founder of Islam's most followed legal school died a prisoner in Baghdad
Abu Hanifa, a silk merchant from Kufa, built a school of Islamic law that still dominates from Turkey to South Asia. He prized reason and analogy in legal thinking and refused to serve as a state judge. Both the Umayyad and Abbasid authorities punished him, and he died in a Baghdad prison in 767.
The Hanafi school, named after him, is the most widely followed of the Sunni legal traditions. It predominates in Central and South Asia, Turkey, the Balkans, Russia, much of Africa and parts of the Arab world. What set it apart was its method: faced with new problems, its jurists leaned on qiyās, reasoning by analogy, on istiḥsān, juristic preference, and on raʾy, personal judgement. Abu Hanifa is remembered as a systematiser of technical legal thinking who shaped his students without ever holding office.
Little is firmly known of his life. He earned his living producing and selling khazz, a silk cloth. As a young man he travelled to Mecca and Medina to study, attended the lectures of the Kufan jurist Hammad ibn Abi Sulayman, and may have learned from Ata ibn Abi Rabah on pilgrimage. He became a leading authority in Kufa. His two chief pupils, Abu Yusuf and Muhammad al-Shaybani, went on to become famous jurists themselves, and most later Hanafis also adopted Maturidi theology.
Almost every detail of his origins is disputed. Most sources give Kufa as his birthplace, though Kabul, Termez and others are proposed, and while 699 is the majority date, some argue for 689. He is usually thought to be of Persian descent; one account says his grandfather was captured at Kabul, sold as a slave in Kufa and freed by an Arab tribesman. Even his nickname is debated: it may mean father of the inkpot, because he always carried one, or father of Hanifa, if he had a daughter of that name.
His independence cost him. Refusing the post of qadi in Kufa and keeping his distance from rulers, he was punished and jailed under two dynasties. The historian al-Dhahabi later called him one of the geniuses of humankind, combining law, worship, scrupulous conduct and generosity.
Source: Abu Hanifa
