Hanafi School

The empire's official legal school was Hanafi, administered through a graded corps of judges under the shaykh al-Islam.

Its jurisprudence follows Hanafi legal method as read through the Deobandi revivalist lineage.

One of the four surviving Sunni schools of jurisprudence.

The Ottoman state took Hanafi law as its official school, so it was Hanafi jurists who were required to reconcile the 1856 reform edict and its grant of equal standing to non-Muslim subjects with the law they administered.

Received as an early record of the terms on which non-Muslim communities lived under Muslim rule rather than as a text of the school.

The Amman Message names the Hanafi school among the eight whose adherents are Muslims, and holds that no one outside its qualified authorities may issue a legal opinion in its name.

Ottoman waqf law and administration ran on the empire's official Hanafi legal framework.

Accepted as one of the canonical transmissions without being the reading recited in the school's heartlands.

The Hanafi school begins the afternoon prayer when an object's shadow reaches twice its own length, where the other Sunni schools begin it at one length. Hanafi and non-Hanafi congregations in the same city can therefore pray Asr an hour or more apart.

The Hanafi school confines lawful sea food to fish, where the other Sunni schools permit sea creatures generally.

The Hanafi call to rise for prayer repeats its phrases in pairs, matching the call to prayer itself, where the other Sunni schools deliver them singly.

The Hanafi position is that the prayer for rain is made as supplication and sermon without a congregational two unit prayer, which the other schools prescribe.

In Hanafi law khums is the fifth of the spoils of war set aside in the Quran, not the standing annual levy on surplus wealth that the Jafari school makes of it.

Independent reasoning in the Hanafi school is exercised within its own method and on its own transmitted material, and the classical schools argued at length over whether reasoning outside a school remained open at all.

The Hanafi school allows an adult woman of sound mind to contract her own marriage without a guardian. It is the best known point on which the school parts from the other three.

The Hanafi school makes the Eid sacrifice wajib on every settled Muslim of means, where the other schools hold it a strongly recommended sunna.

Abu Hanifa's school ranks the Witr as wajib, a binding obligation one degree below fard, where the other schools hold it a strongly recommended sunna that may be left without sin.

The forbidden category is affirmed in Hanafi law, and the school subdivides it, reserving haram for what a decisive text establishes and placing what a probable one establishes in a category below it.

The Hanafi school extends the poll tax and the protected status it buys beyond the peoples of the book to Zoroastrians and, in the school's eastern application, further still, which is the broadest of the four Sunni positions.

Alone among the schools, divides the obligatory into fard, established on decisive evidence, and wajib, established on evidence short of it, with different consequences for the one who omits each.

Accepts istihsan, juristic preference, as a source, a method al-Shafii attacked directly. Distinguishes fard from wajib, obligation on decisive evidence from obligation on secondary evidence, which the other schools do not.

The attribution of the collection to Ali is disputed in Sunni scholarship, which reads it as a later compilation whose material cannot all be traced to him.

Sunni jurists across the schools questioned both the authority claimed for the 1989 ruling and its reach beyond the jurisdiction that issued it.

Hanafi jurisprudence reaches the same ground through juristic preference and custom rather than through an independent doctrine of unstated benefit.

Hadith are affirmed as a source of law and doctrine in the Hanafi school, drawn from the Sunni six-book canon shared across Sunni Islam.

Consensus binds, and Hanafi theory counts the agreement of the scholars of an age rather than requiring the agreement of the whole community.

Ijtihad and taqlid, independent legal reasoning and the practice of following an established school, are both foundational method in the Hanafi school.

Juristic preference, setting aside a strict analogy where it produces hardship or an unreasonable result, is the Hanafi school's signature instrument and the one al-Shafii attacked by name.

The Hanafi school admits analogical reasoning as a source after the Quran, the Sunnah and consensus, and applies it more freely than the other Sunni schools.

Sharia, elaborated through Hanafi jurisprudence, the school founded by Abu Hanifa and historically the most widely followed of the four Sunni madhhabs, is affirmed as binding.

The Quran, held to be the literal and uncreated word of God revealed to Muhammad, is canonical scripture across every branch of Islam, including this tradition.

Jihad is a chapter of Hanafi law, and al-Shaybani's Siyar, the earliest systematic treatment of the law of war and of relations with non-Muslim states, is a Hanafi work.

The division into grave and lesser sins is affirmed in Hanafi doctrine.

Kaffara is affirmed in Hanafi law as a defined expiation discharging a particular liability.

The Hanafi school, the oldest of the four Sunni schools and the most widely followed, historically the school of the Ottoman and Mughal states.