Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal

His father Muḥammad ibn Ḥanbal was of the soldiery of Marw and died at about thirty. Aḥmad said, "I never saw my grandfather nor my father." The age of three, printed everywhere, is in no source: they say only that the father died young and that Aḥmad was raised an orphan. The grandfather Ḥanbal ibn Hilāl is said to have governed Sarakhs and to have been of the ʿAbbāsid partisans — a report resting on one line from one informant, not in the family's own transmission, and containing a further hearsay clause that he was flogged at Bukhara for stirring up the troops. Cooperson and Hurvitz accept it; the family said nothing about it. When a teacher once said to Aḥmad, "I hear you are of the Arabs," he answered, "Abū al-Nuʿmān, we are poor people" — and kept putting him off until he left.

His mother's name is not established. The form that circulates — Ṣafiyya bint Maymūna al-Shaybāniyya — is not in Ṣāliḥ's Sīra, not in Ibn al-Jawzī's Manāqib, and not in al-Dhahabī's entry; Walter Patton wrote in 1897 that "her name and history we do not know." What the sources keep of her is only what Aḥmad remembered: that she pierced his ears and put two pearls in them, which he removed when he grew up and later sold for about thirty dirhams; that she would take hold of his clothes when he wanted to set out for hadith before dawn; and that she would not let him cross the flooded Tigris to reach a teacher.

He went to the schoolroom, then at fourteen to the chancery — what he did there no source says — and began hadith at sixteen, in 179, the year Mālik and Ḥammād b. Zayd died. His first teacher was Hushaym b. Bashīr of Wāsiṭ, and the two figures usually given for the apprenticeship turn out to be the same thing: he first heard from him in 179 but did not rely on all of that year's hearing, and then held to him through 180, 181, 182 and 183 — five calendar years, four of formal attendance. From him alone he wrote more than three thousand hadith.

The itinerary is dated, and dated by the family. Basra five times, in 186, 190, 194, 195 and 200 — not 202, which no source gives. Kufa, the Ḥijāz, Yemen, Syria, the Jazīra, Tarsus. Five pilgrimages, three of them on foot, one of which cost him thirty dirhams; ʿAbd Allāh's version of the count differs from Ṣāliḥ's, so "three on foot" is the majority but not unanimous.

Two places he never reached, on his own testimony, and the reason is the same both times. "If I had had fifty dirhams, I would have gone out to Jarīr b. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd at Rayy. Some of our companions went out, but I was unable to go, because I had nothing." And: "had I had the travelling money, I would have journeyed to Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā" in Nishapur. The ninety-dirham figure that circulates comes through a modern intermediary; the direct reading is fifty.

For ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī he went to Yemen, in 199, and stayed nearly two years. Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn, travelling with him, spotted ʿAbd al-Razzāq making circuits of the Kaʿba at Makka and pointed out that a month's journey each way had just been saved. Aḥmad refused: "God shall not see me, having formed an intention, spoil it by what you say." On the road his money ran out and he hired himself out to camel-drivers to get there — some manuscripts read porters — and would take nothing from anyone. ʿAbd al-Razzāq told the story afterwards weeping: "I took ten dinars and stood him behind the door with no one with either of us… He smiled and said: Abū Bakr, if I accepted anything from anybody, I would accept from you. And he did not accept."

The volume is what everyone remembered. Abū Zurʿa told ʿAbd Allāh that his father memorised a million hadith. Al-Dhahabī deflates it in the same breath he reports it: "this is a sound report about the breadth of Abū ʿAbd Allāh's learning — but they counted in that the repeated, the reports of Companions, the fatwā of a Successor, what was explained, and the like. Otherwise the strong prophetic texts do not reach a tenth of a tenth of that."

The dated contact is Baghdad, 195–197, on the testimony of al-Zaʿfarānī who hosted al-Shāfiʿī. There was also a meeting at Makka, undated, preserved by Isḥāq b. Rāhwayh: "Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal met me at Mecca and said: come, that I may show you a man the like of whom your eyes have never seen. And he showed me al-Shāfiʿī." What he took was method — law and legal theory, not hadith. By 195 Aḥmad was the superior hadith scholar and both men knew it: al-Shāfiʿī said to him, "You know hadith and the men better than I do. So when a hadith is sound, tell me — whether it be Kufan or Basran or Syrian — so that I may go to it." Al-Dhahabī records that al-Shāfiʿī narrated from Aḥmad without naming him, saying only "the trustworthy one related to me."

The saying everyone quotes is impeached by a Shāfiʿī. Its earliest recoverable form is Ibn Wāraʾs, in al-Bayhaqī: Aḥmad asked whether he had written al-Shāfiʿī's books, and on hearing he had not said, "You have failed. We did not know the general from the particular, nor the abrogating hadith from the abrogated, until we sat with al-Shāfiʿī." Al-Dhahabī, in his own voice: "ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Rāzī al-Ṣūfī was alone in transmitting this story from Ibn Nājiya — and he is not trustworthy." The short floating version, without a chain, appears only from the fifth century onward, in Mālikī and Shāfiʿī books. It should not be quoted without that.

The warm material is real. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr preserves ʿAbd Allāh asking his father what sort of man al-Shāfiʿī was, "for I hear you praying for him a great deal," and the answer: "my son, al-Shāfiʿī was like the sun to the world and like health to the body — is there for these two any replacement?" And the reports of praying for him nightly for thirty years — or forty; al-Bayhaqī carries both readings side by side in the same sentence, and thirty is the earlier and majority form.

And the cold material is also real, and is almost never printed. Al-Dhahabī sets the two sides against each other, citing Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, where al-Marrūdhī asks his master directly: "I said to Abū ʿAbd Allāh: do you think a man should write al-Shāfiʿī's books? He said: No. I said: do you think he should write the Risāla? He said: do not ask me about a newfangled thing. I said: did you write it? He said: God forbid." And: "do not write the words of Mālik, nor Sufyān, nor al-Shāfiʿī, nor Isḥāq b. Rāhwayh, nor Abū ʿUbayd." Cooperson makes the same point and adds the other half: "for his part, al-Shāfiʿī thought little of the hadith-men's inept efforts at systematic thinking."

Cooperson and Hurvitz both read the affectionate material as retro-projection serving later school politics while conceding real personal regard. Of the story in which al-Shāfiʿī tries to get Aḥmad a judgeship in Yemen so he can hear hadith at ease, Cooperson writes: "this story appears to have been constructed to build up Ibn Ḥanbal at the expense of his older contemporary." What should not be said is that Aḥmad was a Shāfiʿī.

In Rabīʿ al-Awwal 218/833, four months before he died, al-Maʾmūn wrote from al-Raqqa requiring the scholars and judges of Baghdad to affirm that the Qurʾān is created. He had proclaimed the doctrine six years earlier, in 212, paired with the pre-eminence of ʿAlī. Seven men were summoned to al-Raqqa first, and all seven complied — Muḥammad b. Saʿd who wrote the Ṭabaqāt, Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn, Abū Khaythama and four others. Aḥmad's verdict on them, through his cousin Ḥanbal: "if only they had borne their ordeal and stood fast for God, the matter would have ended there."

What Aḥmad actually said under interrogation is the single most important correction on this page. Al-Ṭabarī's text: Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm asked, "What is your view concerning the Qurʾān?" — "It is the word of God." — "Is it created?" — "It is the word of God, I cannot add any more to these words." He did not say uncreated. Of the identical formula used by another man in 231, the translator of al-Ṭabarī remarks: "the reply dodges the question." The positive doctrine of uncreatedness appears only in Ḥanbal's account of the later trial, and Madelung argues that Aḥmad arrived at it during the ordeal, moving from "the speech of God" to "not created" to "uncreated."

He and Muḥammad b. Nūḥ were sent in chains toward Tarsus. Al-Maʾmūn died on the way, on 18 Rajab 218; Ibn Nūḥ died on the road, on the Euphrates, and Aḥmad struck off his chains and prayed over him. He was returned to Baghdad and imprisoned — twenty-eight months by Ṣāliḥ's count, thirty by Ḥanbal's; the figure of about eighteen months that circulates is in no source. In prison he led the other prisoners in the prayer, having worked out how to get one leg-fetter off.

Under al-Muʿtasim, in Ramaḍān 219, after three days of debate, he was flogged. He was fasting. His shirt was removed rather than torn off because it held one or two of the Prophet's ﷺ hairs in the sleeve. He was suspended between two posts and told to grip them, did not understand, and both his wrists were dislocated — "my father continued to feel pain in them until the day he died." The lictors came forward one at a time, two strokes each, the caliph shouting for harder blows. The count converges at thirty to thirty-four: "over thirty" (Ṣāliḥ), thirty-three or thirty-four (Ḥanbal), thirty-three (al-Masʿūdī) — and even the hostile al-Jāḥiẓ says "only thirty."

Under al-Wāthiq he was not flogged again. The caliph wrote to him: "take care that we never find each other in the same place." Ibn al-Jawzī's account has him move from place to place for several months and then disappear into his house until al-Wāthiq died; Patton's has the caliph ask him to leave Baghdad and Aḥmad simply withdraw instead. Report both. Under al-Mutawakkil the policy was wound down — al-Ṭabarī records no dated edict at all, and the modern datings run from 232 to 237 — and Aḥmad was honoured, which he found harder than the flogging. Summoned to Samarra at seventy-three, he fasted three days at a time and broke his fast on dates; the caliph's Christian physician told him, "there's nothing wrong with you except inanition." He told al-Marrūdhī: "it's been two trials. Before, they tested my religion, and this time they're trying me with the things of this world."

His sons accepted the stipend and he stopped eating with them. A stranger asked why he would not pray behind the elder leading the prayers, and was told: "That's Isḥāq, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal's uncle." — "Why won't Aḥmad pray behind him?" — "He won't talk to him, or to his own sons, because they accept a stipend from the authorities."

He forgave, and the forgiveness was asymmetrical, and he said why. Of al-Muʿtasim, through ʿAbd Allāh: "al-Wāthiq sent me a message asking me to forgive al-Muʿtasim for flogging me. I responded, I forgave him the moment I left the palace." Of Ibn Abī Duʾād, the chief judge who had driven the policy, through Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarbī: "If Ibn Abī Duʾād weren't summoning others to unbelief, I would forgive him, too." He forgave the injury done to his body and withheld forgiveness only from a man still calling others to what he judged unbelief.

Ibn al-Jawzī gives the subject two chapters. One is headed "his aversion to writing books containing opinions reached through independent judgement at the expense of transmitted knowledge"; the other, "his forbidding others to write down or transmit his words." His own summary: "our exemplar Aḥmad did not believe in writing books. He forbade anyone to write down what he said or to record his replies to legal questions. Had he believed otherwise, he would have generated many compilations. His works are therefore compilations of hadith reports."

Two reports carry it. To ʿUthmān al-Dārimī: "Don't look at ʿUbayd's books, or whatever Isḥāq, Sufyān, al-Shāfiʿī, and Mālik have written. Go back to the source." And, on hearing that a student was teaching his answers in Khurāsān: "Bear witness, all of you: I renounce them all." A Khurāsānī once handed him a quire, and when he saw it had some of his own words in it he grew angry and threw the document away.

The famous formula about the four imams is not among these. "Do not imitate me, nor Mālik, nor al-Shāfiʿī, nor al-Awzāʿī, nor al-Thawrī; take from where they took" is not in Ibn al-Jawzī's Manāqib, and could not be verified anywhere. It is conventionally cited to Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr and Ibn al-Qayyim. The site's madhhabs page carries a version of it among the four imams' attributed sayings, and rightly labels the whole group as reported statements with varying chains rather than as prophetic narrations. The cognate that is attested, and says the same thing better, is the Dārimī report above.

And so the school. Abū Bakr al-Khallāl, born six or seven years before Aḥmad died and never his student, travelled to Syria twice, to the Jazīra, Fārs, Kirmān, al-Maṣṣīṣa, Antioch and Egypt, collecting the responsa from about a hundred of Aḥmad's students, and gathered them into a work that survives only in parts. Al-Dhahabī's judgement on what that means has already been quoted on the hub page and is worth having twice: before al-Khallāl, the Imam had no independent madhhab.

The governing fact is the refusal in the section above, and it produces a corpus with a peculiar shape: a great deal of hadith, a great deal of student notebook, and nothing that he sat down and wrote as a book.

Cooperson states the rule for the whole of it: "the works ascribed to Ibn Ḥanbal himself were compiled by his disciples, sometimes directly from dictation, and in some cases apparently with substantial contributions by the compilers." Walter Patton, writing in 1897, was blunter: "in regard to his books we know on the whole very little."

The earliest bibliography is Ibn al-Nadīm's, about a century and a half after his death, and it lists thirteen titles, of which several are lost and one — al-Masāʾil — is a genre of student notebooks being catalogued as a book by Aḥmad. Dodge notes that in one manuscript of the Fihrist the last four titles are written in a different hand, which bears on the ascription of at least one contested work.