Ahmad ibn Hanbal

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (; November 780 – 2 August 855) was Muslim jurist, traditionist and theologian. The last of the Four Sunni Imams, he lent his name to the Hanbali school of law. During his lifetime he was arguably the most active and influential scholar of the age, and posterity has cemented him as "one of the most venerated" intellectual authorities in Islamic history, whose "profound influence" reverberated across virtually every sphere of Sunni thought. Noted for his extensive memorization of hadith – reputedly numbering in excess of one million – he compiled his ''Musnad'', the most expansive hadith corpus of its time, which not only shaped the later canonical compilations of al-Bukhari and Muslim but also exerted enduring authority over the discipline of hadith studies into the present.

Trained in law and hadith from an early age under numerous authorities, Ibn Hanbal assumed a pivotal role during the Mihna under Caliph al-Ma'mun, where he resolutely resisted the state-imposed Mu'tazili doctrine of the Quran's createdness. His steadfast refusal to acquiesce, despite imprisonment and corporal punishment, coupled with his life of ascetic austerity, secured his indelible reputation in the annals of Sunni history as a renewer of religion, revered alike by the erudite scholars of jurisprudence and the ascetic mystics of Sufism as a saintly exemplar of piety and integrity.

Modern scholarship debates his intellectual legacy, particularly in relation to the emergence of Wahhabism, the 18th-century reformist movement that invoked Ibn Hanbal – alongside later Hanbali thinker Ibn Taymiyya – as a precursor. Some researchers argue that his doctrinal outlook played "no real part in the establishment of the central doctrines of Wahhabism", pointing to the medieval Hanbali tradition's extensive affirmations of sainthood, grave visitation, miracles and relics. Others nevertheless regard him as a "distant progenitor" of Wahhabism and a profound inspiration for the broader conservative reform current of Salafism. Nonetheless, his influence in Sunni jurisprudence, hadith scholarship and the wider Islamic intellectual tradition remains incontrovertible. Provided by Wikipedia