About and data

This site maps the books through which the Ḥanafī school recorded its own history: the lives of Abū Ḥanīfa and the biographical dictionaries of his followers.

Source

The data follow Huzeyfe Çeker, Traditions of Biographies in the Hanafi Doctrine (NEU Press), chapters 2 to 4, which grew out of his 2016 doctoral thesis. Section numbers on each page point to his entry. The summaries here are written afresh; for the argument and the references, read the book.

Two genres

Manāqib

A biography of Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) built around his virtues, often with chapters on his leading students. There are 41 here.

Ṭabaqāt

A compilation of Ḥanafī jurists, arranged by generation or alphabetically. There are 27 here.

Method and limits

Dates and centuries

Dates are death dates, hijri first and common era second. Century grouping follows the book: al-Sakhāwī (d. 902) is counted in the 9th century, Müstaḳīmzāde (d. 1202) in the 12th and al-Laknawī (d. 1304) in the 13th.

Places

Regions are the ten the book uses. Seven works are not placed, because the author's home is unknown or the book ties him to no single region. Ibn al-Shiḥna is shown at Aleppo, though the book also counts his work under Egypt.

Survival

"In print", "manuscript only" and "lost" record what the book reports. Newer editions may exist, so check before relying on "manuscript only". Shelfmarks are given as the book gives them.

Links between works

The network shows only the links the book states: a work quoting, abridging or continuing another, and teacher or family ties between authors. It is not a complete map of dependence.

Doubtful works

The book questions whether several of these works existed, or who wrote them. Those pages carry a note.

Names

Transliteration is normalised, so a few spellings differ from the book's (for example al-Athmār al-Janiyya for its al-Asmār). The Arabic forms were added for this site.

Data

The whole dataset can be downloaded and reused with credit to the book and to this site.

• works.csv: one row per work
• links.csv: one row per link between two works
• atlas.json: everything in one file

Credits

Coastlines are from Natural Earth (public domain). The typefaces are Gentium Book Plus, IBM Plex Sans and Amiri, all under the SIL Open Font License and served from this site.