Hanafica

The phrase وَعَلَيْهِ الْفَتْوَى Transliteration: wa ʿalayhi l-fatwā Literal meaning: “And upon it is the fatwā.”

Every legal tradition develops its own technical shorthand — formulas that signal to the reader which opinion is strongest, which is safer, which is easier, and which must be followed in fatwā and practice. In the Ḥanafī madhhab, these expressions became a sophisticated vocabulary through which generations of jurists negotiated the vast corpus of transmitted opinions. Phrases such as wa ʿalayhi l-fatwā (“and upon it is the fatwā”), wa huwa ṣ-ṣaḥīḥ (“and this is the correct opinion”), or wa bihi jarā l-ʿurf (“and this is what custom has proceeded upon”) are more than stylistic notes. They are signals of authority, preference, and methodology. They tell us how jurists weighed evidence, custom, precaution, ease, and scholarly consensus in order to determine the mufta bihi — the ruling to be acted upon. This series of 25 posts explores these key formulas one by one. For each, we will provide: the Arabic phrase, its correct transliteration, literal translation, and its t...

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...