Praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, and peace and blessings be upon our master Muhammad

Abu Hanifa and hypothetical 
fiqh
 
 
 
By hypothetical 
fiqh
we mean the giving of 
fatwas
about situations which have not actually occurred but 
are only imagined. The people of analogy and opinion did this a lot. In the course of deducing the reasons 
behind rulings established by the Book and 
Sunna
, they had to theorise situations in order to ascertain the 
causes for the rulings and apply them. Abu Hanifa frequently used this method since he used analogy a great 
deal and derived the causes from the texts and their contexts. Some claim that he devised 60,000 such 
hypotheses, others 30,000. The last number is more likely. 
The History of Baghdad
reports that when Qatada came to Kufa, Abu Hanifa went to him and asked him, 
“Abu’l-Khattab, what do you say about a man who is absent from his family for years so that his wife thinks 
that he has died and remarries but then the first husband returns: what do you say about her dowry?” He had 
told his companions who had gathered, “If he relates a 
hadith
he will be lying. If he speaks by his own 
opinion he will err.” Qatada exclaimed, “Bother you! Has this occurred?” “No,” he replied. He said, “Why do 
you ask me about something that has not happened?” Abu Hanifa replied, “We prepare for affliction before it 
occurs. When it occurs, we will know what to do it and how to get out of it.” (pt. 12, p. 348) 
Abu Hanifa’s leaning toward hypothesis and theorising was due to his profound grasp of the texts and his 
acting according to the consequences of the meaning and applying the ruling to all situations with similar root 
causes. Al-Hajawi claims that Abu Hanifa is the one who originated hypothetical 
fiqh
. He said, “
Fiqh
in the 
time of the Prophet was confined to explicit rulings about what had actually occurred. After him, the 
Companions and great and minor 
Tabi‘un
used to clarify the rulings regarding what occurred in their time 
while preserving the rulings for what had occurred before them and thus 
fiqh
increased in its branches. Abu 
Hanifa is the one who unleashed theoretical questions, hypothesising situations that might occur and what 
their rulings would be, either by analogy based on what had occurred or by extracting general principles. So 
fiqh
developed and grew.” (
al-Fikr as-Sami
, pt. 2, p. 107) 

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In fact, Abu Hanifa did not originate this method but he promoted and expanded it and added more 
branches and different forms of deduction. It originated before him from the circles of the 
fuqaha’
of opinion. 
Fuqaha’
after him continued to do the same although there was disagreement about its permissibility.