This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Abu Hanifa, born Nu'man ibn Thabit, was an eighth century jurist working in Kufa, in present day Iraq, whose teaching became the foundation of the Hanafi school, historically the most widely followed of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence. He left comparatively little in the way of his own writing, and the school as it survives today was substantially systematized and recorded by his own students, chiefly Abu Yusuf and al-Shaybani, working from his teaching and legal rulings rather than from a single text he himself composed and left behind.
That gap between the man and the written record his name carries is itself part of the school's early history: a teacher whose legal reasoning shaped an entire tradition of jurisprudence primarily through the students who recorded and transmitted it, rather than through his own direct authorship, a transmission pattern common among early Islamic legal scholars but unusually consequential here given how widely the resulting school eventually spread, across the Ottoman lands and into Central and South Asia. The Hanafi school later became the officially favored legal school of the Ottoman Empire, giving a body of teaching first worked out in one Kufan jurist's own lifetime an institutional reach across centuries and continents.