Abu Hanifa: The Great Imam

The biography of Abu Hanifa an-Nu'man ibn Thabit al-Kufi in Al-Jawahir al-Mudiyyah is among the most important sections of the work. Abu Hanifa is universally known as Al-Imam al-A'zam — the Greatest Imam — in the Hanafi tradition, and his biography documents the life of one of the most influential scholars in Islamic history.

Abu Hanifa was born in Kufa around 80 AH (699 CE) to a family of Persian origin whose grandfather had converted to Islam. He grew up in Kufa, the great intellectual center of early Islamic Iraq, and received his education there. His primary teacher in jurisprudence was Hammad ibn Abi Sulayman, himself a student of Ibrahim an-Nakha'i, which connected Abu Hanifa to the Kufan legal tradition that traced back to Abdullah ibn Masud, one of the most important companions as a transmitter of prophetic teaching in Iraq.

Abu Hanifa was primarily a merchant for much of his life — a detail that al-Qurashi preserves — which shaped his practical understanding of commercial transactions and made his legal work particularly sensitive to the needs of the mercantile classes. His legal opinions on commercial matters were among the most developed in the early Islamic tradition and reflected an awareness of economic realities that more exclusively scholarly backgrounds sometimes lacked.

His relationship to hadith has been much debated. Critics in the hadith-based schools sometimes charged that Abu Hanifa gave insufficient weight to hadith and relied too much on rational analogy (qiyas). Defenders, documented in Al-Jawahir al-Mudiyyah, responded that Abu Hanifa was highly selective in accepting hadiths — requiring high standards of reliability — rather than being dismissive of hadith as such. Al-Qurashi preserves the tradition of defending Abu Hanifa against these criticisms as part of the school's ongoing self-presentation.

Abu Hanifa's refusal to accept the position of qadi (judge) under the Abbasids, which led to his imprisonment and reportedly contributed to his death in 150 AH, is documented by al-Qurashi as evidence of his moral courage and his refusal to compromise his scholarly integrity for political advantage.