Ahmad bin Hanbal – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

m so we're once again embarked on one of these stories about men and women who represent in what turns out to be a huge kaleidoscope of different ways represents the principle of leadership we began with the fairly obvious observation that in islam leadership is not something that we seek because the ego tends to be attached to it but that nonetheless people may accept when it is thrust upon them if it is used for the benefit of mankind and the spreading of the deen uh what i want the individual that i want to talk about this evening uh is one of the great four imams of uh the phil according to the ahle sunnah well and this is imam ahmad bin hanbal we need to preface our remarks with the reflection that even though nowadays it's second nature to us as muslims to assume that yes there are four imams just as there are four akhtar and four seems to be a particular number four of the great russell and so forth four of the perfect women but nonetheless the emergence of islamic law was a much less methodical principle and process that that tidy number might suggest the great catastrophe in the history of the ummah happens of course in the year 632 when the holy prophet dies unexpectedly he returns to his lord passes on to al-rafiq leaving the community in consternation confusion suddenly the principle that had been amongst them resolving their disputes providing them with blessing and holiness speaking to them of the meaning of life and what is before life what is afterlife the oracle of everything that they needed to know about this world and the next suddenly was no longer there but continuity was essential if the individual muslim souls and the conveyance of the da'wah and the great ammar the politics of the early community its unity against the polytheistic tribal jahili rivals was to be preserved in a sense all of the great ulama of islam all of the great leaders of islam are great insofar as they recognize that what they are doing is attempting to mitigate that initial catastrophe the great disaster of al-wafir nabawiyah the prophetic death which left some of the sahaba unable to speak unable to walk they were suddenly and calamitously bereaved but the ummah had to continue and the four khalafa were the ones who held the torch and provided the context for the spiritual continuity and the continuity and the political stability and legitimacy of the umma to ride those storms and they were very grave storms in order that the message would not be lost subsequently we find all of these great leaders men and women saints scholars sufis intellectuals quran experts mujahideen princes their greatness in the sight of allah is measured entirely in terms of their success in reducing and mitigating that catastrophe the prophetic demise and in conserving not just in the forms of people's lives but in the hearts of the ummah the principle of the sunnah there was ever for you in allah's messenger an excellent example the ego based chest thumping of abu lahab and abu jahl nor the mindless pride of the ignorant imperial rulers of the time nor the wild vengeance-based code of the bedouin arabs but something completely different and completely new something in line with the fitra and hence something in which human beings found peace so this life and this peace which he brought to the ummah is what the leader of the ummah always seeks to maintain not doing it for his own self but for allah and it is said that unlike in the modern academy where the purpose of the teacher if it's not just to serve the economy but is to serve the student that in the islamic vision the function of a scholar is not to serve the student but to serve truth and with the students the teacher preserves the knowledge that has been conserved from the age of prophecy that is what we serve we serve truth and it is the privilege of the bearers of truth to be a link in that chain and safely to take it through the storms of our generation and to pass it on unaltered unpolluted uncontaminated to the next generation of believers but the scholar is not the servant of the student the scholar is the servant of truth so these four imams emerge in the context of an ummah that has demonstrated extraordinary intellectual vitality while being restrained in various ways by the need to remain loyal to the prophetic vision to the sunnah and the people of the sunnah are called atlas the people of the sunnah and of the community and so a scholar is a scholar for the sunnah for the truth of the sunnah and for the community and in that sense he is a public figure the four imams represent different ways in which the sahaba radwan allahim heard and understood and conveyed the multifaceted brilliance of the prophetic excellence of he who uh was described as allah verily you are on a mighty trait of character the immensity of the prophetic personality the immensity of the word which he carried the immense size and profundity and complexity of the legacy of hadith the extraordinary transformation which he brought to the depths of people's hearts turning wild men into saints all of that immensity was understood differently by the sahaba who stood humbly around that great mountain and tried to record it as much as they could and so the four math hubs represent not random accumulations of early rulings but rather different visions different fragrances different bandwidths in the spectrum cast by the prophetic refraction and of course even in the time of the four imams it was not clear that there were to be four imams there were others [Music] i guess and others who had madhhabs of their own continuing in this way the fact that amongst the sahaba radhillahu they were madhabs the imam that it is our privilege to speak about this evening is the imam who was reached by a particular possibility amongst the salaf that was intensely concerned to maintain the plainness of the revelation without the possibility of contamination by human deduction and this reflects a necessary argument to what extent can the mind autonomously determine truth values ethics laws to what extent is it something that can only be known safely through revelation the allah knowledge is revelation but they take different views on the extent to which reason can interpret that revelation what if there are difficulties in understanding a hadith what if there are difficulties in reconciling different hadiths that seem to be saying different things what if there are difficulties involved in squaring the reports of the sahaba with what seems to be in the hadith what if there are linguistic arguments there's plenty of ways in which the mind is indispensable the scholar is not some kind of database the scholar is a complete human being with a great processing capacity so al-imam and the hanabila who followed him were amongst those scholars who took the view that one needs to be skeptical about the capacity of reason to work things out unaided and to try and follow the scripture to the extent that one can by looking at its outward plain sense this turned out to be a minority interpretation amongst the ulama as part of the greatness of the atlas that unlike other religions where there was an insistence on following just one interpretation at one point in the christian middle ages there were three different popes fighting each other but in islam the imams don't fight each other but respect each other is regarded as something that is due to the intensity of their sincerity in following the sunnah according to their understanding of the sunnah so imam has not been followed by as many as have followed imam malik but in but nonetheless because of the breadth and wisdom of the sunni tradition his position has always been uncontroversially regarded as a valid one and this is part of the greatness of islam the people of scholarship are people who try to make things broad so there has always been this possibility in islam of following we wouldn't call it a fundamentalism which is a loaded term but rather a uh firm determination to follow the plains sense of scripture irrespective of what ratius a nation might determine another thing that we find with the method of imam ahmad and it's related to this is that he took immense care to maintain not only the arthar the akhbar the hadiths and the sayings of the early muslims but also the spirit of those texts this is not a superficial interpretation of islam and as we'll see as we progress to the story of this great imam he was of all of the four imams the one who is closest to the sufis and the one who loved to keep their company and also of the four imams the one of whom we have most reports preserved of his awareness of the sanctity of anything connected with the holy prophet so when he was buried he insisted that the three hairs from the holy prophet's head which he had conserved for their blessing would be buried with him one on each eye one on his lips and his son uh conserved many very moving accounts of his tremendous reverence for anything that was a relic of the holy prophet so not some kind of superficial latter-day fundamentalist with no idea of holiness but somebody who conserved the hadith because he knew the spiritual greatness of the one who the hadith is describing we have plenty of information about his life we know that he was born in the year 164 that's pretty well known and died in the year 241 we know that his mother was from the town of mal which is in central asia and came to baghdad when she was pregnant with al-imam ahmad and on both sides of his family he is of arab stock unlike say imam abu hanifa who is of persian origin uh from uh the shaibani tribe a tribe well known for their martial virtues and for their high aspiration for their himma [Music] the home of the family was somewhere around what's now but probably a bit south of it so sometimes we heard kuwaitis boasting of the fact that ahmed bin hanbal grew up in kuwait which is not unlikely of course the name and the country were not in existence at the time but that's the kind of region had built the great city of basra the sahaba and the ali were great civilizers builders of cities kufa forstat other places so sometimes imam ahmed is called al-basri because that's the kind of area where he grew up and certainly when he went to basra he would always make sure that he would pray in the mosque of of merzin he was asked about that and he said it's the mosque of my ancestors his father muhammad was a soldier some say an officer so he remembers how he would see his father sometimes wearing kind of military clothes or armor but he never really saw him because his father died young at the age of about 30. but his father manages to leave the family a small property in baghdad which generates an income which covers the family's needs subsequently although as we'll see imam ahmad was one of the imams who have really preferred asceticism and a simple life of of poverty so being an orphan in this way gave him a kind of sense of self-reliance and accustomed him to a life of poverty um and he's similar in this respect to imam sheffery good lineage combined with poverty lead to a certain type of human nobility and this is probably one reason why in later life he was so intensely drawn to the company of the zohar the ascetics and of the sufis moves to baghdad baghdad is really the center of the islamic world the greatest city in the world at the time um every tendency of course is present uh every possible sect and denomination every possible religion is there it's a kind of microcosm of the of of the planet uh he engages in the usual traditional studies so he memorizes the holy quran he is a master of the arabic language and would spend a certain amount of time in the kind of royal bureaucratic offices the diwan the scriptorium one of his tasks quite often there was to read soldiers letters to their wives and write down their replies these for soldiers who are not able to read and write and one of the things we find in the lives of all of the four imams is that they were very connected to the reality of ordinary people's lives these are not ivory tower academics these are people who are really determined to understand the reality of the people for whom they're giving fatwas one of the senior scribes said we're told in if this young man lives long enough he will be a proof for the whole people of of his age it was clear that there was a tremendous future in wait for him so many things could be studied in baghdad from astronomy to mathematics to inheritance law to royal administration uh irrigation but he chose dean and in deen of course there were different tracks there was the track of and also the track of hadith you could say those are the two main subdivisions and iraq of course already contained the madhhab of abu yusuf and shaibani the two great inheritors of abu hanifa and it's said sometimes that his first teacher was abu yousef but soon he switches and prefers hadith and he becomes known particularly as a great scholar and uh assessor and compiler of hadith sometimes people say he's just a mohadis and doesn't know firk but that's wrong we have plenty of accounts from his contemporaries indicating that uh he did study fake his pupil al-halal for instance said he studied he didn't give it much attention but but he knew it until the year 186 he continues writing the hadiths that are available in the hadith circles of baghdad then he goes to basra to learn more hadiths there and in the following year he goes to the hijas and then to yemen and all of this is the traditional reclaived hadith the traveling in search of hadith um and then returns to baghdad three more years um and makes further trips to the hajj we're told that he made the hajj five times altogether three times he went walking in the hijaz he meets imam shethei whom he sees in baghdad as well remember these four imams they're kind of even though the generations you know it's a stretch period more than 100 years but still they are part of the same intellectual community and imam shafi'i respected his views absolutely in hadith and would frequently consult him either hadith so he would say to imam ahmad if you think a hadith is sound teach it to me so we have this image of this enthusiast for hadith is lover of hadith and you can only really understand that when you think that hadith is really a difficult discipline based on long islands and the memorization of inconceivable quantities of material and how could a young man be so focused just on that that he through the hadith he saw the chosen one salallahu alaihi wasallam each hadith fills in a piece of the jigsaw and the more of the jigsaw you have you see the face of the mustafa alaihis it's the holy prophet that they're seeking they want to overcome that catastrophe of the prophetic death and to help the ummah as much as possible and to serve the islam to serve the knowledge so this accounts for the extraordinary enthusiasm he wanted to go to some other places to the east he wanted to go to rai but he simply couldn't afford it we're told that on some of his journeys he would sleep on a brick he went to yemen because he needed some hadith from there he couldn't afford any kind of even a donkey and he walked all the way to yemen on the way and while he was there he ran out of money and had to look for work so he was working with some porters people who were just carrying things the historians say he just hired himself out to some porters until he reached sanat so he's just carrying whatever for a few coins just to keep him going uh he did this because it was his principle out of his uh sense of dignity and appropriateness in deen that because he was doing these things for scholarship he didn't want anybody to pay him or subsidized him so even if he was traveling with a group of people and they saw that he was hungry he wouldn't accept any money from them he would go off and find a job of some kind he goes to sanat to get hadith from the great imam abdul razak one of the great early hadith narrators the author of the musa and again abdul razak sees the sky is in rags his thin and the imam wants to help him with some money foreign says to this starving student take this thing and benefit from it because our land is not a land in which people can easily earn or trade and he handed him some coins but ahmad just said i'm fine i'm all right annaber he stays in intense poverty for two years he's hearing hadiths from ibn mussahir from imam and zohari from that line and from imam abdullah and he continues to travel and he is said to have had a box where and he would travel walk these huge distances with a box on his back which had his books in it and people would comment on this and he never stopped studying and taking his books with him even when he became the great imam of baghdad imam ahmad bin hanbal he was asked why he just couldn't stop ever writing down hadith and he said i'm with my ink pot until i go to the hole in the ground the grave it rhymes in arabic he's living in what's called the asra tadween the age in which the writing down of hadith is becoming a huge flourishing activity of the civilization even though he'd memorized his hadiths he would only teach them from a physical text from a book even if he knew something and didn't have the book he would write the hadith down and then teach from that piece of writing this was his style of teaching um he got to meet all kinds of different people especially traveling around in iraq which was this amazingly cosmopolitan place where you could meet people from every possible denomination it said that he spoke farsi quite well um and some of his family were in horus and occasionally would visit him and he could speak to them in in farsi so again a cosmopolitan person not some kind of limited monk um so he's basically just doing this he doesn't hear from imam malik mubarak and some other very early transmitters because they just died too soon and then he's still not teaching he passes the age of 30 35 doesn't teach hadith at the age of 40 his life changes he sits down and he becomes the great muhaddith the great hadith teacher jealous because he was following the quranic verse about maturity so that the age of 40 one reaches one's full maturity and this was from his scrupulousness he knew the enormous amount of the responsibility of teaching the prophetic legacy and he wanted to make sure that he was doing this in his prime at a time of real maturity um so by this time he's finally got his his circle in baghdad he's already famous even when he was just collecting hadiths and hearing isn't ads he had a reputation so when he finally sat down in baghdad to teach huge crowds came it said sometimes 5 000 people would come just to hear some hadiths from him and people would come from from all over and this is said to be one reason why his hadith spread very widely because there's just so many people there to listen to them it's recorded that not everybody attended these sessions just to memorize some hadiths some of them came because of his famous spiritual presence it was a very holy sacred mubarak environment his session so ibn al-jawsi great later historian reports of one in the audience so so somebody who was present said i used to go to imam ahmad bin hanbal regularly for 12 years while he was teaching the musnad to his children but i didn't write down a single hadith i only went because of the guidance that he was given giving the akhlaq that he showed and the adab and just observing the beauty of the man as he taught in this ascetical god-filled way was a spiritual transformation for this person it was his habit to teach the most able students in his house uh but also to give these enormous public lectures in the mosque in baghdad usually after the assault prayer that was his life his sessions were also famous for their their gravitas remember imam malik used to take a russell before sitting to give hadith imam ahmad never in his life was reported to have told anything like a joke in his classes never said anything humorous or witty because he considered his classes to be worship and one should not be light-hearted during a badass it's an intensely intense uh serious environment one of his pupils recalled uh abdullah i've never seen a more precious or unusual gathering than the majority of imam ahmed khan he had tremendous mildness never went too fast was extremely humble was dominated by tranquility and dignity and when in the afternoons after the assad prayer he sat down for his medallists he wouldn't speak until somebody asked him a question he was in this kind of dignified state and people would venture to ask him a question then he would speak so in these sessions we're told that he would do two different things firstly he would be dictating hadith secondly he would be giving fatwas and judgments of various kinds he wouldn't allow anybody to write these down and it said that's because he didn't want to see anything written which contained his own fatwas that was his tradition so everything seems to be going fine for him is this king of the scholars in baghdad this incredibly holy person but then the great catastrophe of his life happens which is what's known in islamic history as the mirna is like an inquisition baghdad despite being the center of the world is also the center of many of the fitness of the world as well as different kinds of shia you have rationalists you have the beginnings of arabic philosophy you have the more tesla uh and this argument between uncle and knuckle reason and the transmitted text of revelation is kind of pulling the city apart and this comes to a head with this event known as the the mirna this begins with the abbasid caliph alma moon and continues with his two immediate successes may not have been a card-carrying member of the mortezalite sect but he certainly was convinced of the idea that somehow allah's book the quran is something new that's that's created this is an idea that had appeared earlier in the umayyad period that's associated with somebody called software effectively a denial of the divine attribute of speech martezalites didn't think that god speaks it's an anthropomorphism and also it suggests that there's been something with god before anything existed and this creates a kind of cluster of entities rather than a single single one god so the mortality said for the sake of tawheed we have to say that the quran comes into being in time and there was a time when it just wasn't around so the mortezalites on this argument and this is one of their more understandable doctrines start to gain in strength in the city of baghdad they infiltrate the entourage of the caliph and matt moore seems to kind of be interested in this this idea uh sometimes abu hashim the great uh mortazalite theologian said that moon would almost stand up when he came in so in the year 212 of the hijra an official californ proclamation goes out saying that the official doctrine is the quran the createdness of the quran this is an official doctrine but at first it's not kind of imposed that comes in two one eight when the scholars obviously are not buying the strange idea and the caliph tries to physically impose it forcibly and gets his soldiers and his entourage and the city police to require the fukuha and the hadith scholars to subscribe to it and those who don't are told that their testimony won't be accepted in courts of law they can't hold any kind of public office like a judgeship so they're kind of cancelled we'd say nowadays everybody's views on this is assembled in a huge book which is sent to matt mourne who looks through it and then orders ultimately that dissidents if they won't change their view should be arrested threatened with execution this is very unusual in islamic history because the caliph doesn't really have the authority to do that for all of the western polemical talk about islam and theocracy the reality is that the ruler doesn't really have much religious authority his name is on the coinage it's recited in the hotbar he can declare jihad he is responsible in some way for the establishment of the hadood but he can't really interfere in or impose a theological or perspective that's god's business as interpreted by the ulama so he's doing something that's rather strange and it's the only example of a major uh doctrinal dispute attempting to be resolved in islamic history through force nowadays all of the regimes are trying to correct the masses akida or whatever but this is not the function of the state historically but seems to have thought it was so the scholars threatened with execution kind of say that they accept this new teaching or they have some way of finessing it so that they can get away with it but some of them refuse and they are arrested beaten up thrown into jail one of these is imam boiti an associate of a chef a a very uh rigorous and beloved scholar who actually dies in prison hamad another hadith expert also dies um is on campaign during this strange period a place called tarous northern syria and claps his hand and says let all of the scholars come to me whether they're free or whether they're in chains so they're going to this kind of council on route the angel of death gets there first and the caliph dies but before he dies he tells his brother martasim to maintain this policy this is probably now more in the hands of his chief wazir ahmed bin abi du'ad who has died in the world convinced mortezalite who tries to impose this thing on the scholars and this idea the quran came into being is created was written and put above all of the doors of the mosques in the empire so that people would have to walk beneath them it's very difficult in islam to use religion or liturgy to impose a doctrine remember at the time of the english reformation in this country uh the chur the state was at liberty to change the form of worship so the apostles creed had to be read in all of the churches under henry viii and elizabeth the first and it was obligatory to go to church so if you didn't accept some of the things in the apostles creed you could be arrested because they could just change their ibadah and islam you can't do that no matter how outrageous the khalifa he can't say please pray now in a different way and insert something so the only way in which the state can really impose a doctrine is by these strange maneuvers of threatening the scholars or putting up big signs in the mosque announcing this new doctrine but they can't they can't really press it into the heart of religion their power is very limited so a mottasim who's a soldier more interested in battles allows this ibn abhidu add this vizier to continue with this policy imam ahmed is in prison in baghdad and they're deciding what to do with him he's asked to repent again the caliph's messenger says just just say something it's embarrassing for the sultan just say something but he refuses and imam ahmed is flogged repeatedly and is in jail for 18 months and he will not shift he won't say anything other than the quran is god's speech god has always had speech so after these 18 months when the masses are really pretty sympathetic to the imam they let him out again and he hasn't changed his position immediately although he's sick and wounded from being flogged for so long he goes to the mosque sits in his mosque but until he's better his wounds have healed he doesn't teach and then when his wounds are just scars which he carries with the rest of his life he begins against teaching hadith in his mosque the new caliph still can't get out of this rut starts this inquisition again but not so violently uh ibn abidu ahad manages to get ibn hanbal kind of under house arrest just waits there until al-wafir dies so there's a period of about five years until 232 when imam ahmed is not teaching finally dies has not changed his position the whole city turns out to welcome imam ahmad as he goes in triumph to the mosque to teach hadith again it's a great moment in the life of the city and you have to remember that those were times when the scholars recognize that they need to be independent of the state even if it meant that they got flogged which is just the way of the uh of the ola map uh they are the representatives of the people uh to the ruler not the other way around in christianity it's the other way around because the bishop crowns the king and the institution of the church is linked to the royal family and together they rule and islam the triangle works differently the ruler is there but the scholars are with the masses and represent the masses to the sultan i was reading just yesterday in the life of muhidin ibn arabi he was once in seville and went to a dinner with his disciples and accepting hospitality muslim culture is a big thing and his host says thank you alan i'd really like you to tell the ruler about a favor that i'd like to be done because something wrong has been done and i'd like him to to sort that out and ibn arabi agrees but doesn't stay for the meal and takes his disciples out why is that because he doesn't want to be beholden to anybody he's going to go to the sultan going to tell him to sort himself out but he's not going to be paid for that that's that's the way that olamide used to be absolute detachment and concern for the masses so we have the imam still not accepting payment so sometimes he would go out into the countryside the sawad around baghdad and ask for permission once the harvest had been brought in to see if he could walk around and find any grains of wheat that had been left behind so he would be be gleaning after the harvest sometimes this great imam would earn a bit of money just by working as a copyist didn't have photocopiers then to get somebody to write things up uh sometimes he worked as a weaver did not accept gifts from caliphs or from governors and he really didn't like it if his students or his colleagues ever accepted gifts particularly from people in political authority the modern idea of the kind of state mufti with his limousine would have been for him the opposite of islam and this of course is one way in which the olimar retain the love of the masses and incentivize the nurses to practice religion they have confidence in their leaders once imam shafer went to him with a message from the ruler saying we would like to appoint you to be akadi a judge in yemen [Music] but imam ahmad refused to do it because the salary was from the ruler and might contain some perhaps the money from the state contained money that had been taken from people unjustly through unlawful taxation or from bribes or all kinds of corrupt sources of income flow into the coffers of the state and this again was one of the ways of particularly these who are engaging with the sufis in the state of warah and and that they don't want anything to come into their bellies that is bought with money that might have come from extortion of any kind so this day in the city of istanbul the sufis love to pray that jummah in the mosque of sultan bayezid maybe not the blue mosque or the other sultan buys it why is that all of the sultans knew that their income came from dubious sources very often sultan bay said when he built his mosque said i'm going to make sure that the money that is used to build my sultanic mosque will absolutely only be from morally correct sources there'll be no expropriation or stuff that i've taken from my enemies or bribes or anything like that only halal money and from that time to this the saliheen of istanbul have liked to pray their jummah in that bayazid mosque and to be imam of the baazid moscow was in there something that is a source of particular pride for the uh for the pure-hearted and i know scholars there who maintain that tradition are still very much very much alive uh so incidentally imam ahmed is not doing it for him but he he doesn't consider it haram to take a state salary this is from his wara he's not going to say there's some ruling in the shariah that proves that you can't be a judge and take money from the local governor that's not there but he's not going to do it himself because of this means scrupulousness so in the city of baghdad this scrupulousness this muhasabha this asceticism this holiness comes really in tandem with his great love for the sufis and i mentioned that more than the other great imams he is particularly concerned to spend time with them in particular he loved maru falcari who was buried in baghdad and is one of the great auliya of baghdad he was originally a christian converted to islam and worker of miracles and really a great a great individual sometimes somebody somebody went to imam ahmad and said this maharov is a convert he doesn't have much became angry and said is true knowledge anything other than what ma roof has achieved hadith and so forth hundred thousand hadith is memorized 200 who knows but real knowledge is the direct knowledge of your creator hadith is something that needs to be done and gives you the fragrance of the chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam but real madrid knowledge of god that's an end in itself not a means to an end um he also loved uh the sufis because of their murabata this was a practice in medieval islam that you would spend some time maybe every year at the front line defending the dara islam from the byzantines in most cases you'll go to ribat a frontier fortress maybe on some frozen hilltop somewhere in asia minor to defend the darul islam and maruful karji was famous for this bishr al-hafi also bishop of the barefoot great saint of baghdad was also known as the great uh mujahid and and murabit uh yeah bishop always useful to remember these people and imam ahmed as well as zealous to keep the company um even though bishar it was a hanafi in his math hub and imam darakotni praises him for the reliability of his hadith narrators he calls him jabal a mountain there's a kind of technical term in describing the the the immensity of the scholars knowledge thicker reliable but mainly known today as one of the great sufis of of baghdad um once bishop met a drunkard on the road who dropped came up to him hugged him said yes oh my master bishop according to the eyewitnesses doesn't push him away you know if drunk came up to me in cambridge and hugged me i was little get away bishop doesn't do that and allows him to hug him and kiss him and lets him finish till he gets fed up and then bishop starts to cry people are watching this weird event his eyes fill with tears and he cries and he says a man here is a man who loves another man because he thinks there's some good in him but perhaps the lover is saved while the one who is loved is unsure about his final destination so he's not embarrassed by the encounter still less does he become all superior about it he's just moved that the man has loved him even though bishop thinks that he himself is not worthy of that love so he's kind of humbled by this man's love we've changed a lot but this is how they were and these are the people imam ahmad loved his zahid we mentioned but of course the marriage is a sunnah so he marries it seems twice his first wife is um who bears him his son saleh she dies under sad circumstances in the marriage another woman an arab woman called reihana she is the mother of the better known abdullah than ahmed bin hanbal she too dies and he says may allah have mercy upon her we lived together for 20 years and we never quarreled once that was it after that he didn't marry again yeah so in his home life he was also this exemplary person he is also in baghdad promoting the correct belief about how you assess other people since the time of the early fitness this has been a divisive issue what about the sahaba who took opposing sides what about the khawarij what about the mortazala who's a believer who's not a believer this has big implications because it means who you can marry inheritance it's a life or death issue his belief is that the sachibal kabira the person of mortal sins is still a believer for the kharijaits they said a person who commits immortal sin is an unbeliever you commit murder or adultery or something you're kafir that's the kharijai position hathan al-basri said such a person can be judged to be among the mortezalites had this strange idea of there being a kind of space between belief and unbelief the manzilla bain al manzilatan person could be called a muslim but not really so he's we call him a muslim but he's still going to hell forever because the more logic was that if you deliberately disobey god in a matter of mortal sin god's going to send you to hell and has to because he's just and in their view his justice means that he has to punish sinners that more tesla like god is very kind of constrained by these abstract ideas of what he can and can't do which is one reason really why the ummah eventually walked away from their position for the four imams a mortal sinner is still a believer and what happens to him in the afterlife is left to allah so imam ahmad ahmed's position it's the position of sunni islam we do not judge anybody to be in heaven or hell because of any action that they do we have hopes for the righteous person we are fearful for the unrighteous person who commits sins but we still hope that allah's mercy will prevail in his case so this is part of the the beauty and the inclusivity of sunni islam that the true believer is naturally repelled by the idea of making tak fear of anyone and the person of weak iman or the heretic or the khariji or the munafak is very quick to say this is wrong this is koffa and that's one of the hallmarks of the traditional scholar um real real reluctance to say uh that anybody is careful how did he do his after all so far our account has apparently been of a hadith scholar but he's the founder of a madhab which is so what's characteristic of his becomes he used to like to begin his fatwas with the word in other words it's going to begin with a hadith he was famous for that if on an issue that he was asked about he couldn't find a hadith he would find if the sahaba ever had an ishmael a unanimous position amongst themselves if they took different views or there wasn't anything evident in their views he would take a view from the taberain the disciples of the sahaba or sometimes a view from an early scholar such as malik or al hozai in particular if there's nothing to contradict it he will accept a mursal or even a weak hadith that is to say the one that's disconnected in its chain in a particular way or a weak hadith but that hadith can't contradict the verdict of a companion so because of this strong hadith centeredness the hanbilis are more inclined to find as many hadiths as they can even if they don't meet the full degree of authenticity and then the other methods and this is why a lot of modern fundamentalists when they study imam ahmed's way don't really like him because he seems to find ways of using weak hadiths which very often they will refuse imam ahmad's madhab and his felk has been more seriously and dangerously misunderstood than the mathhab and the felk of any of the others on the imams so for imam ahmad the word sunnah means the hadith including weak hadith and the fatwas of the sahaba what about bs and logical deduction can you look to see what is the reason for a prohibition that is present in scripture and use that reason in order to deduce a fatwa for a case that's not present in scripture he says you can and the hanbilis allows sorts of analogical deduction but only if absolutely necessary unlike the hanafi's who tend to use griez in their hd head very considerably there's something also very practical about his he doesn't like the iftarad the supposition what if he will only give a fatwa on something that is actually occurred unlike say the math above abu hanifa he doesn't allow any kind of ichthy had or chris or rationality and anything that's to do with worship as such with ibadat but in alet public law public transactions he would actually allow a good deal of latitude this idea we have of the humble is being strict isn't really accurate at all um so the basis for the ruling of things in ibada is that everything is forbidden unless you can find a text that indicates that you can do this thing whereas in ordinary human transactions relations deals and so forth the basis of them is that they are sound unless you can find a text or possibly a bs that indicates that those things are forbidden so actually the handbelly method turns out to be quite flexible particularly when relating to issues that are new for which there wasn't a hadith so a lot of fatwas in modern islamic banking for instance are actually from the hanbali position because of this idea things unless they're explicitly forbidden are just fine some of the olimar would say that that as humanity moves away from the world covered by the hadith humanity encounters more and more different situations will actually mean that religion has less and less to say to those situations it's new it's not in the hadith it's kind of mubarak but that's a generalization because on important issues the hanvales will always struggle to find some kind of text-based uh reason to have an hd head rather than just leaving it as a kind of secular space if there's no nos though no text on an issue he will often seek to determine the muslim or the public interest rather like malik does but possibly a little bit less and of course malice malik's focus on the practice of the people of medina is not something that is central to imam ahmed's system but here again when we have the stereotype of the hanbales as being irrational and just text based in order to determine where the public interest is what is the maslacha you need some kind of rational analysis of that thing is it in the interests of the ummah that there should be sharia compliant hedge funds for instance just suppose anybody would be weird enough to ask such a question imam ahmad wouldn't say it's just not mentioned in that you say where's the maslacher where is the interest and determining that interest does involve the hanbali thinkers necessarily in a certain amount of of ratius a nation and reasoning it out but there is a wing of the hanbales represented famously by somebody called najmadin tofi a later egyptian hanbali which takes the view that just about anything in sharia can be adjusted or defined if you can figure out where public interest lies so quite a lot of modern reformers like to use najma dean tolfi and that type of handballism so again we have to get away from the idea that this is a super strict math hub that these are fundamentalists and into a rather different and more nuanced understanding i mentioned his tremendous love of the chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam he was really a follower of the inward as well as the outward sun there this is one reason for his love of the sufis because he saw in them the holiness of islam rather than just their outward compliance he had a particular attachment to the city of medina um i mentioned the fact that he asked to be buried with three hairs from the holy prophet his son abdullah reported a lot of things that he'd seen in his father he used to keep for instance a hair from the beard of the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi sometimes put it in water take it out and then drink the water for the blessings in the city of medina the bold from which the holy prophet used to drink was conserved when he passed to a medina he would ask to see it and would take baraka by drinking from it himself so we're getting now i think what is a rather different image of this great imam from the conventional one that says the hanvalis kind of lead on to evan tamiya and ibn tamiya leads on to muhammad bin abdullah muhammad bin abdullah leads on to isis and it's all from this that's not the case at all real scholars on the method of imam ahmad and traditional hanbilis would say we have nothing to do with any of that stuff this is a method of mercy and a prophetic love and of closeness to the to allah's people to the awliya but before we finish we should of course think a little bit about the greatest book that imam ahmad left us with which is he wrote several books or compiled several books uh including his kadaba zohod which is a very useful connection of of hadiths mainly about renunciation and leaving dunya but his great book of course is his famous mosnad which is one of the eight or so really great hadith collections and very important for all of the madhabs and really a brilliant monument of scholarship alhamdulillah the sunnah project which has connections here in cambridge and azar as well brought out quite recently a complete new edition of the muslin of ahmed bin the first really good addition that there's ever been they found hadiths that are in the earliest manuscripts that hadn't been published before unfortunately because of the decadence of so much middle eastern publishing but this is we have it in our library at cmc really beautiful respectful way of honoring the legacy of imam ahmad and the book is just so beautiful about 27 000 hadiths in it so bigger than buhari muslim it's heavy 13 volumes or something in the new addition you would risk a sort of lower back pain if you try to carry the whole thing but what's characteristic about this book other than that unlike say the sahih bukhari is that those other books are often arranged according to subject a musnad is a collection of hadith that is arranged according to the name of the companion who narrated that hadith and he actually begins with the ten [Music] companions who are guaranteed paradise while they still live the ashram then he goes on through all of the sahabah so there's muslin of aisha and a musnad of abu huraira and that makes it a little bit specialized difficult to use you can pick up bukhari and say well let me see some hadith about udo and there they are. of course if you want to know how to do waldorf you look at a book of because you might misunderstand the hadith but in the muslim ahmed if you want to find a hadith about you have to find what the new edition which has a lot of indexes and then you can look it up but it's kind of it takes some time so it's a very specialized scholars work it's kind of encyclopedic but according to a specialized principle for those for whom knowledge of the isn't is vital and those whose memorization is so amazing that they will actually remember hadiths by the isanad ah this is the hadith of abu sayyad and they'll think that before they actually think of the subject of the hadith you can hardly find such people nowadays but this is how they were with their amazing eidetic memory so it's a recollection of a time of gigantic uh scholarly erudition and wisdom and it is a book that continues to uh be a a vital treasury of uh the prophetic sunnah so uh we've really come to the end of this uh quick visit to the life of imam ahmad which was a quiet scholar's life apart from the the great tumult of the time of the the fitna but the important thing to bear in mind is that we need to push away the conventional stereotype that says the beginning of stupid fundamentalism in islam and a rejection of rationality and compassion on the contrary this is a highly spiritual person and his mathhab was very often the method of the sufis subsequently who is maybe the greatest best known sufi in baghdad who is hanbali in his doctrine and in his one of the greatest early sufis of what's now afghanistan of herat hanbali the first sufi tafsir in persian is by rasheed in maybody hanbali so we need to get out of this idea that this is something that's that's for formalistic legalistic esoteric uninterested in the living heart of religion it's simply not the case there is always in islam a very close symbiosis between the hadith the real hadith scholars and a kind of prophetic diversion and a love of the awliya and when you think about it you couldn't really separate the two a mark of real love for hadith is a love for the awliya and those whose lives are transformed in this holy and beautiful way by recollection of the chosen ones so that essentially is the story and we just have to ask allah subhanahu wa ta'ala the current misunderstandings of the way of imam ahmad which are a kind of compound ignorance based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the hadith and the nature of how we read hadith and the the nature of life and difference of opinion is in islam those misunderstandings are overcome insha'allah so that the beauty and the ironic inclusivity of classical sunday islam which these imams worked so hard to maintain and defend is restored again so that being at the son of allah is once again this beautiful spiritual inclusive authentic thing that genuinely conserves the reality of the prophetic sunnah rather than just certain poorly understood aspects of its form so may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala have mercy on imam ahmed and grant us the benefit of understanding the life of imam ahmad and bless all of the true hanbales in this age and make us all lovers of the hadith and love of the true fatwa inshallah cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Id: 5udG-DiQ5cw

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021