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The official rite of the
Ottoman Empire was the Hanafi rite. Abu Hanifah was the founder of
the Hanafite school in
d. 767. It is considered to be one of the more liberal schools, when
compared to the
fundamentalists. This school was dominant among Turkic peoples in
Central Asia, Turkey,
and countries as Egypt and India.
Iman Abu Hanifah was
born in the city of Kufa ( modern day Iraq) in the year 80 A.H (689
A.D). His family was of
Persian origin and they descended from the noble Prophets.
Iman Abu Hanifah
accepted the Qur’an but he didn’t have much interest in the Hadith,
the
tradition. He didn’t
think we had to take the tradition too seriously and taught that the
Qur;an
could be extended
through analogy and opinion. According to Abu Hanifef if the Qur’an
doesn’t establish an
exact precedent we can rely on analogy or opinion. He thought that
our
opinions can vary with
the local circumstances. In fact, he says if the ruling on opinion
"seems better" for the
locality, then we should rely on it even if it goes counter to the
Qur'an.
This position is viewed
as the most liberal tradition of the Sunna sect.
The Hanafi school
derived from the bulk of the ancient school of Kufa and absorbed the
ancient school of Basra.
Abu Hanifah belonged to the period of the successors (tabiin) of
the Sahabah (the
Prophet’s companions). It was originated in Iraq and it was favoured
by
the first’s Abasid
caliphs in spite of the school’s opposition to the power of the
caliphs.
Under the Ottomans,the
judgement-seats were occupied by Hanafites sent from Istambul..
The Hanafi madhhab
became the only authoritative code of law in the public life and
official
administration of
justice in all the provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The Hanafite school is
distinguished from the other schools through its placing less
reliance
on mass oral traditions
as a source of legal knowledge.
It developed the
exegesis of the Qur'an through a method of analogical reasoning
known
as Qiyas (see Sunni
Islam). It also established the principle that the universal
concurrence
of the Ummah (community)
of Islam on a point of law, as represented by legal and religious
scholars, constituted
evidence of the will of God. This process is called ijma', which
means
the consensus of the
scholars. Thus, the school definitively established the Qur'an, the
Traditions of the
Prophet, ijma' and qiyas as the basis of Islamic law. In addition to
these,
Hanafi accepted local
customs as a secondary source of the law.
The Hanafi school of
jurisprudence has no distinctive symbol system.
There are no official
figures for the number of followers of the Hanafi school of law. It
is
followed by the vast
majority of people in the Muslim world. The school has no
headquarters as such. It
is followed by the majority of the Muslim population Of Turkey,
Albania, the Balkans,
Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, India and Iraq.
Even today the Hanafi
code prevails in the former Ottoman countries. It is also dominant
in Central Asia and
India |
