Imām Aḥmad

The last of the four great jurists was Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, who was born in Baghdād in 164 A.H. and died there in 241. He too made a very extensive study of Ḥadīth, his famous work on the subject — the Musnad of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal — containing nearly thirty thousand ḥadīth. This monumental compilation, prepared by his son ‘Abd Allāh, was based on the material collected by the Imām himself. In the Musnad, however, as already remarked, ḥadīth are not arranged according to subject-matter but according to names of the Companions to whom they are ultimately traced. Though the Musnad of Aḥmad contains a large number of ḥadīth, it does not apply those strict rules of criticism favoured by men like Bukhārī and Muslim. It was indeed only an arrangement according to subject-matter that made a criticism of Ḥadīth possible, and the Musnads, in which reports relating to the same matter were scattered throughout the book, could not devote much attention to the subject matter, and were not even sufficiently strict in scrutinizing the line of transmission. Accordingly, the Musnad of Aḥmad cannot claim the same reliability as regards its material as can the collections of the other famous collectors. From the very nature of his exertions, it is evident that Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal made very little use of reasoning, and as he depended almost entirely on Ḥadīth, the result was that he admitted even the weakest report. It would thus appear that from the system of Abū Ḥanīfah, who applied reasoning very freely and sought to deduce all questions from the Holy Qur’ān by the help of reason, the system of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal is distinguished by the fact that it makes the least possible use of reason, and thus there was a marked falling off in the last of the four great jurists from the high ideals of the first, so far as the application of reason to matters of religion is concerned. Even the system of Abū Ḥanīfah himself deteriorated on account of the later jurists of that school not developing the master’s high ideal, with the consequence that the world of Islām gradually gave up reasoning or exercise of judgment (Ijtihād) and stagnation reigned in the place of healthy development.