Skip to main content

Reconnecting: The purpose and mission of Hanafica

Hanafica Project • Research Journal

The Mission Behind Hanafica

Reconstructing the intellectual history of the Hanafi school of law.

Hello again.

It has been three months since my first post, and I am pleased to share the next chapter of the Hanafica Project. Today I would like to explain the purpose of this undertaking and the questions that guide my research.

Research Focus

The Hanafica Project seeks to reconstruct how the Hanafi school evolved, adapted and influenced legal thought across different regions and historical periods.

Key Objectives

① Documenting the evolution of Hanafi law
Tracing the school from Abu Hanifa to contemporary interpretations.
② Analysing jurists and texts
Studying both celebrated and overlooked scholars.
③ Regional development
Following the tradition across Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire and South Asia.
④ Political context
Examining interactions with Abbasid, Ottoman and colonial institutions.
⑤ Reference resource
Creating a comprehensive collection of biographies, texts and thematic studies.

Research Framework

Origins
Abu Hanifa		 Texts
Manuals & Commentaries		 Jurists
Networks		 Regions
Transmission		 Institutions
Courts & States

The ambition of Hanafica is not simply to catalogue books and scholars, but to understand how a legal tradition develops into an enduring intellectual civilisation.

It is an ambitious project and I am building it one step at a time. Thank you for following this journey. I look forward to sharing new discoveries in the months ahead.

Cheers,
Aybek
Labels:

Popular posts

Hanafi Legal Identity Within the Naqshbandiyya: Doctrinal, Historical, and Sociological Dimensions

The Naqshbandiyya, one of the most influential Sufi traditions of the pre-modern and modern Islamic world, is deeply intertwined with the Hanafi school of law. This relationship is neither incidental nor merely geographic. Rather, the Naqshbandi path evolved within a Hanafi juridical environment, absorbed its epistemic sensibilities, and relied on Hanafi scholars as transmitters, guardians, and interpreters of the tradition. Drawing on textual fragments, historical patterns, and the broader secondary literature, this report examines the doctrinal compatibility and social co-evolution of the Naqshbandiyya and the Hanafi madhhab. I. Doctrinal Compatibility 1. Primacy of Shari‘a over Sufi ecstatic practice The Naqshbandiyya is widely distinguished by its commitment to shari‘a observance and its avoidance of ecstatic or antinomian behaviors. This aligns closely with the Hanafi legal ethos, which privileges: • sobriety (sahw), • rational adjudication, • avoidance of performative piety, • pr...
Read more

A progress note on method, memory and the architecture of Hanafica

The Hanafica Project has now moved beyond the stage of isolated reflections. It is beginning to take the shape of a structured research infrastructure: a digital intellectual map of the Hanafi school of law, its scholars, texts, doctrines, regions and manuscript traditions.  The central ambition is simple, but demanding: to restore the Hanafi tradition not merely as a sequence of famous jurists and canonical books, but as a living legal civilisation. It was formed through teachers and students, courts and markets, cities and empires, manuscripts and commentaries, juristic disagreement and regional adaptation.
Read more

Bibliographia Hanafica: Reconstructing the Intellectual History of the Hanafi School

When we speak of the Hanafi madhhab, we often think of it simply as “the largest school of Islamic law.” But behind this label lies a vast intellectual history: thousands of scholars, tens of thousands of texts, manuscripts scattered across libraries from Istanbul to Delhi, Cairo to St. Petersburg, and networks of teaching and debate stretching across more than a millennium. And yet, despite the richness of this tradition, we still do not have a comprehensive bibliographical map of the Hanafi school. We have fragments: Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur , some regional studies, individual catalogues. But what is missing is a systematic, modern, and global attempt to bring it all together. That is what I am trying to build: Bibliographia Hanafica . What is Bibliographia Hanafica ? At its heart, it is both simple and ambitious: A reference work that lists Hanafi scholars , their works , and the genres they contributed to. Organized chronologically, geographic...
Read more