Virtues of the Imam Ahmad ibn Ḥanbal: Volume One

Introduction

xi Introduction Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, who died in the 241st year of the Muslim calendar, 855 according to the Christian one, is probably one of the most famous Muslims in history. Thanks to him, many came to believe that the only right religion was the one practiced at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. To keep their community together in this world and gain salvation in the next, Muslims needed to live as the Prophet and his Companions had lived: to eat what they ate, wear what they wore, buy and sell only as they had done. “Is there anything I’m doing wrong?” one of Ibn Ḥanbal's wives asked him a few days after they were married. “No,” he answered, “except that those sandals you’re wearing didn’t exist at the time of the Prophet” (62.7). To live as the first Muslims had lived, it was necessary to know as much as possible about them. Reports of their words and deeds were repeated by one believer to another, along with the names of those who had passed these reports on. By Ibn Ḥanbal's time, a proper report—called a Hadith—was expected to include a list of names beginning with the speaker’s source and ending with the person who had seen the Prophet or a Companion doing or saying whatever it was that one wished to know. After Ibn Ḥanbal was arrested during the Abbasid Inquisition, a well-wisher counseled him by citing the following Hadith: We heard al-Layth ibn Saʿd report, citing Muḥammad ibn ʿAjlān, citing Abū l-Zannād, citing al-Aʿraj, citing Abū Hurayrah, that the Prophet, God bless and keep him, said: “If any ask you to disobey God, heed him not” (68.4). What if a seeker could find no Hadith report about a particular question? In that case he might apply his own reasoning to the problem. Yet the scope for undisciplined individual effort was small and growing smaller. In Ibn Ḥanbal's time, most Muslims no longer believed that they could simply judge as they thought best. For many, it was necessary to take into consideration all related Qurʾanic verses and Hadith reports, and then—using an increasingly complex system of legal reasoning—come up with a rule that seemed best to approximate God’s will. Yet Ibn Ḥanbal himself could not accept this approach. For one thing, the solution was to learn more Hadith reports, in the hope that one or another report would supply the information one needed. In practice, this solution placed great xii Introduction demands on the learner. The people who happened to know a particular report might be living anywhere in the lands settled by Muslims, and it was necessary to seek them out. On his return from a Hadith-gathering mission to the town of Kufa, Ibn Ḥanbal was accosted by a friend who reproached him for overdoing it: “Today it’s Kufa; tomorrow it’ll be Basra again! How much longer can you keep this up? You’ve already copied thirty thousand reports! Isn’t that enough?” [Aḥmad] said nothing. “What if you reach sixty thousand?” He was still silent. “A hundred thousand?” “At that point,” he replied, “a man might claim to know something” (4.20). Another problem was keeping track of what one was learning. Premodern societies are often described as oral cultures, and premodern people as having extraordinary abilities to memorize vast amounts of material, but not everyone found rote learning easy. Ibn Ḥanbal’s older contemporary al-Shāfiʿī reportedly ingested frankincense to strengthen his memory, to the point that he suffered internal bleeding.1 Ibn Ḥanbal himself insisted that one write down the Hadiths one learned (13.9). He is described as carrying his notes—organized by topic— into the mosque to teach (26.2) and rummaging through piles of papers to find the report he wanted (26.1). Even if one learned many Hadith reports, one's task had only begun. Simply knowing many reports was not enough: it was also necessary to live in accordance with the teachings they contained. For Ibn Ḥanbal, this meant denying oneself the luxuries the Prophet scorned, or had never seen, including chairs and silver vessels (53.3). It was, furthermore, necessary to avoid objects and activities that might have been acceptable in themselves but which were tainted by association with something forbidden or merely suspicious. For example, Ibn...