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The four imams · the bibliography

The Books of the Four Imams

Sixty-nine works, and for each one the same four questions: whose book is it, how did it get here, does it survive, and what is it for. Where the attribution is contested the entry says so and names the scholars on both sides.

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.

Three things this catalogue does that a reading list does not. It separates a book an imam wrote from a book a student wrote down from a book somebody assembled centuries later out of his scattered remarks — three different objects that library catalogues file under one name. It records the works that are attributed to him and are not his, because a bibliography that prints only the accepted attributions leaves a reader defenceless in a bookshop. And where the record simply stops — a title named in a tenth-century book-list with no copy known, an epistle whose chain the Mālikīs graded sound and whose text nobody has seen — it says so instead of guessing.

The catalogue also carries the school's own books: al-Shaybānī's al-Aṣl, Saḥnūn's Mudawwana, al-Muzanī's Mukhtaṣar, al-Khallāl's Jāmiʿ. They are here because leaving them out would misrepresent what the four madhhabs run on. Most Mālikīs meet the school through Ibn Abī Zayd's Risāla, not through anything of Mālik's; most Ḥanafīs meet it through a creed their eponym did not write.

Nine kinds of authorship

These are statements about how a text came into being, not grades of reliability. A book a named student wrote down and marked up is often better evidence than an unchained autograph.

The catalogue

69 works

Risālat Abī Ḥanīfa ilā ʿUthmān al-Battī

رسالة أبي حنيفة إلى عثمان البتي

His letter to ʿUthmān al-Battī — a reply to a Basran jurist who had written to tell him what people were saying about him.

His own bookAbū ḤanīfaLetter · creed
Whose book
The one surviving text modern scholarship accepts as his own composition. Ramon Harvey calls it "the only surviving example of his own literary composition." Its authenticity is accepted by Schacht, Madelung, Michael Cook, van Ess, Sezgin and Ulrich Rudolph. The grounds are unglamorous and therefore persuasive: it names the addressee, quotes back words ʿUthmān had used, gives a reason for writing, offers to continue the correspondence, and uses the religious vocabulary of the middle of the second century and no other. Rudolph's remark is that a forger who could get the tone right would probably have written at greater length.
How it reaches us
Abū Ḥanīfa → Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798) → Muḥammad b. Samāʿa (d. 233/847) → Nuṣayr b. Yaḥyā al-Balkhī (d. 268/881) → ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Fārisī (d. 335/947), and onward into Transoxania, where the later Māturīdī theologians read it. The chain is what shows how early the letter reached Balkh.
Does it survive
Extant, and short. Edited by Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī inside al-ʿĀlim wa'l-Mutaʿallim (Cairo, 1949), pp. 34–38. A second letter to the same man, on human responsibility before revelation, survives in manuscript and has never been published; van Ess, who first analysed it, judged its authenticity weaker than the first's, and Rudolph concluded that no verdict is possible — the text is incomplete at both ends and the tradition knows of only one letter.
Used for
The primary text for anyone arguing about what Abū Ḥanīfa himself believed, and in particular about the charge of irjāʾ. He answers it by refusing the label rather than the position: those called Murjiʾa, he says, are the people of justice and the Sunna.
Sources — Rudolph, al-Māturīdī and the Development of Sunnī Theology in Samarqand, 29–37 · Harvey, JAOS 142.3 (2022), 600 n. 9 · Sezgin, GAS I, 418 · van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft I, 193, 204–7

al-Fiqh al-Absaṭ

الفقه الأبسط

"The Fuller Understanding" — and for seven hundred years this was the book called al-Fiqh al-Akbar.

Written down by a studentAbū ḤanīfaCreed · teaching dialogue
Whose book
Written by Abū Muṭīʿ al-Ḥakam b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Balkhī (d. 199/814), a student who was qāḍī of Balkh for sixteen years. It is cast as a dialogue — the student's questions are short and abrupt, the master's answers long — and Rudolph's judgement is that "the form, presentation, and the developed state of the thematization convincingly prove that we are not dealing with the words of Abū Ḥanīfa, but rather a text by one of his students." The tradition mostly called Abū Muṭīʿ its transmitter; al-Dhahabī called him its ṣāḥib, its author.
How it reaches us
Abū Muṭīʿ → Nuṣayr b. Yaḥyā al-Balkhī (d. 268/881) → ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Fārisī (d. 335/947). Rudolph notes the chain is not sound as it stands: the gap between Abū Muṭīʿ and Nuṣayr is too wide for a direct hearing.
Does it survive
Extant, and reworked. Rudolph judges that a later hand did not merely gloss the text but broke sentences up and merged them into new contexts, and that one passage on the divine attributes contradicts what Abū Muṭīʿ had said a few pages earlier. His verdict: the original form cannot now be recovered, and the text is nevertheless valuable, because its base material is from the original source. Edited by al-Kawtharī (Cairo, 1949), pp. 39–60.
Used for
Displaced in the madrasa by the creed now called al-Fiqh al-Akbar and by al-Ṭaḥāwī's ʿAqīda, and read chiefly by historians of early Ḥanafī theology. The renaming is the point. Every early citation of "al-Fiqh al-Akbar" — by Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Ustawāʾī, the Bazdawīs, al-Juwaynī — is a citation of this book. The title moved to a different text, and the earliest source found using the name al-Fiqh al-Absaṭ for it is al-Bayāḍī, who died in 1097/1687.
Sources — Rudolph, al-Māturīdī, 54–63 · Harvey, JAOS 142.3 (2022), 597–620 · van Ess, "Kritisches zum Fiqh akbar", REI 54 (1986), 327–38 · Daiber, The Islamic Concept of Belief in the 4th/10th Century (1995)

Kitāb al-ʿĀlim wa'l-Mutaʿallim

كتاب العالم والمتعلم

"The Teacher and the Pupil" — a dialogue on faith, on the standing of the grave sinner, and on whether a Muslim may argue about theology at all.

Written down by a studentAbū ḤanīfaCreed · teaching dialogue
Whose book
Written by Abū Muqātil Ḥafṣ b. Salm al-Samarqandī (d. 208/823). Rudolph: "Here we have for the first time a text not by Abū Ḥanīfa, but rather by an author from his circle of students." The decisive observation is stylistic — the book separates the pupil's questions from the master's answers scrupulously, and then writes both in the same voice. Al-Dhahabī, against the mainstream, already named Abū Muqātil as the book's author rather than its transmitter.
How it reaches us
Abū Muqātil → Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī and ʿIṣām b. Yūsuf al-Balkhī → al-Jūzjānī and Muḥammad b. Muqātil al-Rāzī → Abū Bakr al-Jūzjānī → al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944) → the Pazdawīs and al-Nasafī. The book reached Balkh very early and became a source text for Transoxanian theology.
Does it survive
Extant. Edited by al-Kawtharī (Cairo, 1949) and by Qalʿajī and al-Nadwī (Aleppo, 1972). Commented on by the Ashʿarī Abū Bakr Ibn Fūrak (d. 406/1015) — a rare case of one school's theologian working through another's foundational text.
Used for
A source text for Ḥanafī–Māturīdī theology, and for historians one of the two or three earliest surviving windows onto second-century Kufan argument. A caution the tradition itself supplies: the hadith critics held Abū Muqātil unreliable, and reported that he would invent chains of transmission because he liked how they sounded.
Sources — Rudolph, al-Māturīdī, 42–47 · Schacht, "An Early Murciʾite Treatise", Oriens 17 (1964), 96–117 · Sezgin, GAS I, 418

al-Fiqh al-Akbar

الفقه الأكبر

The creed studied in Ḥanafī madrasas from Turkey to South Asia — twenty-nine short articles on God, the attributes, the Companions, faith and the Last Day.

Attributed but not hisAbū ḤanīfaCreed
Whose book
Doubted since 1891 and, on the current state of scholarship, not his. Shiblī Nuʿmānī noticed its anachronistic language and that nobody commented on it before the eighth/fourteenth century. Wensinck (1932) dated it to al-Ashʿarī's milieu; Watt, van Ess and Rudolph followed. Ramon Harvey's 2022 study is now decisive: no Ḥanafī or Ashʿarī author of the fourth or fifth century cites it, though several cite al-Fiqh al-Absaṭ by that name; its chain of transmission is the same chain as al-Balkhī's book, transmitter for transmitter; and its oldest known manuscript is dated 826/1423. Harvey proposes an obscure late fourth-century Bukharan, Abū Ḥanīfa Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Bukhārī, whose existence is independently attested — a man who shared the kunya.
How it reaches us
Claimed through his son Ḥammād b. Abī Ḥanīfa (d. 176/792). Harvey argues the Ḥammād link is an artefact — later writers, wanting a lineage, took a cue from a passage in which Ḥammād is mentioned near an early quotation of the creed. Against it stands a report in which Dāwūd al-Ṭāʾī warns that same Ḥammād against speaking about the Qurʾān beyond what God has said, which is not the posture of a man transmitting this creed's developed formulations.
Does it survive
Extant in many manuscripts and printings; the standard commentary is Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī's (d. 1014/1606). English: Imām Abū Ḥanīfa's al-Fiqh al-Akbar Explained, tr. Abdur-Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera (White Thread Press, 2007).
Used for
Still the standard creedal primer of the school, and its doctrinal function is untouched by the authorship question. The tradition noticed the problem itself: Ibn Ḥajar wrote in his Fatāwā that the relied-upon copies of al-Fiqh al-Akbar lack the notorious clause about the Prophet's ﷺ parents, which is found "only in those copies that are by Abū Ḥanīfa Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Bukhārī" — and al-Barzanjī (d. 1103/1691), having examined a manuscript of al-Balkhī's text copied in 651/1253, concluded outright that this creed is not the Imam's. Defenders of the attribution include Ḥājjī Khalīfa, al-Ziriklī, ʿInāyatullāh Iblāgh, Wahbī Ghāwjī and Mangera; Harvey's answer is that they do not take up the charge of anachronism.
Sources — Harvey, "Mistaken Identity", JAOS 142.3 (2022), 597–620 · Wensinck, The Muslim Creed (1932), 188ff., 245–46 · Rudolph, al-Māturīdī, 56–58 · Shiblī Nuʿmānī, Sīrat al-Nuʿmān (1891)

"al-Fiqh al-Akbar I"

الفقه الأكبر (الأول)

A ten-article creed that does not exist and never did.

Attributed but not hisAbū ḤanīfaCreed · phantom text
Whose book
A scholarly ghost, and it is worth catalguing precisely because so much has been written about it. Wensinck, in The Muslim Creed (1932), printed a decalogue of ten theological articles which he took to be Abū Ḥanīfa's authentic creed and therefore the first Islamic statement of faith. He admitted that no Arabic manuscript contains it: he had reconstructed it out of a later commentary. Josef van Ess showed in 1986 that the commentary is not a commentary on any lost decalogue but on al-Balkhī's al-Fiqh al-Absaṭ, which it quotes verbatim at length. Rudolph's re-collation found the borrowing denser still.
How it reaches us
None. There is no chain, because there is no text.
Does it survive
Does not exist. The name should be used only to explain the error.
Used for
Still cited in reference works and popular writing as though it were a book. It is not.
Sources — van Ess, "Kritisches zum Fiqh akbar", REI 54 (1986), 327–38 · Rudolph, al-Māturīdī, 56–58 · Harvey, JAOS 142.3 (2022), 597 n. 1

al-Waṣiyya

الوصية

A short creed cast as a deathbed testament.

Attributed but not hisAbū ḤanīfaCreed
Whose book
Rejected by modern scholarship. Wensinck translated it and dated it late; Rudolph groups it with al-Fiqh al-Akbar among texts "excluded at the outset as a source for Abū Ḥanīfa's theology"; Montgomery Watt is blunter — "an anonymous work from his school, and is probably not earlier than 850 in view of various discussions to which it refers." Harvey adds a quiet point: like al-Fiqh al-Akbar, it never appears in the fourth- and fifth-century record where it should. A modern Ḥanafī survey concedes the attribution is "highly questionable."
How it reaches us
Not established.
Does it survive
Extant; long printed in the Hyderabad collections with the commentary of Mullā Ḥusayn b. Iskandar. Akmal al-Dīn al-Bābartī's genuine commentary on it survives at the Süleymaniye (MS Hamidiye 769/2) — and is the commentary often mis-catalogued as being on al-Fiqh al-Akbar.
Used for
Taught alongside al-Fiqh al-Akbar in some Ḥanafī curricula; one of the five works the seventeenth-century scholar al-Bayāḍī fixed as the school's canonical theological corpus.
Sources — Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, 124–31, 185–87 · Watt, Islamic Creeds: A Selection (1994) · Rudolph, al-Māturīdī, 27 · Harvey, JAOS 142.3 (2022), 614 n. 84

Musnad Abī Ḥanīfa

مسند أبي حنيفة

Not one book but roughly twenty, each named after whoever assembled it.

Assembled long afterAbū ḤanīfaHadith
Whose book
None of them is a book he wrote. The Turkish İslâm Ansiklopedisi defines al-Musnad as "the shared title of the ḥadīth books attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa," says it is uncertain whether he authored any such work, and counts about twenty surviving versions. The contents are the hadith he cited as evidence when teaching, plus reports he transmitted from Companions and Successors — gathered afterwards by others, in some cases three to five centuries afterwards.
How it reaches us
The named compilers include al-Ḥārithī al-Bukhārī (d. 340/951), Ibn al-Muẓaffar (d. 379/989), Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣbahānī (d. 430/1038) — a Shāfiʿī, which gives his recension cross-school weight — Ibn Khusraw al-Balkhī (d. 526/1132) and Qāḍī al-Māristān (d. 535/1141). Their standing as transmitters varies sharply and should not be flattened. Qāḍī al-Māristān, a Ḥanbalī, is graded thiqa and ḥujja. Al-Ḥārithī, whose collection is the principal quarry for the later compilations, was faulted for mixing chain and text together, for tadlīs, and for singular reports from reliable men. Al-Ḥasan b. Ziyād al-Luʾluʾī, whose name heads another, was impugned in the heaviest terms the critics use.
Does it survive
Extant in several printed recensions. The best-known synthesis is Jāmiʿ al-Masānīd of al-Khwārizmī (d. 665/1267), who gathered fifteen of them into one work arranged by legal chapter — about six hundred hadith through some fifty chains. He says in his preface that he did it to answer people in Damascus who denied Abū Ḥanīfa knew hadith, so the book is polemic as well as compilation, and should be read as both.
Used for
Used within the school to show that its eponym transmitted hadith, and used by historians as evidence of what he cited. The honest formulation is not "forged" but "compiled later and attributed" — which is a different charge and a fairer one.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "el-MÜSNED (Ebû Hanîfe)" · İbrahim Tozlu, Turkish Studies 12/2 (2017), 205–40 · Ibn Ḥajar, Taʿjīl al-Manfaʿa I, 235–44

Kitāb al-Āthār

كتاب الآثار

The hadith and the reports of the Kufan Successors that he taught from, arranged by chapter of law.

Written down by a studentAbū ḤanīfaHadith arranged by legal chapter
Whose book
Two different books under one title, and neither is by Abū Ḥanīfa. One is the recension of Abū Yūsuf, transmitted through his son Yūsuf; the other, fuller and far more used, is Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī's. Al-Shaybānī transmits from about twenty teachers, most of the material from Abū Ḥanīfa, and repeatedly appends his own verdict — qāla Muḥammad: wa-bihi naʾkhudh, "Muḥammad said: this is what we hold" — sometimes with an argument for it. That makes it a book of law driven by hadith rather than a hadith collection, and the additions are the compiler's.
How it reaches us
Abū Ḥanīfa's taught material → Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798) and al-Shaybānī (d. 189/805) → their own students. Within the school's own hierarchy of sources both recensions rank among the nawādir, second-degree evidence, below al-Aṣl and the two Jāmiʿs.
Does it survive
Both extant; Abū Yūsuf's incompletely. Al-Shaybānī's recension is widely represented in the Istanbul collections and has been printed repeatedly since Lucknow 1883, most recently ed. Khālid al-ʿAwwād (Dār al-Nawādir, 2011). English: The Kitab al-Athar of Imam Abu Hanifa, tr. Abdussamad Clarke (Turath, 2006) — a title that reproduces the traditional attribution rather than the scholarship.
Used for
The earliest Ḥanafī hadith text in active use, roughly contemporary with Mālik's Muwaṭṭaʾ and structurally its Kufan counterpart. Behnam Sadeghi argued in 2010 for its authenticity as a genuine second-century work of al-Shaybānī — which is the claim that matters, and is not the claim on the cover. A modern Ḥanafī survey reaches the same place: "the safer scholarly approach is to refrain from attributing Kitāb al-Āthār directly to Imām Abū Ḥanīfa."
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "el-ÂSÂR" and "NÂDİRÜ'r-RİVÂYE" · Sadeghi, Islamic Law and Society 17/3–4 (2010), 291–319 · Ibn Ḥajar, al-Īthār bi-maʿrifat ruwāt al-Āthār

al-Aṣl (al-Mabsūṭ)

الأصل / المبسوط

"The Foundation" — the first and largest of the six books on which Ḥanafī law actually rests.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaFiqh
Whose book
Al-Shaybānī's own book. It centres on positions attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa, records where Abū Yūsuf and al-Shaybānī himself departed from him, and leaves silence to mean agreement — where no disagreement is noted, all three held the same. So the doctrine of the school's founder reaches the school inside a book written by a man who studied with him for about two years and finished his training under someone else.
How it reaches us
Several students transmitted it; Abū Sulaymān al-Jūzjānī's transmission became the authoritative one. Abridged by al-Ḥākim al-Shahīd (d. 334/945) as al-Kāfī, which al-Sarakhsī then expanded into his thirty-volume al-Mabsūṭ — dictated from memory in prison, with students reading al-Kāfī aloud to him because he had no books.
Does it survive
Extant. Editions by Shafīq Shaḥāta (Cairo, 1954, partial), Abū al-Wafāʾ al-Afghānī (Hyderabad, 1966–73) and Mehmet Boynukalın (Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2012), the last based on wide manuscript collation. Sources give it as twelve or thirteen volumes. Al-Kāfī itself has never been printed and remains in manuscript.
Used for
The primary evidence base for historians of early Islamic law, and studied in advanced Ḥanafī and Turkish faculty curricula. Al-Sarakhsī's al-Mabsūṭ is the school's standard reference work and is cited routinely in contemporary fatwā.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "el-ASL" and "ZÂHİRÜ'r-RİVÂYE" · Ibn ʿĀbidīn on the three tiers of Ḥanafī sources

al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr

الجامع الصغير

About 1,532 legal questions, stated flat, with no evidence attached.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaFiqh
Whose book
Al-Shaybānī's, written at Abū Yūsuf's request. It gathers Abū Ḥanīfa's teaching as it came down the single line Abū Ḥanīfa → Abū Yūsuf → al-Shaybānī, which is why it is the closest thing the school has to a direct transcript, and why its silences matter.
How it reaches us
From al-Shaybānī by ʿĪsā b. Abān and Ibn Samāʿa. It originally had no chapter divisions; Abū Ṭāhir al-Dabbās later cut it into what became thirty-three books.
Does it survive
Extant, with more than thirty major commentaries — al-Pazdawī, al-Sarakhsī, Qāḍīkhān, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī — and several verse abridgements. Printed at Lucknow, Bulaq and Beirut.
Used for
Abū Yūsuf, as chief judge, is reported to have required judges and jurists to memorise it. It is still a core text of Ḥanafī legal training.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "el-CÂMİU's-SAGĪR (Şeybânî)"

al-Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr

الجامع الكبير

The book in which the student stops recording and starts thinking.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaFiqh
Whose book
Al-Shaybānī composed this one himself and revised it later, adding chapters and rulings; it reflects his own mature positions rather than his teacher's. It records where the three founders diverge and gives no evidence for any of them. The weight falls heavily on transactions rather than worship.
How it reaches us
Abū Ḥafṣ al-Kabīr, Abū Sulaymān al-Jūzjānī, and Hishām b. ʿUbayd Allāh al-Rāzī.
Does it survive
Extant, with more than forty commentaries. Ed. Abū al-Wafāʾ al-Afghānī (Hyderabad, 1356 AH) from several manuscripts; Beirut offset 1399 AH.
Used for
Advanced Ḥanafī study, and the text where the distance between Abū Ḥanīfa's doctrine and the school's is easiest to measure.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "el-CÂMİu'l-KEBÎR (Şeybânî)"

al-Siyar al-Kabīr

السير الكبير

The law of war, truces, treaties, captives and safe-conduct — the first comprehensive work of its kind.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaLaw of nations
Whose book
Al-Shaybānī's, written in sixty separate quires while he was qāḍī of al-Raqqa. He presented it to Hārūn al-Rashīd, who was impressed enough to send his sons al-Amīn and al-Maʾmūn to study with the author. The Islamic tradition treats al-Shaybānī, not Abū Ḥanīfa, as the founder of the discipline.
How it reaches us
Transmitted orally by Abū Sulaymān al-Jūzjānī and Ismāʿīl b. Tawba. The original text does not survive. The earliest witness is al-Sarakhsī's commentary, which reached him by three separate chains and which sometimes omits stretches of the base text.
Does it survive
Only inside al-Sarakhsī's Sharḥ. Printed Hyderabad 1917–18 and Cairo 1957–71. Translated into Ottoman Turkish in 1825 — ninety-two years before the Arabic was printed — and used to instruct Ottoman officers; into English by Majid Khadduri as The Islamic Law of Nations (Johns Hopkins, 1966), and into French by Muhammad Hamidullah for UNESCO.
Used for
The standard entry point for scholarship on Islamic international law.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "es-SİYERÜ'l-KEBÎR" · Khadduri, The Islamic Law of Nations (1966)

al-Ziyādāt

الزيادات

"The Additions" — the rulings he had left out of the two Jāmiʿs, written down late and never tidied.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaFiqh
Whose book
Al-Shaybānī's, and by the description of it in the sources not a treatise at all but a set of working notes. The chapters stand in no order; later scholars rearranged them into the conventional sequence.
How it reaches us
No independent original manuscript survives. The printed text descends from Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Adhraʿī's reconstruction, made from the commentaries rather than from any copy of the book. Al-Pazdawī's commentary preserves, in its preface, what the original arrangement was.
Does it survive
Only by reconstruction. About thirteen commentaries; al-Sarakhsī's is lost but quoted in his own al-Mabsūṭ.
Used for
Cited within the school as the sixth of the ẓāhir al-riwāya books — though some Ḥanafīs count five, folding al-Siyar al-Ṣaghīr into al-Aṣl.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "ez-ZİYÂDÂT"

Kitāb al-Kharāj

كتاب الخراج

Abū Yūsuf's book on land tax, written for a caliph — thirty-nine chapters answering twenty-six questions.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaPublic law and finance
Whose book
Abū Yūsuf's, written at Hārūn al-Rashīd's request — though the Turkish encyclopaedia notes drily that the caliph is never actually named in the text. It covers booty, land, the conquest terms of the Sawād, Syria and the Jazīra, irrigation, tax collection, the standing of non-Muslim subjects, criminal law and officials' salaries.
How it reaches us
Under Abū Yūsuf's own name from the outset.
Does it survive
Extant and much printed. Contested: Norman Calder argued it is not Abū Yūsuf's at all but al-Khaṣṣāf's, compiled under the caliph al-Muhtadī. The attribution is defended by TDV and by the general run of criticism of Calder's datings.
Used for
One of the most-used sources for the administrative and fiscal history of the early ʿAbbāsid state, well beyond the Ḥanafī school.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "KİTÂBÜ'l-HARÂC (Ebû Yûsuf)" · Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, ch. 6

al-Radd ʿalā Siyar al-Awzāʿī

الرد على سير الأوزاعي

Abū Yūsuf answering the Syrian jurist al-Awzāʿī on the law of war.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaPolemic · law of war
Whose book
Abū Yūsuf's. Its interest is bibliographical as well as legal: it survives most fully inside al-Shāfiʿī's Kitāb al-Umm, where al-Shāfiʿī reproduces it and adjudicates between the Syrian and Iraqi positions. That gives one of the very few second-century Ḥanafī texts an independent transmission line running outside the school.
How it reaches us
Through al-Shaybānī, and separately through al-Shāfiʿī's Egyptian dictations.
Does it survive
Ed. Abū al-Wafāʾ al-Afghānī (Cairo, 1357 AH), and printed within al-Umm VII, 303–336.
Used for
A primary source for how the schools argued with each other before they were schools.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "EBÛ YÛSUF" · Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), n. 28

Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā

اختلاف أبي حنيفة وابن أبي ليلى

A student setting down, point by point, where his two teachers disagreed.

The school's book, not hisAbū ḤanīfaComparative fiqh
Whose book
Abū Yūsuf's, recording the differences between Abū Ḥanīfa and Ibn Abī Laylā (d. 148/765), the qāḍī of Kufa. One of the earliest works of comparative law in Islam, and a reminder that the Kufan scene was an argument, not a consensus.
How it reaches us
Through al-Shaybānī, and preserved in al-Umm.
Does it survive
Ed. Abū al-Wafāʾ al-Afghānī (Cairo, 1357 AH); also in al-Umm VII, 87–150.
Used for
Read by historians for what it shows about second-century Kufan legal practice.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "EBÛ YÛSUF"

Works circulated under his name

كتب منسوبة إليه

Titles printed as his that the reference literature declines to accept.

Attributed but not hisAbū ḤanīfaVarious
Whose book
The Turkish İslâm Ansiklopedisi lists a cluster of works whose attribution it holds doubtful, and one it rejects outright: Maʿrifat al-madhāhib, which "contains later-developed theological sects and shows stylistic inconsistencies indicating non-attribution to the eighth-century jurist." The rest of the cluster: Mujādala li-aḥad al-dahriyyīn, al-Ḍawābiṭ al-thalātha, Risāla fī'l-farāʾiḍ, Duʿāʾ Abī Ḥanīfa, a Mukhāṭaba with Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, Fatāwā with al-Shaybānī, and al-Maqṣūd fī'l-ṣarf — which is a grammar book. A devotional poem in praise of the Prophet ﷺ, al-Qaṣīda al-Nuʿmāniyya, is also printed under his name; its authenticity is not established.
How it reaches us
None established for any of them.
Does it survive
Several are extant in manuscript and print. TDV's verdict on the whole group: "caution regarding their genuine attribution to Abū Ḥanīfa remains appropriate."
Used for
Listed here so that a reader who meets one of these titles knows what the reference literature says about it.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "EBÛ HANÎFE" · Brockelmann, GAL I, 176–77 · Sezgin, GAS I, 409–19

al-Muwaṭṭaʾ

الموطأ

"The Well-Trodden Path" — hadith, the sayings of Companions and Successors, the settled practice of Madīna, and Mālik's own rulings, arranged by chapter of law.

His own bookMālik ibn AnasHadith and fiqh
Whose book
His own book, and the outstanding exception in this whole catalogue. Yasin Dutton's recent study affirms Mālik's authorship while placing it in the teaching and transmission practice of the second century: he dictated, students read back, and he revised — for decades. Abū Muṣʿab reports that he was still working on it when the caliph al-Manṣūr died in 158/775. Apart from Zayd b. ʿAlī's Majmūʿ, it is the oldest surviving book of Islamic law.
How it reaches us
This is where the interesting part is. Around ninety to a hundred students are named as having transmitted the whole book from him. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ knew "about twenty" textual recensions, "and some have said thirty"; fourteen to sixteen can be identified today; four survive complete in print — Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Laythī (d. 234/848), Muḥammad al-Shaybānī, Abū Muṣʿab al-Zuhrī (d. 242/856) and Ibn Bukayr (d. 231/845) — with al-Qaʿnabī's surviving in a single manuscript in Istanbul. Yaḥyā al-Laythī's is the vulgate, and it became so because Mālikism became the state school of Umayyad al-Andalus; he came to Mālik in the last year of the imam's life and did not hear the whole text from him, filling the gaps from the Andalusian Ziyād "Shabṭūn". Al-Qaʿnabī's reading, by contrast, was done in 161 or 163 AH, some eighteen years earlier — and it lacks reports that all the later recensions have, which is the evidence that Mālik was still adding.
Does it survive
Extant. Standard text ed. Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī (Cairo, 1951); critical edition by M. M. al-Aʿẓamī (Abu Dhabi, 2004, 8 vols). English: ʿAbdalhaqq and Aisha Bewley (1989), and the Royal Moroccan edition supervised by Mohammad Fadel and Connell Monette, distributed by Harvard University Press (2019) — both from Yaḥyā's recension.
Used for
The standard curriculum text wherever Mālikism prevails, especially in North and West Africa, and studied everywhere as the earliest muṣannaf. On the number of hadith: the classical figure is Abū Bakr al-Abharī's (d. 375/985) — 1,720 reports in all, of which 600 are connected to the Prophet ﷺ, 222 mursal, 613 from Companions and 285 from Successors. Modern numberings vary because they count different things. On al-Shāfiʿī's famous remark that there is no book on earth after the Book of God sounder than Mālik's: the substance is well transmitted, the exact wording is not stable, and both al-Dhahabī and al-Nawawī note that it was said before al-Bukhārī and Muslim compiled. It was never a claim that the Muwaṭṭaʾ outranks the two Ṣaḥīḥs.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/202–3 · al-Aʿẓamī, ed. al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, muqaddima 1/86–114, 188–89 · Dutton, "The Ur-Muwaṭṭaʾ and Its Recensions", Islamic Law and Society 28/4 (2021) · al-Zarkashī, al-Nukat 1/192, quoting al-Abharī

al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, recension of Muḥammad al-Shaybānī

موطأ مالك برواية محمد بن الحسن

The Ḥanafī reading of the Mālikī book, with the Ḥanafī answer appended after each entry.

A student's recensionMālik ibn AnasHadith and fiqh
Whose book
Al-Shaybānī studied with Mālik in Madīna — his own words are "I stood at Mālik's door for three years and a bit" — and transmitted the book with his own comments attached, typically qāla Muḥammad: wa-bihi naʾkhudh, "and this is what we hold," giving the Ḥanafī position after Mālik's.
How it reaches us
Directly from Mālik, into the Ḥanafī school.
Does it survive
Extant, and the outlier. A computational collation by the KITAB project found Yaḥyā's and Abū Muṣʿab's recensions sharing roughly three quarters of their text with each other, while al-Shaybānī's overlaps less than a quarter with either — it "resembles a commentary rather than a straightforward recension." It carries additional Iraqi material, and, tellingly, lacks the passages hostile to Iraq that Yaḥyā's recension carries. Of its roughly 1,180 reports, 1,005 come from Mālik, thirteen from Abū Ḥanīfa and four from Abū Yūsuf.
Used for
Famous in the Ḥaramayn and in India, usually read with al-Laknawī's commentary al-Taʿlīq al-Mumajjad. It is the best single illustration of what a recension is: the same book, and not the same book.
Sources — Sarah Bowen Savant, KITAB project, "A Tale of 3 Versions" · al-Sibāʿī, al-Sunna wa-Makānatuhā 1/434 · Maribel Fierro, Islamic Law Blog, Muwaṭṭaʾ Roundtable

al-Mudawwana al-Kubrā

المدونة الكبرى

Some thirty-six thousand legal questions — the book Mālikī law actually runs on.

The school's book, not hisMālik ibn AnasFiqh · responsa
Whose book
Not a work of Mālik, and it is worth being blunt about that. It is third-generation. Asad b. al-Furāt, who had studied with Mālik in Madīna and then with Abū Yūsuf and al-Shaybānī in Kufa, brought the Iraqis' hypothetical questions to Ibn al-Qāsim in Egypt and got answers from Mālik's doctrine — the Asadiyya. Saḥnūn then carried that text back to Ibn al-Qāsim, went through it with him question by question (Ibn al-Qāsim retracted some of his earlier answers), and rearranged, chaptered and supplemented the result. The classic summary: "Mālik with his answers, Ibn al-Qāsim with his analogies and his additions, and Saḥnūn with his ordering, refining, chaptering and some additions."
How it reaches us
Mālik → Ibn al-Qāsim (d. 191/806), who kept his company some twenty years → Asad b. al-Furāt (d. 213/828) → Saḥnūn (d. 240/854). Saḥnūn never met Mālik; the imam died before he could reach him. The books Saḥnūn did not revise kept their original mixed state and gave the work its second name, al-Mukhtaliṭa, "The Mixed".
Does it survive
Extant; no manuscript of the Asadiyya survives at all. Early Mudawwana material is preserved at Qayrawān. The title al-Mudawwana al-Kubrā is modern, given with the first printed edition of 1323/1905. Caution: Jonathan Brockopp, working from the manuscript fragments, notes that the interlocutors are not always identified, which suggests a composite text rather than one hand — and that of the three dates the sources give for Saḥnūn's journey east, "every one represents a different polemical position, and none may reflect historical reality."
Used for
The foundational reference of Mālikī substantive law and the base of the whole commentary tradition — al-Barādhiʿī's Tahdhīb, Ibn Abī Zayd's abridgement, al-Lakhmī's Tabṣira.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 3/297–99 · Muḥammad Ibrāhīm ʿAlī, Iṣṭilāḥ al-Madhhab ʿind al-Mālikiyya, 114–17 · Brockopp, IJMES 43/1 (2011), 115–32 · Thiessen, "The Formation of the Mudawwana" (PhD, Victoria, 2014)

Risāla ilā al-Layth b. Saʿd

رسالة إلى الليث بن سعد

A short letter to the great jurist of Egypt, arguing that the practice of Madīna is binding — and the long reply that says it is not.

His own bookMālik ibn AnasLetter · legal theory
Whose book
Transmitted and vouched for by Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, who says "we have transmitted it also, and we set it out in full at the beginning of the book, because it is short" — that is, he prints the text himself. Ibn Farḥūn calls it "famous and current among the scholars." No classical rejection of it is recorded, and it has not had the source-critical treatment the Muwaṭṭaʾ has; Schacht does not list it among the attributed works at all, neither to affirm nor deny.
How it reaches us
Both letters — Mālik's and al-Layth's — are preserved together in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn.
Does it survive
Extant and complete.
Used for
The single best text for the fault line between Madīna and Egypt, and the most explicit statement of the ʿamal ahl al-Madīna doctrine in Mālik's own voice. Al-Layth's answer is the sharper document: he points out that Rabīʿa and al-Zuhrī — Mālik's own teachers, and eminent Medinans — themselves departed from the practice, and that the Companions settled in Egypt, Syria and Iraq too. Note that the two men were born a year apart, 93 and 94; al-Layth was not Mālik's student but his correspondent and near-equal.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/207 · Ibn Farḥūn, al-Dībāj al-Mudhahhab 1/126 · Ibn al-Qayyim, Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn · Dutton, The Origins of Islamic Law

Risāla fī'l-Qadar wa'l-Radd ʿalā'l-Qadariyya

رسالة في القدر والرد على القدرية

On the divine decree, written to his Egyptian student Ibn Wahb.

Attribution disputedMālik ibn AnasCreed
Whose book
The best-authenticated of the short epistles — by the tradition's own reckoning. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ gives two full chains and concludes "this is a sound chain, its men well known, all of them trustworthy"; al-Dhahabī agrees, "and its chain is sound." ʿIyāḍ calls it the most famous of them and "one of the choicest books in this field." Against that, Schacht files it among the non-legal attributions and applies his blanket verdict of doubt to the whole group. So the Mālikī tradition grades the chain sound and the leading orientalist authority does not accept the group — and the page reports both rather than choosing.
How it reaches us
Written to ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb, and transmitted from him by two independent Andalusian and North African lines.
Does it survive
Only in excerpts. Ibn ʿAsākir quotes passages from it in two places in Tabyīn Kadhib al-Muftarī. No complete text or critical edition was found.
Used for
Cited in discussions of Mālik's theology, where the material is thin enough that a few quoted paragraphs carry a lot of weight.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/204 · al-Dhahabī, quoted in al-Aʿẓamī 1/63 · Schacht, EI², "Mālik b. Anas"

Risāla ilā Hārūn al-Rashīd

رسالة إلى هارون الرشيد

A book of counsel to a caliph on manners and admonition — and the clearest forgery in the Mālikī corpus.

Attributed but not hisMālik ibn AnasAdab · mirror for princes
Whose book
Rejected by name, repeatedly, from within the school. Aṣbagh b. al-Faraj (d. 225/840), of the generation right after Mālik, "rejected it, and swore that it is not of Mālik's composition." Ismāʿīl al-Qāḍī (d. 282/895): "it is not sound, and its route to Mālik is weak, and in it are ḥadīths we do not know." Al-Abharī (d. 375/985): in it are munkar ḥadīths that contradict his principles — and, in another wording, ḥadīths such that had Mālik heard someone relating them, he would have disciplined him. Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī the same. Ibn ʿAttāb: the chain is a mistake and a transmitter has dropped out of it. Al-Dhahabī: "This epistle is forged." Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ is not himself among the rejecters — he is the source who preserves their rejections.
How it reaches us
The chains do not reach Mālik. ʿIyāḍ says so twice, in as many words.
Does it survive
Extant, complete, and in print — Cairo, Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1373/1954, and widely available digitally. Survival is not authenticity, and the two facts belong side by side.
Used for
Still circulating and still quoted. Schacht's characterisation is useful for placing it: it is "the Mālikī counterpart to Abū Yūsuf's Kitāb al-Kharāj" — which is a statement about genre, and has been mistaken by at least one reference work for a statement that Mālik wrote a book on land tax. He did not.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/205–6 · al-Dhahabī, in al-Aʿẓamī 1/64 · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist · Schacht, EI², "Mālik b. Anas"

Kitāb fī'l-Nujūm wa-Ḥisāb Madār al-Zamān wa-Manāzil al-Qamar

كتاب في النجوم وحساب مدار الزمان ومنازل القمر

On the stars, the reckoning of the year, and the mansions of the moon.

Attribution disputedMālik ibn AnasAstronomy and calendar
Whose book
ʿIyāḍ grades the chain sound — "all its transmitters trustworthy" — and calls it "a good and very useful book; people have relied on it in this field and made it a foundation." But it rests on one man. Saḥnūn heard it from Ibn Nāfiʿ al-Ṣāʾigh, and it is "among what ʿAbd Allāh b. Nāfiʿ al-Ṣāʾigh transmitted from Mālik alone." That is the profile that ordinarily invites doubt, and ʿIyāḍ's sound grading sits oddly beside it. Schacht does not mention the work at all.
How it reaches us
Mālik → Ibn Nāfiʿ al-Ṣāʾigh (d. 186) → Saḥnūn, and onward through several North African and Andalusian lines.
Does it survive
Unknown. No surviving manuscript or printed edition could be traced. What is attested is its reception: Ibn Masrūr al-Qarawī built on it and opened his own chapters with it, and Ibn al-Makwī incorporated the whole of it into his Jāmiʿ.
Used for
Not in use. Listed because a bibliography that quietly drops the works it cannot find misreports the man.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/204–5 · Ibn Farḥūn, al-Dībāj 1/124

Tafsīr Gharīb al-Qurʾān

تفسير غريب القرآن

An explanation of the rare words of the Qurʾān.

Attribution disputedMālik ibn AnasQurʾānic lexicography
Whose book
ʿIyāḍ gives a full chain and, unusually, passes no verdict on it. Al-Dhahabī describes the item merely as "a juzʾ on tafsīr" — which means the Juzʾ fī'l-Tafsīr that some lists carry separately is not a second work but the same one under a description. Schacht groups it with the doubtful.
How it reaches us
Through Khālid b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Makhzūmī from Mālik.
Does it survive
Not established. One Arabic secondary source states it was printed under the title Marwiyyāt al-Imām Mālik with part of it lost; this could not be confirmed against a catalogue.
Used for
Not in use.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/205 · al-Dhahabī, in al-Aʿẓamī 1/64

Risāla fī'l-Aqḍiya

رسالة في الأقضية

On judicial decisions, written for a judge, in ten parts.

Attribution disputedMālik ibn AnasJudicial procedure
Whose book
ʿIyāḍ gives the chain and no verdict; al-Dhahabī mentions it without comment; Schacht lists it among the legal attributions under his general doubt. The last name in the chain is a nice detail — ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Jalīl, described as Mālik's own childhood tutor.
How it reaches us
Through ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Jalīl.
Does it survive
Not established.
Used for
Not in use.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/205 · Schacht, EI², "Mālik b. Anas"

Risāla fī'l-Fatwā

رسالة في الفتوى

A letter on giving legal opinions, addressed to a Medinan contemporary.

Attribution disputedMālik ibn AnasLetter · legal method
Whose book
ʿIyāḍ calls it famous and names two transmitters, Khālid b. Nizār and Muḥammad b. Muṭarrif, adding that Ibn Muṭarrif was a leading Medinan and a peer of Mālik rather than a pupil. Evidence it really circulated: Abū Isḥāq b. Shaʿbān quoted Mālik's positions from this epistle in his own book. Schacht groups it with the doubtful.
How it reaches us
Khālid b. Nizār and Muḥammad b. Muṭarrif.
Does it survive
Not established.
Used for
Not in use.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/205 · Schacht, EI², "Mālik b. Anas"

Kitāb al-Sirr / al-Sīra / al-Siyar

كتاب السر / السيرة / السير

A single juzʾ transmitted by Ibn al-Qāsim, whose title nobody can agree on.

Attribution disputedMālik ibn AnasUncertain
Whose book
The manuscripts do not even settle what it is called. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ in Bakīr's edition reads al-Sirr, "the Secret"; Ibn Farḥūn reads al-Sīra; al-Aʿẓamī, summarising ʿIyāḍ, reads al-Siyar; Schacht, following al-Suyūṭī, reads al-Sirr. Neither ʿIyāḍ nor al-Dhahabī pronounces on its authenticity, and al-Dhahabī says only that it is one juzʾ.
How it reaches us
By licence: Ibn al-Qāsim from Mālik, thence through al-Ḥārith b. Miskīn and a chain of Andalusian scholars.
Does it survive
Not established.
Used for
Not in use. Listed for the title problem, which is instructive on its own.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/207 · Ibn Farḥūn, al-Dībāj 1/126 · Schacht, EI², "Mālik b. Anas"

Kitāb al-Manāsik

كتاب المناسك

A book on the rites of the pilgrimage, attributed to him on one authority.

Attributed but not hisMālik ibn AnasFiqh of hajj
Whose book
The title rests on al-Suyūṭī alone, reported by Schacht, who groups it with the doubtful writings. No classical chain and no surviving text could be traced. Two likely sources of the confusion: Ashhab b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz wrote a Kitāb al-Ḥajj which survives at Qayrawān, and Ibn Wahb's own Muwaṭṭaʾ al-Ṣaghīr contains a Kitāb al-Manāsik.
How it reaches us
None established.
Does it survive
No text known.
Used for
Not in use.
Sources — Schacht, EI², "Mālik b. Anas", citing al-Suyūṭī

"al-Muwaṭṭaʾ al-Ṣaghīr"

الموطأ الصغير

A small Muwaṭṭaʾ sometimes listed as Mālik's second book. It is not his.

Attributed but not hisMālik ibn AnasHadith and fiqh
Whose book
It is ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb's. Ibn Wahb kept Mālik's company for some twenty years and wrote his own Muwaṭṭaʾ al-Kabīr and Muwaṭṭaʾ al-Ṣaghīr alongside his transmission of Mālik's. No classical bibliography attests a small Muwaṭṭaʾ by Mālik.
How it reaches us
Ibn Wahb's own composition.
Does it survive
Muwaṭṭaʾ Ibn Wahb al-Ṣaghīr is extant and published, arranged by chapters of law.
Used for
Read as an early Egyptian Mālikī text — which is what it is.
Sources — ʿIyāḍ and the Mālikī ṭabaqāt on Ibn Wahb · ʿUddat al-Burūq 1/84

al-ʿUtbiyya (al-Mustakhraja)

العتبية / المستخرجة من الأسمعة

A vast collection of what students had heard from Mālik and his circle — and the school's own scholars did not think much of it.

The school's book, not hisMālik ibn AnasFiqh · responsa
Whose book
Compiled by Muḥammad al-ʿUtbī (d. 255/869). The classical verdict on it is sharply negative and deserves printing. Ibn Lubāba, quoted by both Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ and al-Dhahabī: "he is the one who compiled al-Mustakhraja, and multiplied in it the discarded transmissions and the anomalous questions" — and yet, as the later literature adds, people took to it anyway.
How it reaches us
Gathered from the asmiʿa, the audition-records of Mālik's students.
Does it survive
Extant, and its enduring importance is as the base text of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd's great commentary al-Bayān wa'l-Taḥṣīl.
Used for
Read through Ibn Rushd's commentary rather than on its own.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 4/253 · al-Dhahabī, Siyar 20/117 · Muʿlamat al-Fiqh al-Mālikī 1/142

al-Wāḍiḥa fī'l-Sunan wa'l-Fiqh

الواضحة في السنن والفقه

The book that carried Mālikī law into al-Andalus.

The school's book, not hisMālik ibn AnasFiqh
Whose book
By ʿAbd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb al-Sulamī (180–238 / 796–853), "the scholar of Spain" — a polymath who also wrote on medicine, history and genealogy, and who was criticised as a transmitter for holding his chains loosely. He is also the first Andalusian to transmit the spurious letter to Hārūn al-Rashīd, which is a fair measure of his critical standards.
How it reaches us
His own composition, from his teachers in Madīna and Egypt.
Does it survive
In fragments, at Qayrawān, edited by Miklos Muranyi.
Used for
A primary source for the earliest phase of Mālikism in the West.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ on Ibn Ḥabīb · Muranyi's editions of the Qayrawān fragments

al-Risāla of Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī

الرسالة لابن أبي زيد القيرواني

The school's elementary handbook — one chapter of creed, then forty-four of law.

The school's book, not hisMālik ibn AnasFiqh · handbook
Whose book
By Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (310–386 / 922–996), called "the little Mālik" for his authority in the Maghrib. He wrote it for beginners, wanting learners "to precede their hearts to the understanding of the religion" while they were still memorising the Qurʾān. He is also one of the three named scholars who rejected the letter to Hārūn al-Rashīd.
How it reaches us
His own composition.
Does it survive
Extant, with an enormous commentary literature.
Used for
Still the standard first text of Mālikī law across the Maghrib and West Africa. Most Mālikīs meet the school through this book, not through anything of Mālik's.
Sources — Ibn Farḥūn, al-Dībāj · the standard Mālikī ṭabaqāt

al-Tamhīd and al-Istidhkār

التمهيد والاستذكار

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr's two great commentaries on the Muwaṭṭaʾ — one on its chains, one on its law.

The school's book, not hisMālik ibn AnasCommentary
Whose book
By Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr of Córdoba (368–463 / 978–1071), "the Bukhārī of the West". Al-Tamhīd is arranged by Mālik's teachers in alphabetical order and traces connected chains for the book's mursal reports; al-Istidhkār follows the Muwaṭṭaʾ's own order and expounds the law. Ibn Ḥazm on the first: "I know of nothing on the fiqh of ḥadīth like it — how then anything better?"
How it reaches us
His own composition. Notably, he studied al-Qaʿnabī's recension rather than the Yaḥyā recension his own region preferred.
Does it survive
Both extant and much printed.
Used for
The standard scholarly apparatus for reading the Muwaṭṭaʾ. Approximately a hundred commentaries exist on Yaḥyā al-Laythī's recension alone; the best known besides these are al-Bājī's al-Muntaqā, Ibn al-ʿArabī's al-Qabas and al-Zurqānī's Sharḥ.
Sources — Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-Madārik 1/199–201 · Ibn Ḥazm, quoted in the Mālikī ṭabaqāt

al-Risāla

الرسالة

"The Epistle" — the oldest surviving work on how a ruling is derived, and the book everything later in the subject argues with.

His own bookal-ShāfiʿīLegal theory
Whose book
His, and written twice. He composed a first version in Iraq, at the request — so the tradition says — of the Basran traditionist ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Mahdī; that text is lost. The version we have was written in Egypt and reflects his final positions. Al-Bayhaqī's own inventory of his works lists al-Risāla al-qadīma and al-Risāla al-jadīda as two separate items, which is early and explicit confirmation that the school knew of two.
How it reaches us
Through al-Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān al-Murādī (d. 270/884), universally.
Does it survive
Extant. The manuscript is its own story. A Cairo codex carried a licence in al-Rabīʿ's name dated Dhū al-Qaʿda 265 AH, and Sezgin dated it to about 200 AH — near al-Shāfiʿī's own lifetime, and 16 of its 78 folios later than the rest. Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir's 1940 edition rests on it. That dating is contested: Muḥammad Ḥājj ʿĪsā argues the codex is not in al-Rabīʿ's hand, that its earliest reading-note is dated 394 AH, that the 265 colophon was copied mechanically by a later scribe, and — the sharpest point — that the manuscript garbles a Qurʾānic citation in a way inexplicable in a genuine autograph. The codex itself was found stolen from Dār al-Kutub in 2002 and has not been recovered.
Used for
Translated by Majid Khadduri (1961) and, better, by Joseph Lowry as The Epistle on Legal Theory (Library of Arabic Literature, 2013) — Khadduri reordered the text to make it look like a classical uṣūl manual, and Lowry left it alone. What the book is is itself disputed. The old reading takes it as a primitive textbook of the four sources; Lowry has shown that reading to be an anachronism. And on whether al-Shāfiʿī founded the discipline at all, Wael Hallaq argued in 1993 that his foundational status was constructed retrospectively; E. Chaumont in the Encyclopaedia of Islam concedes Hallaq's premise — that the Risāla "remained a dead letter for more than a century" — and rejects the inference.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī", IX, 181–85 · Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory (Brill, 2007) · Hallaq, IJMES 25/4 (1993), 587–605 · Vishanoff, "A Reader's Guide to al-Shāfiʿī's Epistle" · Sezgin, GAS I (Ar. tr.), 190

al-Risāla al-Qadīma

الرسالة القديمة

The first Risāla, written in Iraq.

Known only as a titleal-ShāfiʿīLegal theory
Whose book
His, and gone. Al-Bayhaqī lists it separately from the Egyptian version, so its existence is not in doubt; its contents are, since it survives only in scattered quotation.
How it reaches us
Not established; al-Zaʿfarānī is the usual candidate.
Does it survive
Lost. Sources disagree even on where it was written — the Encyclopaedia of Islam says Iraq, some Arabic accounts say Mecca, and since Ibn Mahdī wrote from Iraq the reply could have gone out from either.
Used for
Reconstructed piecemeal by scholars working on the difference between his old and new doctrine.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" · al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib al-Shāfiʿī 1/246ff.

al-Umm

الأم

The great compendium of his Egyptian teaching — around a hundred and forty separate books bound together.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīFiqh
Whose book
His dictations; not his title, and not his arrangement. The text runs on a formula — akhbaranā al-Rabīʿ, qāla akhbaranā al-Shāfiʿī — and the formula is differentiated, which is the strongest single argument for its integrity: where al-Rabīʿ did not hear a book from al-Shāfiʿī but copied it from his autograph, he says so. Kitāb al-Waṣāyā opens "we wrote this book from al-Shāfiʿī's copy in his own hand; we did not hear it from him." Al-Rabīʿ also interjects in his own voice, sixteen times in the eight-part text, marked qāla al-Rabīʿ. Whoever assembled this was not smoothing anything over.
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān al-Murādī's recension, which the jurists preferred; al-Zaʿfarānī transmitted a rival Baghdadi recension in the same arrangement, which they did not use.
Does it survive
Extant. The oldest dated manuscript is Chester Beatty Ar. 3230, 735/1334 — five centuries after al-Rabīʿ. Printed at Bulaq 1321–25 AH; the fullest modern edition is Rifʿat Fawzī ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib's (Dār al-Wafāʾ, 2001, 11 vols). No complete English translation is known.
Used for
The title is not his. Ibn al-Nadīm, writing about 377/987, has no Kitāb al-Umm at all: he calls the corpus al-Mabsūṭ, and so does al-Rabīʿ. Sezgin's verdict is that the name "goes back to the generation after him." Whether it originated with al-Rabīʿ, with al-Buwayṭī or with a later hand cannot be settled. And the authorship has been contested twice, sixty years apart. Zakī Mubārak published a book in Cairo in 1934 arguing that al-Buwayṭī compiled it and al-Rabīʿ interfered with it; Norman Calder argued in 1993 that the text is a school product of the late third century. Ahmed El Shamsy's 2012 study answers Calder from the external evidence — accurate third-century quotations, contents-lists, and abridgements by students who died in 231 and 264. Christopher Melchert remains sceptical of the optimistic reading, in his own words: "his optimism strikes me as nonfalsifiable, while my scepticism may well strike him the same way."
Sources — Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, ed. Ramaḍān, 246–48 · al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib al-Shāfiʿī 1/246–54 · Sezgin, GAS I (Ar. tr.), 184–85 · Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, ch. 4 · El Shamsy, JAOS 132/2 (2012), 199–220 · Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 249–64

Kitāb al-Ḥujja

كتاب الحجة

The compendium of his old doctrine.

Known only as a titleal-ShāfiʿīFiqh
Whose book
His Iraqi teaching, "probably a compilation" in the Encyclopaedia of Islam's phrase, transmitted by al-Ḥasan al-Zaʿfarānī (d. 260/874), whom the school reckoned the more reliable of the two men who carried the old doctrine.
How it reaches us
Al-Zaʿfarānī, and to a lesser degree al-Karābīsī (d. 245 or 248), a copy of whose transmission still existed in the fourteenth century.
Does it survive
Lost.
Used for
Known only through quotation. Its loss is why the qadīm can only be reconstructed, and why the school's rule that the jadīd prevails has practical force: you cannot easily consult what you are being told to set aside.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" and "al-Shāfiʿiyya", IX, 184, 186

Ikhtilāf al-Ḥadīth

اختلاف الحديث

What to do when two sound reports appear to contradict each other.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīHadith criticism
Whose book
Genuine, and among the best-attested pieces of the corpus. Al-Suyūṭī records him as the first to write in the genre. It is transmitted by al-Rabīʿ as an integral book of al-Umm, listed by Ibn al-Nadīm, and — the decisive check — Musnad al-Shāfiʿī contains a corresponding section of fifty-three reports that tracks the order of the Umm's text.
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ.
Does it survive
Extant; 359 reports across some seventy-nine chapters. Printed within al-Umm and separately, ed. ʿĀmir Aḥmad Ḥaydar (Beirut, 1985).
Used for
The foundational text of mukhtalif al-ḥadīth, and still the standard account of the sequence a scholar follows: harmonise if you can, then abrogation, then preference.
Sources — Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 7 · Sezgin, GAS I · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist

Kitāb Jimāʿ al-ʿIlm

كتاب جماع العلم

An argument, in question and answer, with someone who will not accept a report carried by a single chain.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīLegal theory · polemic
Whose book
Genuine, transmitted by al-Rabīʿ within al-Umm. Chaumont singles it out, with Ibṭāl al-Istiḥsān, as one of the two texts of al-Shāfiʿī's legal theory besides the Risāla that "have yet to receive the attention that they deserve." A caveat worth carrying: it does not appear under that exact title in Ibn al-Nadīm's list.
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ.
Does it survive
Extant, in al-Umm VII, 250–262; separately ed. Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir (Cairo, 1940).
Used for
One of the bases of modern reconstructions of his hermeneutics.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" · Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 11

Kitāb Ibṭāl al-Istiḥsān

كتاب إبطال الاستحسان

Against juristic preference — any ruling not grounded in text, consensus or analogy.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīLegal theory · polemic
Whose book
Genuine; it is the last title in Ibn al-Nadīm's list of his books, and is transmitted by al-Rabīʿ in al-Umm. Al-Ghazālī attributes to him the maxim man istaḥsana fa-qad sharaʿa — whoever practises istiḥsān has legislated.
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ.
Does it survive
Extant, in al-Umm VII, 267–277. Joseph Lowry notes that the boundaries between this treatise and al-Ḥukm bi'l-Ẓāhir are not perfectly stable across the early lists.
Used for
The text usually cited for the Shāfiʿī rejection of istiḥsān, and one of the clearest surviving records of what the Iraqis were actually being accused of.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" · Lowry, "A preliminary study of al-Shāfiʿī's Ibṭāl al-istiḥsān" (2013)

Kitāb Siyar al-Awzāʿī

كتاب سير الأوزاعي

Three jurists in one book: al-Awzāʿī's positions, Abū Yūsuf's refutation of them, and al-Shāfiʿī judging between the two.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīLaw of war · polemic
Whose book
A layered text. Al-Awzāʿī (d. 157/774) is quoted; Abū Yūsuf's refutation is the base; al-Shāfiʿī's own comments are laid over both. Melchert's observation is what makes the book important: "I am unaware that the base text of Siyar al-Awzāʿī, apparently the compilation of Abū Yūsuf, survives independently." Al-Shāfiʿī's book is the vehicle by which Abū Yūsuf's refutation of the Syrians reaches us at all.
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ.
Does it survive
Extant, in al-Umm VII, 303–336; also printed separately as Abū Yūsuf's, ed. Abū al-Wafāʾ al-Afghānī (Cairo, 1357 AH).
Used for
One of the most valuable texts in the whole corpus for the legal history of the second century — three schools arguing in one place before any of them was a school.
Sources — Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 12 and n. 28 · Sezgin, GAS I (Ar. tr.), 185–86

Ikhtilāf Mālik wa'l-Shāfiʿī

اختلاف مالك والشافعي

The student taking his teacher's doctrine apart, in public.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīComparative fiqh
Whose book
Genuine in substance; the Encyclopaedia of Islam holds that "in the form in which it has survived" the book is al-Rabīʿ's work — "a book for which the Mālikīs, of Egypt especially, were not to forgive him." It is also the best-corroborated tract of them all: the corresponding section of Musnad al-Shāfiʿī carries 136 reports, of which all but one are in the Umm's version and all but two stand in exactly the same order, drawn from the beginning to the end of the book.
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ.
Does it survive
Extant, in al-Umm VII, 177–249; 398 reports.
Used for
The classic statement of the case against ʿamal ahl al-Madīna as a source of law. It preserves al-Shāfiʿī's remark that no one was more given to disagreeing with the people of Madīna than Mālik.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" · Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 8 · Brunschvig, "Polémiques médiévales autour du rite de Mālik"

al-Radd ʿalā Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan

الرد على محمد بن الحسن

The refutation of the man who had taught him Iraqi law — and, on one account, saved his life.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīComparative fiqh · polemic
Whose book
Genuine, listed by Ibn al-Nadīm. Like Siyar al-Awzāʿī it is a layered text, interpolating al-Shāfiʿī's comments into what its editor takes to be part of the otherwise lost second half of al-Shaybānī's Kitāb al-Ḥujja ʿalā ahl al-Madīna. The Encyclopaedia of Islam notes he wrote it "while retaining immense admiration for him."
How it reaches us
Al-Rabīʿ. Al-Muzanī knew it as Kitāb al-Imlāʾ ʿalā Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan.
Does it survive
Extant, in al-Umm VII, 277–303.
Used for
Read alongside the Ḥanafī texts it answers, and as evidence of how he worked: he reportedly bought al-Shaybānī's books for sixty dinars, studied them for a year, and then wrote against them.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" and "al-Shaybānī" · al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib 1/162 · Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), n. 28

Kitāb al-Sabq wa'l-Ramy

كتاب السبق والرمي

On racing and archery — a small book, and a real one.

Dictated by himal-ShāfiʿīFiqh
Whose book
Al-Muzanī says al-Shāfiʿī dictated it to him personally, and used to call him "al-Qaṭāmī the archer" — the sort of first-hand, slightly irritable detail that is hard to invent. The title is in Ibn al-Nadīm's list.
How it reaches us
Al-Muzanī.
Does it survive
An extract survives in al-Umm IV, 149–155; a manuscript of the whole is recorded by Sezgin.
Used for
Little read, but worth listing: the archery stories in his biography, which are otherwise pure hagiography, turn out to have a mundane residue in an actual book.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī", citing Sezgin, GAS I, 490 · al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib 2/128, 2/272

Musnad al-Shāfiʿī

مسند الشافعي

The hadith of al-Umm, pulled out and bound separately — in Nishapur, a century and a half after his death.

Assembled long afteral-ShāfiʿīHadith
Whose book
Not a book al-Shāfiʿī wrote, and — strictly — not one al-Aṣamm wrote either. Al-Dhahabī: "al-Shāfiʿī did not assemble it as a separate work. Rather, Abū Jaʿfar Ibn Maṭar derived it for Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Aṣamm from what he related from al-Rabīʿ from al-Shāfiʿī from Kitāb al-Umm and other works." Al-Kattānī puts it flatly: laysa huwa min taṣnīfihi — it is not of his authorship. Ibn al-Athīr's ascription of the compiling to al-Aṣamm himself is the minority view.
How it reaches us
Al-Shāfiʿī → al-Rabīʿ → Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Aṣamm (247–346), a Nishapuran traditionist and professional copyist who lost his hearing young and went blind in 344; the extraction was made by his disciples.
Does it survive
Extant; 1,835 reports in ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib's edition, of which over 98 per cent are also in al-Umm. Sezgin lists thirteen manuscripts — more than the basis of any edition. Avoid the twentieth-century retypings of the Bulaq text.
Used for
A correction worth making: despite the title, it is not arranged by Companion. Its sections are headed "and from the book of…" and track the chapters of al-Umm. Melchert's verdict is that it is a genuine alternative recension of al-Rabīʿ's dictation, and therefore evidence for the state of al-Umm as al-Rabīʿ had fixed it by the 260s — not for the state al-Shāfiʿī left it in.
Sources — Melchert, "The Musnad of al-Shāfiʿī", Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 249–64 · al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-Islām 25/367 · Ibn Ḥajar, Taʿjīl al-Manfaʿa 1:238–9 · Sezgin, GAS I, 488

al-Sunan al-Maʾthūra

السنن المأثورة

A second, independent line of his dictation — collected by a Ḥanafī.

Assembled long afteral-ShāfiʿīHadith
Whose book
Collected by Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933) — the great Ḥanafī — from his maternal uncle al-Muzanī, who was al-Shāfiʿī's student. Just under seven hundred reports, of which all but fifteen he heard from al-Muzanī.
How it reaches us
Al-Shāfiʿī → al-Muzanī (d. 264/877) → al-Ṭaḥāwī.
Does it survive
Extant. Ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Amīn Qalʿajī (Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1406/1986); a textually superior edition by Khalīl Ibrāhīm Mullā Khāṭir (Jedda, 1409/1989).
Used for
The single best external control on al-Umm. Fewer than half its reports are paralleled there — a genuinely independent line — and, as Melchert notes, some of the reports in the Musnad that are missing from al-Umm turn up here, which confirms that both go back to al-Shāfiʿī's dictation while small discrepancies show al-Rabīʿ and al-Muzanī were working from different notes.
Sources — Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 17 and n. 39

Aḥkām al-Qurʾān

أحكام القرآن

The book on the legal verses that carries his name on the title page and was assembled two and a half centuries after he died.

Assembled long afteral-ShāfiʿīQurʾānic law
Whose book
Al-Bayhaqī's (d. 458/1066). Chaumont, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam: it "is not the one, now lost, composed by al-Shāfiʿī himself. It is in fact a work of compilation undertaken by the great Shāfiʿī al-Bayhaqī on the basis of different texts of al-Shāfiʿī." Melchert agrees. The complication should not be smoothed over: Ibn al-Nadīm's list does include a Kitāb Aḥkām al-Qurʾān by al-Shāfiʿī, and the Risāla refers to one. That book is lost; this one is on the shelf.
How it reaches us
Al-Bayhaqī gathering from al-Shāfiʿī's scattered statements, mostly from al-Umm.
Does it survive
Extant. Ed. with a foreword by Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Cairo, Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1370–71/1951–52, with notes by ʿAbd al-Ghanī ʿAbd al-Khāliq.
Used for
Used as a source for Shāfiʿī Qurʾānic jurisprudence. Melchert reconstructs the lost original's scope from the Musnad's corresponding section and concludes it "reviewed examples from just a few areas of the law, mostly marriage and divorce" — a much smaller book than the one now printed under the name.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" · Melchert, Studia Islamica 114/3 (2020), 9 and n. 21–22

Mukhtaṣar al-Buwayṭī

مختصر البويطي

An abridgement of the corpus by the student al-Shāfiʿī called "my tongue", who died in chains in Baghdad.

The school's book, not hisal-ShāfiʿīFiqh
Whose book
By Yūsuf b. Yaḥyā al-Buwayṭī (d. 231/846), whom al-Shāfiʿī is said to have named his successor. Al-ʿAbbādī describes it as "in the utmost excellence, following the arrangement of the chapters of al-Mabsūṭ."
How it reaches us
His own abridgement of his teacher's dictations.
Does it survive
Extant in manuscript — Ahmet III 1078 (868 AH) and 1079 (909 AH), Murad Molla 1189 (625 AH). Its section abridging the Risāla was edited and translated by Ahmed El Shamsy and Aron Zysow in 2012.
Used for
Load-bearing evidence. A student who died in 231/846 abridged the Risāla — which by itself makes any dating of that book to around the year 300 impossible. Al-Buwayṭī was arrested in the miḥna over the createdness of the Qurʾān, imprisoned in Baghdad, and died in detention.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" and "al-Shāfiʿiyya" · El Shamsy & Zysow, Islamic Law and Society 19/4 (2012), 327–55 · El Shamsy, "The First Shāfiʿī", ILS 14/3 (2007), 301–41 · Sezgin, GAS I, 491

Mukhtaṣar al-Muzanī

مختصر المزني

The abridgement the school actually taught from for a thousand years.

The school's book, not hisal-ShāfiʿīFiqh
Whose book
By Ismāʿīl b. Yaḥyā al-Muzanī (175–264 / 791–878), whom al-Shāfiʿī called "the one who makes my doctrine triumph." Ibn Surayj called it "the foundation of the books composed in the Shāfiʿī school"; al-Nawawī ranked it among the five foundational works. And it is not simply his teacher's doctrine: al-Rāfiʿī faulted al-Muzanī for departing so often that his singular positions fall outside the school, and al-Asnawī reports that he wrote a book renouncing al-Shāfiʿī's doctrine for one of his own.
How it reaches us
His own composition, from his teacher's dictations.
Does it survive
Extant; printed in the margins of the Bulaq al-Umm, parts 1–5.
Used for
The base text of the Shāfiʿī commentary tradition. Its independent value is as a control: al-Muzanī's notes and al-Rabīʿ's do not always agree, and where they differ you can see two men writing down the same lecture.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Muzanī", VII, and "al-Shāfiʿiyya", IX, 186

Dīwān al-Shāfiʿī

ديوان الشافعي

The most quoted book on this page, and there is no such book.

Attributed but not hisal-ShāfiʿīPoetry
Whose book
No dīwān of al-Shāfiʿī exists in any authorial sense. Nothing corresponding to a poetry collection appears in Ibn al-Nadīm's hundred-odd titles, in the Umm or Musnad recensions, or in al-Bayhaqī's inventory of a hundred and forty books. The printed collections are twentieth-century anthologies assembled out of adab and manāqib literature. Al-Bayhaqī's own chapter heading is exact: "what is attributed to him of poetry."
How it reaches us
Modern anthologists — ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sayyid al-Ahl (1966), Emil Badīʿ Yaʿqūb (1991) and others. The Arabic Wikisource text of the vulgate is filed under "texts of unknown source," which is a fair verdict.
Does it survive
The only genuinely critical edition is Mujāhid Muṣṭafā Bahjat, Shiʿr al-Shāfiʿī: jamʿ wa-taḥqīq wa-dirāsa (Dār al-Qalam, 1999). Its findings, as reported: about six pieces securely attributed with chains through his students; about eleven that are verse he recited, mistaken by transmitters for verse he composed — the famous tamannā rijālun an amūta is in fact by the pre-Islamic poet ʿUbayd b. al-Abraṣ; about twenty-nine rejected outright, surfacing only in late books and sometimes at odds with his own law; and a residue undetermined.
Used for
Heavily quoted on the internet and in sermons, and should not be cited as evidence of al-Shāfiʿī's views on anything. The structural error is exactly named by Jamāl bin Ḥuwayrib, summarising Bahjat: whoever gathered the dīwān "treated transmission and recitation as equivalent to composition." Many verses in it also sit in the dīwān ascribed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib — the same floating anthology, two famous names.
Sources — Mujāhid Muṣṭafā Bahjat, Shiʿr al-Shāfiʿī (Dār al-Qalam, 1999) · al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib al-Shāfiʿī, bāb mā yunsab ilayhi min al-shiʿr · Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī"

al-Waṣiyya

الوصية

Two different things go by this name, and only one of them is his.

Attribution disputedal-ShāfiʿīTestament · creed
Whose book
His actual will is preserved inside al-Umm, opening with al-Rabīʿ's dating formula — "this is a book which Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī wrote in Shaʿbān of the year 203" — and covering manumissions, provision for his son, bequests, and executors in Egypt and Mecca. It is as well attested as anything in the corpus. A separate creedal Waṣiyya circulates in theological anthologies, usually printed beside the spurious Fiqh al-Akbar; Chaumont's verdict on that one is that its authenticity "is doubtful" — doubtful rather than spurious.
How it reaches us
The will: al-Rabīʿ, who states that Kitāb al-Waṣāyā was copied from al-Shāfiʿī's autograph rather than heard from him. The creed: not established.
Does it survive
The will: extant in al-Umm. The creed: edited by Friedrich Kern in Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen XIII (1910), 141–45.
Used for
The dated will is a small but sharp piece of evidence in the authenticity debate — Zakī Mubārak used it in 1934 to argue the corpus was compiled after al-Shāfiʿī's death, and Aḥmad Ṣaqr answered that al-Rabīʿ himself says he copied that book rather than hearing it.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī" · Kern, MSOS XIII (1910), 141–45 · al-Umm, Kitāb al-Waṣāyā

al-Fiqh al-Akbar fī'l-Tawḥīd

الفقه الأكبر في التوحيد

A short creed printed under his name.

Attributed but not hisal-ShāfiʿīCreed
Whose book
Chaumont, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, is unequivocal: it "is clearly apocryphal." Ḥājjī Khalīfa had said much the same in the seventeenth century — "there is doubt about ascribing this book to al-Shāfiʿī; most likely it is the work of some other of the great scholars." There is no chain to al-Shāfiʿī, no mention by al-Rabīʿ, al-Muzanī, al-Buwayṭī or al-Zaʿfarānī, none by Ibn al-Nadīm, and none by Ibn Abī Ḥātim or al-Bayhaqī in their exhaustive lives of him.
How it reaches us
None.
Does it survive
Extant; Cairo, al-Maṭbaʿa al-Adabiyya, 1324/1906, 48 pp.
Used for
Note the confusion behind it. Al-Fiqh al-Akbar is famous as Abū Ḥanīfa's creed, where the attribution is itself contested; a version of it was then re-ascribed to al-Shāfiʿī, and that second ascription is weaker still. Chaumont frames the whole body of creeds attributed to al-Shāfiʿī as retrospective projection: some make him a forerunner of Ashʿarism, others of Ḥanbalism, and the debates they take positions in did not become urgent until after his death.
Sources — Chaumont, EI², "al-Shāfiʿī", IX, 184 · Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-Ẓunūn 2:1287–88

Tafsīr al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī

تفسير الإمام الشافعي

A three-volume commentary on the Qurʾān under his name, published in 2006.

Assembled long afteral-ShāfiʿīTafsīr
Whose book
A modern doctoral compilation by Aḥmad b. Muṣṭafā al-Farrān (Dār al-Tadmuriyya, Riyadh, 3 vols, 1427/2006), gathering his exegetical remarks from across the corpus. Al-Shāfiʿī wrote no tafsīr.
How it reaches us
A modern editor's gathering.
Does it survive
In print.
Used for
Useful, and honestly presented by its editor — but a book of his sayings, not a book of his.
Sources — al-Farrān, Tafsīr al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī (Dār al-Tadmuriyya, 2006)

al-Musnad

المسند

Some twenty-seven thousand reports, arranged not by subject but under the name of the Companion who carried each one.

His own bookAḥmad ibn ḤanbalHadith
Whose book
His own selection — and not his edition. Ibn al-Jazarī: "the Imam Aḥmad set about collecting this Musnad, and wrote it on separate sheets, and scattered it in separate parts, after the manner of a rough draft; then the coming of death forestalled the attaining of the wish, so he hastened to have it heard by his children and his household — and he died before revising and polishing it, so it remained as it was." Al-Dhahabī is blunter: "this Musnad he did not compile, nor arrange, nor attend to polishing; rather he used to narrate it to his son as copies and parts, and order him: put this in the musnad of so-and-so." The clearest proof that the received text is not his final intention: he asked for one report to be struck out as anomalous and dangerous, and his son kept it in — along with the story of the request.
How it reaches us
Four layers, and they can be told apart. (1) Aḥmad's own material — the formula is ḥaddathanā ʿAbd Allāh, ḥaddathanī abī. (2) His son ʿAbd Allāh (213–290), who arranged the scattered parts and added material of his own from other teachers — ḥaddathanā ʿAbd Allāh, ḥaddathanī someone else; the Risāla edition flags 642 of these, one dedicated study counts 229, and another figure of about 10,000 for ʿAbd Allāh and al-Qaṭīʿī together circulates without explanation. Say the counts disagree. (3) Abū Bakr al-Qaṭīʿī (273–368), through whom everything printed descends, and whose own voice enters as qāla Abū Bakr. (4) The post-Qaṭīʿī line — Ibn al-Mudhhib, then Ibn al-Ḥuṣayn, who heard the whole book at the age of six.
Does it survive
Extant, and the numbering is a trap. Al-Arnaʾūṭ's Risāla edition numbers 27,647; al-Zayn 27,519; al-Darwīsh 27,718; Bayt al-Afkār 28,199. Aḥmad Shākir's incomplete edition numbers 1–8,099 and does not agree with al-Arnaʾūṭ. A bare Musnad number is not a citation unless the edition is named. The older Western and Arab convention cites the six-volume Cairo Maymaniyya printing by volume and page, which carries no numbers at all.
Used for
Universally placed immediately after the Six Books, and it is the largest surviving example of its genre. Its distinctive value is measurable: on Ṣāliḥ al-Shāmī's de-duplicated count, 3,546 of its 9,566 distinct reports are found in no other of the eight main collections. Aḥmad did not require soundness. In his own words: "I aimed in the Musnad at the well-known hadith, and left people under God's covering. Had I intended to confine myself to what is sound in my judgement, I would not have narrated of this Musnad but a thing here and a thing there." The classical assessments split three ways — Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī held everything in it a proof, and Ibn Kathīr and Ibn al-Qayyim rejected that; Ibn al-Jawzī and al-ʿIrāqī found fabrications in it; Ibn Taymiyya, al-Dhahabī, Ibn Ḥajar and al-Suyūṭī held that its weak material approaches the acceptable and that fabrications are extremely rare. Ibn Ḥajar's al-Qawl al-Musaddad answers the charges one by one.
Sources — al-Dhahabī, Siyar 11/181, 13/517–26 · Ibn al-Jazarī, al-Masʿad al-Aḥmad · Ibn Ḥajar, al-Qawl al-Musaddad; Itḥāf al-Mahara 1/23–25 · Kandemir, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "el-MÜSNED" · Ṣāliḥ al-Shāmī, Musnad al-Imām Aḥmad mudhayyalan bi-ḥadhf al-mukarrar (2003), 32 · Melchert, Der Islam 82/1 (2005), 32–51

The letter to the vizier ʿUbayd Allāh b. Yaḥyā b. Khāqān

رسالة أحمد إلى عبيد الله بن يحيى بن خاقان

A statement of belief written for the caliph's minister, at the caliph's request.

His own bookAḥmad ibn ḤanbalCreed · letter
Whose book
The one creedal statement of Aḥmad's that survives the modern scrutiny. Saud al-Sarhan's study of the creeds ascribed to him rejects or reassigns essentially all six preserved in Ibn Abī Yaʿlā's Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila, and accepts this one. Melchert, who replied to al-Sarhan in the same volume and went on to translate all of them, evidently does not accept the wholesale rejection — but the letter is common ground.
How it reaches us
Preserved in his son Ṣāliḥ's Masāʾil and Sīra, and in ʿAbd Allāh's al-Sunna; abridged by Ibn al-Jawzī. Probably written in 237/852.
Does it survive
Extant. English in Michael Cooperson's translation of Ibn al-Jawzī, Virtues of the Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (Library of Arabic Literature), 2:12–15.
Used for
The safest text to quote for what Aḥmad actually held.
Sources — Saud al-Sarhan, "The Creeds of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal", in Gleave (ed.), Books and Bibliophiles (Gibb Memorial Trust, 2014), 29–44 · Melchert, "A Response", same volume, 45–50 · Ṣāliḥ b. Aḥmad, Sīrat al-Imām Aḥmad, 116–22

The Masāʾil

المسائل

Ten or so notebooks of questions and answers — and the whole of Ḥanbalī law is built on them.

Written down by a studentAḥmad ibn ḤanbalLegal responsa
Whose book
These exist because he forbade what they are. He would not write down his own legal opinions and told his students not to either. When he heard that Isḥāq al-Kawsaj was teaching his answers in Khurāsān, he said: "Bear witness, all of you: I renounce them all." A Khurāsānī once handed him a quire; "when he saw that it had some of his own words in it, he grew angry and tossed the document away." The notebooks were kept anyway.
How it reaches us
By name: his sons ʿAbd Allāh (d. 290) and Ṣāliḥ (d. 266); Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī (d. 275); Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm b. Hāniʾ al-Naysābūrī (d. 275), whose text survives on a single manuscript that its editor owned; Isḥāq b. Manṣūr al-Kawsaj (d. 251), whose collection uniquely records Ibn Rāhwayh's answers alongside Aḥmad's; Ḥarb al-Kirmānī (d. 280), published only piecemeal, mostly as university theses, with no unified edition; al-Marrūdhī (d. 275), with al-Maymūnī's material bound in; and al-Athram, of whose large collection only fifty-three pages survive.
Does it survive
Mostly extant, in editions of very uneven quality. The best single story about how they were checked is al-Ḥākim's: al-Kawsaj heard that Aḥmad had retracted some of the answers he had recorded, so he carried them in a sack on his back and walked to Baghdad, laid Aḥmad's own handwriting before him question by question, and Aḥmad affirmed them a second time — and admired him for it.
Used for
Susan Spectorsky's Chapters on Marriage and Divorce (Texas, 1993) translates three of them and is the standard English entry point. Saud al-Sarhan's 2015 survey in Islamic Law and Society catalogues the whole genre with its manuscripts and editions. Ibn al-Nadīm already lists al-Masāʾil as "a book by Aḥmad" in the tenth century — which is exactly the misattribution this catalogue exists to correct.
Sources — Ibn al-Jawzī, Manāqib, chs. 27–29 · al-Dhahabī, Siyar, on al-Kawsaj · Spectorsky, Chapters on Marriage and Divorce (1993) · al-Sarhan, "The Responsa of Aḥmad Ibn Ḥanbal", Islamic Law and Society 22/1–2 (2015), 1–44

Kitāb al-Zuhd

كتاب الزهد

Renunciation, in the sayings of prophets, Companions and early ascetics — one of the largest such collections from the first two centuries.

Written down by a studentAḥmad ibn ḤanbalAscetic reports
Whose book
Assembled by his son ʿAbd Allāh, who contributed about half of it himself. That is Christopher Melchert's finding, in his own abstract: the book "was assembled by his son ʿAbd Allāh, who contributed about half the sayings in it independently of his father." ʿAbd Allāh also produced a separate supplement, al-Zawāʾid ʿalā Kitāb al-Zuhd.
How it reaches us
Aḥmad's dictation, gathered by ʿAbd Allāh.
Does it survive
Extant but incomplete — significant portions were lost, and the printed text is shorter than the original. 2,409 numbered reports in 58 chapters; ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Salām Shāhīn (Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999).
Used for
A standard source for early Islamic asceticism, and central to the modern argument about Aḥmad's own piety. Do not confuse it with Ibn al-Mubārak's Kitāb al-Zuhd wa'l-Raqāʾiq, a different book by a different man.
Sources — Melchert, "Aḥmad Ibn Ḥanbal's Book of Renunciation", Der Islam 85/2 (2008), 345–59 · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, tr. Dodge, 553

Faḍāʾil al-Ṣaḥāba

فضائل الصحابة

The merits of the Companions — and the one book where you can watch the layers being added.

Written down by a studentAḥmad ibn ḤanbalHadith
Whose book
Three layers, same structure and same cause as the Musnad: Aḥmad's material, transmitted by ʿAbd Allāh with his own additions, transmitted by al-Qaṭīʿī with a further layer. Here the layering is not inference — the manuscript tradition flags it. Two chapter headings in the printed edition read "some of the merits of ʿUthmān, from the hadith of Abū Bakr b. Mālik from his shaykhs other than ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad," and the same for ʿAlī. Abū Bakr b. Mālik is al-Qaṭīʿī.
How it reaches us
Aḥmad → ʿAbd Allāh → al-Qaṭīʿī, and the text says which is which.
Does it survive
Extant; 1,963 numbered reports. Ed. Waṣī Allāh b. Muḥammad ʿAbbās, originally an Umm al-Qurā dissertation, published Mecca 1403/1983 and in a revised, enlarged edition (Maktabat Ibn al-Jawzī, Dammam, 1420/1999). How much of the printed text is Aḥmad's own could not be established and the proportions are disputed.
Used for
Heavily used in Sunni–Shīʿī polemic in both directions, because of its very large section on ʿAlī — much of which belongs to al-Qaṭīʿī's layer, a fact both sides deploy.
Sources — ed. Waṣī Allāh b. Muḥammad ʿAbbās, Faḍāʾil al-Ṣaḥāba (Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1403/1983) · TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi

al-ʿIlal wa-Maʿrifat al-Rijāl

العلل ومعرفة الرجال

Hidden defects in hadith, and verdicts on the men who carried them — his most technically important surviving work after the Musnad.

Written down by a studentAḥmad ibn ḤanbalHadith criticism
Whose book
Not one book but a family of student notebooks. The compilers named are al-Marrūdhī, al-Athram, al-Khallāl and his son ʿAbd Allāh; two main recensions are in print. Ibn al-Nadīm lists it first among Aḥmad's books, which shows how early the material was circulating under his name.
How it reaches us
The ʿAbd Allāh recension, much the largest, is what is meant when "al-ʿIlal" is cited. Al-Marrūdhī's recension, with Ṣāliḥ's and al-Maymūnī's material bound in, is a separate text — and was edited twice independently in the same year, which has caused lasting citation confusion.
Does it survive
Extant. ʿAbd Allāh's recension ed. Waṣī Allāh b. Muḥammad ʿAbbās, 2nd ed. Dār al-Khānī, Riyadh, 1422/2001. Al-Marrūdhī's ed. by the same editor (Bombay, 1988) as al-Jāmiʿ fī al-ʿIlal, and by Ṣubḥī al-Sāmarrāʾī (Riyadh, 1988). Al-Khallāl's own Kitāb al-ʿIlal in three volumes is lost.
Used for
Every dictionary of narrators from Ibn Abī Ḥātim onwards depends on it.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, tr. Dodge, 553

Kitāb al-Ashriba

كتاب الأشربة

On what may be drunk — his most distinctive and least followed legal position, argued at length.

Written down by a studentAḥmad ibn ḤanbalFiqh · hadith
Whose book
In Ibn al-Nadīm's list, which is unusually good external attestation for this corpus. The transmitter is contested: Shamela's catalogue names Abū al-Qāsim al-Baghawī (with an impossible death date attached), other Arabic listings name ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad, and the question could not be resolved. TDV calls it Kitāb al-Ashriba al-Ṣaghīr, implying a lost larger version.
How it reaches us
Contested; see above.
Does it survive
Extant; 242 reports, 82 pages. Ed. Ṣubḥī al-Badrī al-Sāmarrāʾī, Baghdad 1976 and ʿĀlam al-Kutub, Beirut, 1405/1985. (Some bibliographies split that one editor into two men.)
Used for
Ibn Taymiyya's testimony places it exactly: "the Imam Aḥmad composed a large book on drinks — I know of no one who composed a larger, nor a smaller, than he. And he was the first to make this sunna manifest in Iraq, so much so that someone entered Baghdad and asked, 'Is there anyone here who forbids nabīdh?' and they said, 'No — except Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal.'"
Sources — Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā xxi. 8 · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, tr. Dodge, 553 · TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi

Kitāb al-Waraʿ

كتاب الورع

A hundred hard cases about scrupulous earning, doubtful food, and dealing with rulers.

Written down by a studentAḥmad ibn ḤanbalEthics · casuistry
Whose book
The book is al-Marrūdhī's, not Aḥmad's. Shamela catalogues it under Abū Bakr al-Marrūdhī (d. 275/888) as author, and the standard Arabic survey says outright that "al-Waraʿ is definitively not Aḥmad's work; it is al-Marrūdhī's." It belongs to the masāʾil genre. Cooperson notes an internal proof that it is a genuine record of Aḥmad's answers: when al-Marrūdhī has a question about practice, Aḥmad asks what Bishr al-Ḥāfī says about it — and by Aḥmad's own admission the two men never met.
How it reaches us
Al-Marrūdhī, who was the closest of Aḥmad's companions, closed his eyes when he died, washed his body, and was buried near his grave.
Does it survive
Extant. Best-known modern edition ed. Samīr b. Amīn al-Zuhayrī (Dār al-Ṣumayʿī, Riyadh, 1418/1997). Al-Khallāl also produced a Kitāb al-Waraʿ within his Jāmiʿ, which is easily confused with this one.
Used for
Read for Aḥmad's ethics of livelihood, which is not an abstract subject in his case: he lived on the rent of premises his father left, said of it "this rent does not sustain us; I take it only out of necessity," and gleaned in the fields on his travels because he would not accept gifts.
Sources — Ibn al-Jawzī, Manāqib, ch. 40–41 · Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography, 155–56 · TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi

al-Radd ʿalā al-Jahmiyya wa'l-Zanādiqa

الرد على الجهمية والزنادقة

The refutation of the Jahmiyya, reportedly written in prison in 220 — and, on the manuscript evidence, a late-medieval composite.

Attribution disputedAḥmad ibn ḤanbalTheology · polemic
Whose book
The decisive modern study is Andrew McLaren's, and it is uncomfortable reading in both directions. Three related recensions survive in manuscript; the text "only emerged over several centuries"; the idea behind it may go back to Aḥmad's own notebooks; Recension 1 emerged after the mid-fourth century in Baghdad, Recension 2 at the beginning of the sixth, and Recension 3, a conflation of the two, is the basis of most printed editions. The classical ground for doubt is older and comes from inside the school: the chain runs through al-Khiḍr b. al-Muthannā al-Kindī, whom Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī declared unknown — "he alone narrates from ʿAbd Allāh objectionable reports that are not corroborated." Al-Dhahabī hesitated over it. The Turkish encyclopaedia adds a pointed observation: its argumentation is itself of the kalām type, which is awkward for a book ascribed to the arch-opponent of kalām.
How it reaches us
Aḥmad → ʿAbd Allāh → al-Khiḍr b. al-Muthannā al-Kindī.
Does it survive
Extant in more than sixteen manuscripts naming Aḥmad as author. Ascribed to him by Ibn al-Nadīm, Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, Ibn al-Jawzī and Brockelmann; its editors list forty-odd scholars affirming the attribution. English translation in Morris S. Seale, Muslim Theology (London, 1964).
Used for
Widely used in modern creedal argument, usually without the textual history. Note that Ibn al-Nadīm's own list is unstable at exactly this point: Dodge records that in one manuscript of the Fihrist the last four titles, including this one, are written in a different hand.
Sources — Andrew G. McLaren, "Ibn Ḥanbal's Refutation of the Jahmiyya: A Textual History", JAOS 140/4 (2020), 901ff. · Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī on al-Khiḍr b. al-Muthannā · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, tr. Dodge, 553 and notes

Kitāb al-Sunna

كتاب السنة

Three different books go by this name. Never cite it without saying which.

Attribution disputedAḥmad ibn ḤanbalCreed
Whose book
(a) The large anti-Jahmī compendium of 1,300-odd reports printed under ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad's name. Its attribution is defended on the ground that Ibn Taymiyya, al-Bayhaqī, Ibn al-Qayyim and al-Dhahabī all used it; it is attacked on the ground that the surviving transmission runs through two men held to be unknown. The attackers are named — ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khalīfa, Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Idlibī, Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ — and the line is a partisan one, the Ḥanafī and Ashʿarī counterweight to Ḥanbalī textual claims; it should be presented as one side. Its defenders concede that the chapter attacking Abū Ḥanīfa rests on reports not soundly established, and that it was excised from some printings. (b) A short creed ascribed to Aḥmad himself, essentially the Uṣūl al-Sunna material. (c) Al-Khallāl's Kitāb al-Sunna, a third-generation compilation in three volumes, of which three sections are published. Material from (c) has undoubtedly migrated into what people call "Aḥmad's Kitāb al-Sunna."
How it reaches us
Different for each of the three.
Does it survive
All three partly extant. Al-Khallāl's sections ed. ʿAṭiyya al-Zahrānī, Riyadh, 1410/1989.
Used for
A datum worth registering: Ibn al-Nadīm's list contains no "Sunna" title at all. The absence from the earliest bibliography is itself evidence about the ascription.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, tr. Dodge, 553 · Melchert, Early Ḥanbali Creeds (Oxford ORA, 2016)

Uṣūl al-Sunna and the creeds

أصول السنة والعقائد

Six short creeds transmitted under his name — and a 2014 study that reassigns nearly all of them.

Attribution disputedAḥmad ibn ḤanbalCreed
Whose book
Ibn Abī Yaʿlā's Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila preserves six creeds ascribed to Aḥmad, of which the third is the text printed as Uṣūl al-Sunna in the ʿAbdūs b. Mālik al-ʿAṭṭār recension. Saud al-Sarhan's study reattributes Creed I to Ḥarb al-Kirmānī, Creed III to ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī or his circle, and Creed IV to al-ʿAbbās ibn Mūsā ibn Miskawayh; questions Creeds II and VI on their transmitters; and rejects Creed V for contradicting other statements of Aḥmad's. Christopher Melchert published a reply in the same volume and then translated all six, so he plainly does not accept the wholesale rejection — but the content of his counter-argument is not something this page can report, and it should not be guessed at.
How it reaches us
Named recensions run through ʿAbdūs b. Mālik al-ʿAṭṭār, Musaddad b. Musarhad, Aḥmad b. Jaʿfar al-Iṣṭakhrī and Ibn Hāniʾ. Al-Iṣṭakhrī's is the long, hard-line one containing the ḥadd language later Ḥanbalīs and their critics fight over.
Does it survive
Extant in Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, and separately in print. Melchert's Early Ḥanbali Creeds (Oxford ORA, 2016) is the convenient English access. The founding modern study is Henri Laoust's, 1957.
Used for
Uṣūl al-Sunna is a standard creedal text in Ḥanbalī and Salafī teaching. Its contents are the recognisable Sunni articles — the Qurʾān uncreated, the vision of God, faith increasing and decreasing, the merits of the Companions in the order of their caliphates, obedience to rulers and no rebellion by tongue or sword.
Sources — Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila · al-Sarhan, "The Creeds of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal" (2014), 29–44 · Melchert, "A Response" (2014), 45–50, and Early Ḥanbali Creeds (2016) · Laoust, "Les premières professions de foi hanbalites" (1957)

Kitāb al-Ṣalāt / Risālat al-Ṣalāt

كتاب الصلاة / رسالة الصلاة

An epistle on the prayer, with a fierce passage on those who neglect it.

Attributed but not hisAḥmad ibn ḤanbalFiqh · exhortation
Whose book
Al-Dhahabī disputed the attribution, and the modern Arabic survey lists it among works falsely ascribed to Aḥmad, adding that the text "diverges from his method and manner." Al-Albānī and Muqbil al-Wādiʿī reject it. Ibn Taymiyya is reported already to have had to answer objections to the ascription, so the dispute is at least seventh-century. The strongest argument against it is the simplest: it is not in Ibn al-Nadīm's list. The wording often quoted from al-Dhahabī — "I fear it may be forged" — could not be verified against a citable text and should not be printed as a quotation.
How it reaches us
Addressed, in the Arabic tradition, to Muhannā b. Yaḥyā.
Does it survive
Extant; manuscripts in the Baghdad waqf library. Printed Bombay 1311; Cairo 1322, 1323, 1347; Cairo 1964 under the title al-Risāla al-Saniyya.
Used for
Still quoted in arguments about the standing of one who abandons the prayer.
Sources — TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi · al-Dhahabī, Siyar, on Aḥmad's ascribed writings

al-Jāmiʿ li-ʿUlūm al-Imām Aḥmad

الجامع لعلوم الإمام أحمد

Al-Khallāl's gathering of everything Aḥmad had ever been asked — the book that made a school out of a man.

The school's book, not hisAḥmad ibn ḤanbalFiqh · responsa
Whose book
By Abū Bakr al-Khallāl (d. 311/923), who was not Aḥmad's student — he was born six or seven years before Aḥmad died and always transmits through intermediaries. He travelled to Syria twice, to the Jazīra, to Fārs, to Kirmān, to al-Maṣṣīṣa and Antioch, and to Egypt, collecting the responsa from about a hundred of Aḥmad's students. Al-Dhahabī's verdict is the best single sentence on the whole question of what a school founder founds: 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."
How it reaches us
From al-Khallāl's own students, chiefly Ghulām al-Khallāl.
Does it survive
Only parts. The size reports are irreconcilable — Ibn al-Jawzī says about two hundred parts, others twenty volumes, Ibn Taymiyya about forty fascicles of which many were never incorporated. Surviving sections circulate as separate books: Aḥkām Ahl al-Milal, al-Wuqūf wa'l-Tarajjul, Kitāb al-Wuqūf, Aḥkām al-Nisāʾ, Kitāb al-Sunna. A warning for any bibliography: the 22-volume al-Jāmiʿ li-ʿUlūm al-Imām Aḥmad published at al-Fayyūm in 2009 is not al-Khallāl's book — it is a modern compilation assembling Aḥmad's transmitted material from across the sources.
Used for
Sezgin's description is the one to keep: "it is the Musnad of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal's masāʾil" — a documented, chain-bearing corpus of legal responsa, the exact analogue in law of what the Musnad is in hadith.
Sources — al-Dhahabī, Siyar 14/297 · al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād · Bakr Abū Zayd, al-Madkhal al-Mufaṣṣal i. 500–501 · Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography, 111

Kitāb al-Tafsīr

كتاب التفسير

A Qurʾān commentary of a hundred and twenty thousand reports, which may never have existed.

Attribution disputedAḥmad ibn ḤanbalTafsīr
Whose book
Listed by Ibn al-Nadīm and repeated by Ibn al-Jawzī. The figure comes from Ibn al-Munādī, describing what ʿAbd Allāh heard from his father: "and the Tafsīr, and it is one hundred and twenty thousand, of which he heard eighty thousand and the rest by finding it written." Al-Dhahabī denied it ever existed, arguing that if it had, it would have left traces in the literature — and Melchert endorses the denial, suggesting that tenth-century Ḥanbalīs may have ascribed a commentary to their exemplar out of "anxiety not to be outdone by al-Ṭabarī."
How it reaches us
Claimed through ʿAbd Allāh; a later Ḥanbalī exegete reports having a licence from him for it.
Does it survive
No copy known.
Used for
The defensible middle position: Aḥmad certainly gave exegetical opinions, scattered through the masāʾil, the Musnad and al-Khallāl. Whether they were ever gathered into a book is disputed, and the form of Ibn al-Munādī's own testimony — most of it found written rather than heard — suggests a mass of transmitted material rather than an authored commentary.
Sources — Ibn al-Munādī, in Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila ii. 11 · al-Dhahabī, Siyar 13:522 · Melchert, "Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and the Qurʾān", Journal of Qurʾanic Studies (2004), 24

The titles that are only titles

كتب مفقودة

Books his son heard read aloud, and nobody has seen since.

Known only as a titleAḥmad ibn ḤanbalVarious
Whose book
The single most informative passage on Aḥmad's lost library is Ibn al-Munādī's, describing what ʿAbd Allāh heard: the Musnad, the Tafsīr, al-Nāsikh wa'l-Mansūkh, al-Taʾrīkh, Ḥadīth Shuʿba, al-Muqaddam wa'l-Muʾakhkhar fī Kitāb Allāh, Jawābāt al-Qurʾān, and al-Manāsik in a longer and a shorter version, "and other compositions besides." Ibn al-Nadīm adds al-Farāʾiḍ, al-Īmān and Ṭāʿat al-Rasūl; Ṣāliḥ independently confirms hearing the last from his father, along with al-Asāmī wa'l-Kunā.
How it reaches us
All through his sons and household.
Does it survive
None of them survives as a book. Al-Dhahabī reportedly saw a single leaf of al-Farāʾiḍ. Kitāb al-Īmān survives, if at all, only inside al-Khallāl's Jāmiʿ, for which British Museum manuscripts are recorded.
Used for
Listed so that the shape of what was lost is visible. Two modern misattributions to correct while here: Kitāb al-Zuhd wa'l-Raqāʾiq is Ibn al-Mubārak's, and al-Muqniʿ is Ibn Qudāma's.
Sources — Ibn al-Munādī, in Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila ii. 11 · Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, tr. Dodge, 553 · Ṣāliḥ b. Aḥmad, Masāʾil, muqaddima i. 51–52
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