How the School Reasons, and Where It Is Followed

Hanbali jurisprudence is often described from outside as literalism, and the description is too blunt to be useful. The school does hold that the Quran and the sunna settle a question wherever they speak, and it is reluctant to extend a ruling by reasoning that travels a long way from the text. But it recognises consensus and analogy as well, and in matters of contract and transaction it has a reputation for breadth rather than narrowness: the working presumption that a stipulation agreed between parties is valid unless something specific forbids it is more generous in Hanbali law than in several of its neighbours.

The school was small for centuries and concentrated in Baghdad, then Damascus, then the Arabian peninsula. Its great systematiser is Ibn Qudama, whose Mughni is the standard comprehensive statement of its positions and is read well outside the school for its comparative treatment of the others. Ibn Taymiyya, working in the fourteenth century, extended its concerns far past law into theology and polemic, and his writings were later taken up by movements that were not themselves simply Hanbali.

Today the school is the reference for the courts of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and is followed by communities elsewhere in the Gulf. It is the smallest of the four surviving Sunni schools by number of adherents, and that number does not track its influence, because its texts were the ones that eighteenth and twentieth century revivalist movements read most closely. Arguments first made in Hanbali terms now circulate far beyond the places where Hanbali law is applied.