The great jurists and hadith scholars

Part oneThe four imams and the schools of law

Within a century of the Prophet's ﷺ passing, Muslims lived from Spain to the borders of China. They met new questions in trade, property, marriage and government. Scholars of fiqh, the study of Islamic law, worked to answer them from the Quran and from the example of the Prophet ﷺ.

Four men of this age gave their names to the schools followed by most Sunni Muslims. Each is called an imam here, meaning a leading teacher of the law.

Abu Hanifa, who lived from about 699 to 767, taught in Kufa and Baghdad. He was known for careful reasoning, and his students, among them Abu Yusuf and al-Shaybani, wrote down and spread his methods. The Hanafi school took root in Iraq and later in Central Asia, Anatolia and South Asia.

Malik ibn Anas, who lived from about 711 to 795, taught in Madinah, the city of the Prophet ﷺ. He compiled the Muwatta, one of the earliest surviving books of law and hadith, in which he set down the reports and the practice of Madinah. The Maliki school spread across North Africa, al-Andalus and West Africa.

Al-Shafi'i was born in Gaza in 767. He studied in Makkah and Madinah, where he learned from Malik, then lived in Iraq and finally in Egypt, where he died in 820. His book al-Risala was among the first to set out how rulings are drawn from the Quran, the sunnah and the other sources. The Shafi'i school became established in Egypt, East Africa and South-East Asia, among other places.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal was born in Baghdad in 780 and lived most of his life there. He was a great collector of hadith, and his huge collection, the Musnad, is still studied. The Hanbali school grew from his teaching.

In Madinah, Ja'far al-Sadiq, a descendant of the Prophet ﷺ through his daughter Fatimah (may Allah be pleased with her), also taught. He died in 765. Shia Muslims follow his legal teaching, and many Sunni scholars narrate from him with respect.

The schools differed on details, and they treated one another as sincere attempts to follow the same revelation. A believer could follow the school of their own region, and scholars debated across lines for centuries.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal is also remembered for a hard test. In 833 the caliph al-Ma'mun ordered scholars to state that the Quran was created, a view held by the Mu'tazila school of theology. Most complied under pressure. Ahmad refused. He was imprisoned and flogged under a later caliph, al-Mu'tasim, and still refused. The policy, known as the Mihna, was dropped by the time of al-Mutawakkil, and Ahmad's steadiness made him a respected figure among ordinary Muslims.

From the hadith

Narrated Abu Hurairah:

that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: "Whoever takes a path upon which to obtain knowledge, Allah makes the path to Paradise easy for him."

Part twoGuarding the words of the Prophet ﷺ

Hadith are reports of what the Prophet ﷺ said, did and approved. The Companions (may Allah be pleased with them) had carried them to every land they settled. As generations passed, the reports multiplied, and some were mistaken or invented. Scholars needed a way to tell the sound from the weak.

They built one. Each report was traced through its isnad, the chain of narrators who had passed it on, back to the Companion and to the Prophet ﷺ. Scholars then studied the narrators themselves. Were they honest? Was their memory good? Could they really have met the person they claimed to have heard from? Whole books were written about the lives of narrators for this purpose. Students travelled for months to hear a hadith from a teacher in person.

From the 9th century, the great collections were put together. Six became the most widely used among Sunni Muslims: - Sahih al-Bukhari, by Muhammad al-Bukhari (810-870) - Sahih Muslim, by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (c. 821-875) - Sunan Abi Dawud, by Abu Dawud (817-889) - Jami at-Tirmidhi, by al-Tirmidhi (c. 824-892) - Sunan an-Nasa'i, by an-Nasa'i (c. 829-915) - Sunan Ibn Majah, by Ibn Majah (824-887)

Al-Bukhari was born in Bukhara, in Central Asia. He travelled through Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and Egypt, hearing hadith from hundreds of teachers. His Sahih is traditionally said to have taken about sixteen years to compile. He accepted only reports that met his strict conditions about the chain and the narrators, and he left out many that he had heard. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, from Nishapur, followed a similar method. Their two books, called the Two Sahihs, are regarded as the most reliable.

The other four collections are arranged by the subjects of law and daily practice, and several of them comment on how strong each report is. Their authors came from Sijistan, Termez, Nasa and Qazvin, places far from Arabia. Many of the scholars who shaped Islamic learning in this age were Persians and Central Asians, writing in Arabic, and studying in Madinah, Baghdad and Cairo.

A scholar could spend months on the road to hear one report from the person who had heard it first.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Kufa
• Madinah
• Baghdad
• Gaza
• Egypt
• Bukhara
• Nishapur

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