Aḣmad Ibn Ḣanbal and the Qur'an

Abstract

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. Baghdad, 241/855) was the central, defining figure of Sunnism in the earlier ninth century CE. He was a major collector and critic of ḥadīth, as well as stories of early renunciants, and his collected opinions would form the literary basis of the Ḥanbalī school of law. Men would assert as a badge of orthodoxy that their creed was Aḥmad's (e.g. Muzanī, Ṭabirī, Ashcarī). He famously resisted the Inquisition of Maↄmūn and his successors, refusing to acknowledge that the Qur'an was created. Aḥmad's ideas about the Qur'an are found in collections of his answers to questions (masāↄil), in biographies (both of him personally and of his followers), and in his Musnad. They show a devotion above all to the liturgical use of the Qur'an; for example, how it should be recited aloud, how it should be integrated with the ritual prayer. He did not tend to infer the law directly from the Qur'an, but from ḥadīth, and put together his own version of the text (qirāↄa), although it is not preserved. (The report that he assembled a huge Qur'anic commentary is doubtful.) Therefore, it was not mainly as a record of Islamic law that Aḥmad defended the transcendence of the Qur'an but more directly as the basis of fslamic piety.