Hanbalis

The adherents of one of the four schools of Islamic law (Arab. madhahib, sing. madhhab), who played an important role in propagating opposition to Frankish rule in the Levant. Hanbali scholars served this cause while acting as propagandists of jihad (holy war) in the courts of local rulers, as popular preachers (some of whom joined the army on military campaigns), as authors of religious treatises of various genres, as emissaries to the caliphal court in Baghdad, and, in one case, as a leader of an emigration of villagers from Frankish Outremer to Muslim-ruled territory.

The Hanbali school struck roots in Syria and Palestine in the eleventh century with the establishment of Hanbali communities in Damascus, Jerusalem, Harran, Baalbek, and Mt. Nablus. It is considered to have been founded by the Baghdadi Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), who preached a strict reading of the letter of the law, literal interpretation of theological maxims in the Qur’an, rigid mores, an ascetic lifestyle, and material independence from rulers. Ibn Hanbal’s followers, especially between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, clashed with Shi‘ites, with adherents of schools of speculative theology (the Mu‘tazila and Ash‘ariyya), and with any individual or group they considered heretic or corrupt. Hanbalis stood in the forefront of the political-religious movement of Sunni restoration, initiated in the court of the ‘Abbasid caliph in face of the Shi‘ite-Buyid occupation of Baghdad in the eleventh century, which was taken up by the Zangid and Ayyubid rulers of Syria in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

-Daniella Talmon-Heller

Bibliography

Cook, Michael, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Drory, Joseph, “Hanbalis of the Nablus Region in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Asian and African Studies 22 (1988), 93-112.

Leder, Stephan, “Charismatic Scripturalism: The Hanbali Maqdisis of Damascus,” Der Islam 74 (1997), 279-304. Talmon-Heller, Daniella, “The Shaykh and the Community: Popular Hanbalite Islam in 12th-13th century Jabal Nablus and Jabal Qasyun,” Studia Islamica 79 (1994), 103-120.