Ahmad ibn Hanbal

Ahmad ibn Hanbal, an Arab jurist and scholar of the Abbasid-era Islamic Golden Age, was born in Baghdad in November 780 and died there on August 2, 855. He founded the Hanbali school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, one of the four major Sunni schools of law and later the dominant school in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He compiled the hadith collection al-Musnad, described as the largest such collection of its time and said to have influenced the methodology of later compilers including the authors of Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. He became especially renowned for his refusal, during the Mihna inquisition under the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, to accept the doctrine that the Quran was a created rather than eternal text, a stand that strengthened his standing among later Sunni scholars.