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Fiqh · the four imams
The Four Imams
Four men, born across eighty-four years, whose names are attached to the four schools of Sunni law. This section is about the men and about their books — who they were, whose sons they were, what they lived on, what happened to them when they refused the state, and, above all, what they actually wrote. The comparison of the schools ruling by ruling is elsewhere on the site. This is the part that page has no room for.
How these pages are sourced. The biography and the bibliography are drawn from the standard
reference literature — the classical biographical dictionaries (al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī's Taʾrīkh
Baghdād, al-Dhahabī's Siyar Aʿlām an-Nubalāʾ, Ibn Khallikān, al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ's
Tartīb al-Madārik, Ibn Abī Yaʿlā's Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila), the bibliographical
surveys (Ibn an-Nadīm's al-Fihrist, Ḥājjī Khalīfa's Kashf aẓ-Ẓunūn, Brockelmann's
GAL, Sezgin's GAS), and modern scholarship in Islamic studies, including the
Encyclopaedia of Islam. Each entry in the catalogue names the sources it rests on.
Where the sources disagree, this page says they disagree and gives each position rather than
picking one quietly; where something is not known, it says so.
No ḥadīth is cited by number anywhere in this section. The numbering of a collection varies
between editions, and a citation that cannot be checked is worse than none — the hadith themselves
are in the hadith library, by number, where they can be read.
What a founder founded
Not one of them set out to found a school. Abū Ḥanīfa refused judicial office twice and was flogged for it once; Mālik taught in the Prophet's ﷺ mosque and then, in old age, from a couch in a rented house; al-Shāfiʿī moved to Egypt because Madīna belonged to Mālik's students and Baghdad to al-Shaybānī's; Aḥmad forbade his students to write down what he said and told a Khurāsānī who was teaching his answers, "Bear witness, all of you: I renounce them all." The schools were organised after they died, out of what their students had written down anyway.
Al-Dhahabī says it about the last of the four in one sentence, and it is worth having in front of you before any of the rest: Abū Bakr al-Khallāl "gathered and stored up — and before him the Imam had no independent madhhab, until he tracked down Aḥmad's texts and recorded them and demonstrated them, after the year three hundred." That is a Sunni ḥadīth master writing about a school he respected, sixty years after the founder's death, saying that the founder did not found it.
Which is why the bibliography is the interesting question and not a formality. When a book says al-Umm, by al-Shāfiʿī, it is telling you a compressed version of something more complicated: that al-Shāfiʿī dictated in Fusṭāṭ for six years; that his student al-Rabīʿ wrote it down and marked, honestly, which books he had heard and which he had copied from his teacher's handwriting; that al-Rabīʿ interjected in his own voice sixteen times; that a rival Baghdadi recension existed which the jurists chose not to use; and that the title al-Umm appears nowhere until a hundred and fifty years after his death, when everyone still called the book al-Mabsūṭ.
Three of the four are in a straight line. Mālik taught al-Shāfiʿī in Madīna until his death in 179; al-Shāfiʿī taught Aḥmad in Baghdad in the years after 195. The fourth connects through his student: al-Shaybānī, who had studied with Abū Ḥanīfa for about two years before he died, taught al-Shāfiʿī Iraqi law — and al-Shāfiʿī then wrote a refutation of him, having first bought his books for sixty dinars and read them for a year.
Behind Abū Ḥanīfa the Kufan chain runs back through his teacher Ḥammād to Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī, to ʿAlqama, to Ibn Masʿūd, whom ʿUmar had sent to Kufa to teach. Behind Mālik the Madinan chain runs through Nāfiʿ to Ibn ʿUmar. Both chains should be handled with the caution the specialists apply to them. Christopher Melchert has argued that the tidy Kufan pedigree, and the whole identification of Kufa with reasoning and Madīna with ḥadīth, emerged only in the ninth century — that is, that the genealogy was drawn backwards.
The teaching lines, 30–241 AHThe lines as the tradition draws them. Melchert argues the Kufan chain in this form is a third-century reconstruction giving the school a Companion-anchored pedigree; the Madinan one is less contested. Neither chain is a chain of books — nothing in it was written down as a book until al-Shaybānī and Mālik.
What each man actually wrote
The four are not alike in this, and the differences are not small.
Refused to have his opinions written down. His Musnad reaches us in four layers.
Mālik is the outlier. He wrote a book, revised it for something like thirty years, and it survives. Al-Shāfiʿī dictated a large corpus that a named student wrote down under his eye and marked up honestly. Aḥmad selected a huge body of hadith and then died before arranging it, and refused throughout his life to have his legal opinions recorded — so his law reaches us as ten sets of student notebooks and his hadith reaches us in four distinguishable layers. Abū Ḥanīfa left almost nothing. Ulrich Rudolph's formulation is exact: "unlike fiqh, for which we have no record whatsoever of his writings at our disposal, several works in the discipline of theology have been transmitted in his name" — and of the two best of those, he adds, "in both cases one can thus assume that the students mentioned are the actual authors."
What this does not mean is that the doctrine is unreliable. A book written down by a named student who says which parts he heard and which he copied is a better historical record than an undated autograph with no chain. It means something narrower and more useful: that "by Abū Ḥanīfa" on a cover is usually a claim about a school's doctrine rather than about a man's pen, and that a reader is entitled to know which.
Nine kinds of authorship
Every entry in the catalogue carries one of these. They are not grades of reliability — a book written down by a student can be more trustworthy than one an imam scribbled and never checked — but statements about how a text came into being.
His own bookHe composed it himself and worked on it over time. Very few works in this catalogue are of this kind — three of the four imams left almost nothing that they wrote out and finished.
Dictated by himHe spoke it and a student wrote it down under his eye, so the wording is substantially his — but the arrangement, the chapter divisions and the selection are the student's, and different students produced different states of the same text.
A student's recensionThe book is the imam's; the text in your hands is one student's copy of it. Copies differ — sometimes by a few reports, sometimes by three quarters of the content.
Written down by a studentThe imam did not write it. A student recorded what he said, taught or answered, and the shape of the book — what was kept, what order it stands in, what got added — is the student's work.
The school's book, not hisWritten by a follower, carrying the imam's doctrine along with the follower's own. These are the books the madhhabs actually run on, and none of them is by the man the madhhab is named after.
Assembled long afterA later scholar gathered his scattered material into a book he never saw and would not have recognised. The contents can still be his; the book is not.
Attribution disputedScholars have not agreed whether it is his, and the disagreement is real rather than sectarian noise. The entry names who holds what.
Attributed but not hisIt circulates under his name and the weight of scholarship — often including scholars of his own school — holds that he did not write it.
Known only as a titleNamed in the old book-lists or by someone who heard it read, with no copy known to survive. Listed because a bibliography that prints only what survives misreports what existed.