Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Douglas Bullis, “The Longest Hajj: 

The Journeys of Ibn Battuta.” Saudi Aramco World 51 

(July/August 2000): 7–39; Ross Dunn, The Adventures of 

Ibn Battuta (1986. Reprint, Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 2004); Hamilton A. R. Gibb, The Travels 

of Ibn Battuta 1325–1354. 5 vols. (Cambridge: Hakluyt 

Society at the University Press, 1954–2000).

Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad

 

(780–855)  leading 

Sunni hadith scholar and theologian remembered as 

the founder of the Hanbali legal school; a popular 

defender of traditional Islamic piety against Muslim 

rationalists and the Abbasid Caliphate

Ahmad ibn Hanbal was born in Abbasid b

aghdad

and lived there most of his life. His family’s ances-

tors had participated in the Arab conquests of Iraq 

and northeastern Iran, where his grandfather had 

served as a governor and his father as a soldier. 

He studied Arabic and Islamic law (

fiqh

), but 

his real passion was for the 

hadith

. Beginning in 

795, when he was 14 years old, Ibn Hanbal went 

to study hadith with scholars in Kufa and Basra 

(leading Iraqi centers of learning). He also stud-

ied in y

emen

, s

yria

, m

edina

, and m

ecca

. A pious 

man, he had made the 

haJJ

 to Mecca five times 

before he turned 33, and he performed several 

religious retreats in Medina. Because of his exper-

tise in the area of hadith studies, he was one of the 

leading People of Hadith, a group of traditional-

ist religious scholars who opposed the People of 

Opinion (ray), religious scholars who preferred 

individually reasoned legal thinking over strict 

adherence to precedents expressed in the hadith.

Ibn Hanbal’s most celebrated work was the 

Musnad, a multivolume collection of an estimated 

27,000 hadith that has been ranked among the six 

most authoritative Sunni books of hadith. Unlike 

other hadith collections, which were organized 

by subject, the Musnad was organized according 

to the names of the earliest known transmitters 

of each hadith. It began with hadith attributed to 

the first four caliphs (a

bU

  b

akr

, U

mar

, U

thman

, 

and  a

li

), then other leading c

ompanions

 

oF

 

the

p

rophet

, the a

nsar

, Meccans, Medinans, people 

of Kufa and Basra, Syrians, and female authori-

K  330