Hanbali School

One of the four surviving Sunni schools of jurisprudence.

Hanbali theology, traditionalist in method, rejects rationalist Mutazili and Twelver arguments for an independent standard of divine justice in favor of scripture and hadith alone.

Ibn Hanbal's refusal to say the Quran was created, held through the caliphal inquisition from 833 at the cost of flogging and imprisonment, is the founding act of the school and the position it is remembered for.

Ibn Taymiyya was a Hanbali jurist and the ruling is a Hanbali legal opinion.

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 Hanbali 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.

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

Hanbali law counts the face and the hands among what a woman covers before those outside the prohibited degrees, where the Hanafi and Maliki schools except them.

Circumcision is an obligation in Hanbali law rather than a recommended custom.

In Hanbali law khums is the fifth of the spoils of war set aside in the Quran, not a standing annual levy on surplus wealth.

Independent reasoning in the Hanbali 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.

Accepts istishab and holds most closely to the texts, admitting the fewest supplementary sources of the four Sunni schools.

Hanbali scholarship treats the singling out of mid Shaban for prayer and fasting as a practice without established warrant.

The Hanbali tradition, and Ibn Taymiyya most forcefully, argues that the birthday observance has no warrant in the practice of the first generations, while stopping short of forbidding what is done out of love for the Prophet.

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.

The Hanbali school measures innovation against the practice of the first generations, and the concept carries more weight there than in the other Sunni schools.

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

A Hanbali jurist.

Ibn Hanbal is reported to have distrusted claims of consensus beyond the generation of the Companions, on the ground that a man who claims it cannot have canvassed everyone.

Ijtihad and taqlid are both foundational method in the Hanbali school.

Analogy is admitted in the Hanbali school but used sparingly, since Ibn Hanbal preferred a weak report from a Companion to a jurist's own reasoning.

Sharia, elaborated through Hanbali jurisprudence, the school founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the most traditionalist of the four Sunni madhhabs in its reliance on hadith over rational analogy, 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.

The forbidden category is affirmed in Hanbali law, and the school's working presumption is that acts outside worship are permitted until a text forbids them.

Jihad is a chapter of Hanbali law, and Ibn Taymiyya's treatment of it, written in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions, is the text later movements have most often reached for.

The poll tax and the protected status it buys are treated in Hanbali law, which reads the categories of those eligible for it narrowly.

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

Kaffara is affirmed in Hanbali law as a defined expiation.

The Hanbali school, the most textualist of the four and the school in which later Salafi thought is largely rooted.

The five rulings are the classification of acts in Hanbali jurisprudence.

Athari theology is historically closely tied to the Hanbali legal school through the figure of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, though the theological and legal schools are not identical.

Most Hanbali authorities treat walima as a strongly emphasised sunna.