Abu Hanifa’s Methodology of Systematic Codification of Law with Reference to Islamization of the Legal System

Abstract

After the century-long vacuum in the systematic jurisprudence mainly caused by the absence of an ‘authoritative legislative body’, Abu Hanifa established a ‘private legislature’ with the help of forty men of extra-ordinary legal acumen of his time. Over three decades that legislature solved more than eighty thousand legal issues, both practical and speculative. The codification was without any political sanction and yet it achieved so much success that immediately after the departure of Abu Hanifa, when his chief disciple Abu Yusuf was appointed Chief Justice of Abbasid Empire, the legal outputs of that assembly turned into the positive laws of the land. The systematic codification of the positive laws of Islam started by Abu Hanifa was followed by the subsequent jurists which ultimately led to the creation of different schools of thought (majhab). The same vacuum has occurred in our time due to the advent of European colonialism which forcefully evicted the Islami legal systems from the Muslim lands and substituted them with their own secular legal system. This article ventures to focus on the initiatives taken by Abu Hanifa to fill the legal vacuum up and tries to find out to what extent his methodology can help in restoring back the dynamism of Islami legal thinking after the stagnation of two centuries.