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Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon the most noble of messengers, our master Muhammad, and upon his family and Companions. It is out of God's mercy that He granted this community with a wealth of sincere scholars and mujadids. Abu Hanifa is considered one of the most prominent imams sent by Allah to renew religion for the people. While reading about imam Abu Hanifa, I found that he possessed an outstanding genius that would place him beyond the leading minds of not only his time but ours as well. The imam's ingenuity could be credited to several factors. Some of these, such as his sagacity and keen intellect and perception, were divinely endowed. Others were the result of circumstances that left their mark on his character and thought and in particular on his jurisprudential output. If I were to give a name to the jurisprudence of imam Abu Hanifa, I would call it 'free jurisprudence' that seeks truth, respects the human mind and will, and takes into account the objectives of Islamic law. Imam Abu Hanifa was the founder of a new methodology in ifta (issuance of legal edicts) and in understanding hadith, derivation of rulings, and in taking a rational approach to understanding religious texts. Abu Hanifa passed on this methodology to his students over the course of thirty years or more. Imam Abu Hanifa based his jurisprudence on the basic sources such as the Quran, Sunnah, ijma' (consensus), the opinion of a Companion, qiyas (analogy), istihsan (juristic preference), and 'urf (custom). While Abu Hanifa's admirers have nothing but praise to say about him, his detractors vilify and accuse him of neglecting the Sunnah and giving precedence to qiyas over solitary reports. But they are wrong. Imam Abu Hanifa himself said, "This is a falsehood. By Allah! Those who maintain that we give precedence to qiyas over primary texts utter a calumny against us." Throughout the history of Islamic jurisprudence, there has been no other man who had been so highly praised and so severely criticized as Imam Abu Hanifa. Imam Abu Hanifa did not write down the rules of jurisprudence he framed And on which he based his juristic school. This paper briefly discusses the life of the imam and his scholarly efforts in jurisprudence and its principles in an attempt to contribute towards his defense
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