INTRODUCTION

The ḥanafīs were the oldest of the Sunnī law-schools. But unlike the ḥanbalites, they were slow in developing a distinct theological identity. Abū ḥanīfa (d. 150/767f.) had held views on theological questions, or at least such views were later ascribed to him; a tradition going back to these views was established among the ḥanafīs of Samarqand, and eventually became known as Māturīdism. By the fifth/eleventh century this tradition was predominant in Transoxania, whence it spread to the Turks. Yet prior to this development, and for a while thereafter, ḥanafīs subscribed to a variety of theological persuasions. There were ḥanafī Mu'tazilites and ḥanafī traditionalists, together with a second peculiarly ḥanafī school, the Najjāriyya; we even encounter a ḥanafī Ash'arite. But the brute force of history, in the shape of the Turkish invasion of the fifth/eleventh century and the subsequent domination of the Turks, was to sweep away this diversity, and establish Māturīdism as the theological face of ḥanafism.

Our knowledge of ḥanafī views of forbidding wrong is accordingly dominated by the Māturīdite heritage, and it is on the material preserved there that most of this chapter is inevitably based. We are not wholly ignorant of the ḥanafīMu'tazilites, since some of their literature survived both within and outside the ḥanafī mainstream; one work stemming from this milieu will be considered at the end of this chapter.