page_title: Ahmad ibn Hanbal
section_title: Early life and family
hierarchical_section_title: Ahmad ibn Hanbal / Biography / Early life and family
context_page_description: Abū ʿAbdillāh Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥanbal Ash-Shaybānī, often referred to as Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal or Ibn Ḥanbal for short, was an Arab Muslim jurist, theologian, ascetic, hadith traditionist, and founder of the Hanbali school of Sunni jurisprudence — one of the four major orthodox legal schools of Sunni Islam.
  A highly influential and active scholar during his lifetime, Ibn Hanbal went on to become "one of the most venerated" intellectual figures in Islamic history, who has had a "profound influence affecting almost every area of" the traditionalist perspective within Sunni Islam. One of the foremost classical proponents of relying on scriptural sources as the basis for Islamic law and way of life, Ibn Hanbal compiled one of the most important Sunni hadith collections, the Musnad, which has continued to exercise considerable influence in the field of hadith studies up to the present time.
context_section_description: Ahmad ibn Hanbal's family was originally from Basra, Iraq, and belonged to the Arab Banu Shayban tribe. His father was an officer in the Abbasid army in Khurasan and later settled with his family in Baghdad, where Ahmad was born in 780 CE.
  Ibn Hanbal had two wives and several children, including an older son, who later became a judge in Isfahan.
caption: A manuscript of Ibn Hanbal's legal writings, produced October 879
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