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.
Hanafica is not intended to be another static bibliography. Its purpose is to make visible the hidden structure of the Hanafi world: who transmitted what, where, through which texts, under which political conditions, and with what doctrinal consequences.
What Has Been Achieved So Far
The conceptual architecture of the project is now largely in place. The major research modules have been defined: chronology, bibliography, jurisprudence, regional diffusion, manuscript transmission and intellectual networks. This gives the project a clear internal grammar.
A preliminary historiographical series has also begun. It has examined modern scholars of Islamic legal history such as Joseph Schacht, Yakov Meron, Ignaz Goldziher, Nurit Tsafrir and others. This matters because Hanafica cannot be built only from medieval texts. It must also understand how modern scholarship has shaped, distorted, corrected and reimagined the history of Islamic law.
A visual identity has also emerged: blackboard lectures, Oxford-style research notes, manuscript-inspired diagrams and clean analytical layouts. This is not decoration. It is part of the method. A project about legal memory needs a visual language capable of showing chains, regions, ruptures and continuities.
The Main Research Gap
The next challenge is integration. At present, Hanafica has many strong components: biographies, themes, visual concepts, research hypotheses and historiographical essays. What it now needs is a master structure that can connect them into one working system.
The most urgent task is therefore the creation of a master knowledge graph. This graph should connect scholars, teachers, students, books, manuscripts, legal doctrines, regions and historical periods. Once this is in place, every new post, article or bibliographical note will no longer stand alone. It will become part of a cumulative scholarly map.
Immediate Priorities
- build a chronological database of Hanafi jurists;
- classify early Hanafi works as extant, lost or partially preserved;
- map the teacher-student chains from Kufa to Transoxiana;
- create a manuscript register with library, catalogue and shelfmark data;
- develop a regional map of Hanafi expansion across Iraq, Khurasan, Central Asia, India and the Ottoman world.
Today’s Deliverables
The most useful work for today is not to produce another isolated essay, but to create the foundations of the system. The first deliverable should be a basic schema for the Hanafica Master Knowledge Graph. It should define the core entities: person, text, place, doctrine, manuscript, school, period and source.
The second deliverable should be a pilot list of one hundred Hanafi scholars, beginning with Abu Hanifa, Abu Yusuf, Muhammad al-Shaybani and Zufar, then moving through the early Iraqi, Khurasani and Transoxanian layers of the tradition.
The third deliverable should be a preliminary catalogue of early Hanafi works, clearly distinguishing between works that survive, works known only through later citations, and works whose attribution remains uncertain.
Strategic Conclusion
Hanafica has reached a serious turning point. Its future value will not depend on the number of posts produced, but on whether those posts can be absorbed into a durable research architecture. The task is to move from content to infrastructure.
If successful, Hanafica can become more than a personal research project. It can become a digital archive, a teaching tool and a replicable model for studying Islamic legal schools through the methods of digital humanities.
Hanafica
Mapping the Hanafi legal tradition across texts, scholars, regions and time.