ABU HANIFA  AN-NU'MAN IBN THABIT, Mahommedan canon lawyer, was born at Kufa in A.H . 8o (A.D . 699) of non-Arab and probably Persian parentage . Few events of his life are known to us with any certainty . He was a silk-dealer and a man of considerable means, so that he was able to give his time to legal studies . He lectured at Kufa upon canon law (figh) and was a consulting lawyer (mufti), but refused steadily to take any public post . When al-Mansur, however, was building Bagdad (145-149) Abu IJanifa was one of the four over-seers whom he appointed over the craftsmen (G . Le Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, p . 17) . In A.1I . 150 (A.D . 767) he died there under circumstances which are very differently reported .

A persistent. but apparently later tradition asserts that he- died in

prison after severe beating, because he refused to obey al-Mansur's command to act as a judge (cadi, gddi) . This was to avoid a responsibility for which he felt unfit —a frequent attitude of more pious Moslems . Others say that al-Mandi, son of al-Mansur, actually constrained him to be a judge and that he died a few days after . It seems certain that he did suffer imprisonment and beating for this reason, at the hands of an earlier governor of Kufa under the Omayyads (Ibn Qutaiba, Ma`arif, p . 248) . Also that al-Mansur desired to make him judge, but compromised upon his inspectorship of buildings (so in Tabari) . A late story is that the judgeship was only a pretext with al-Mansur, who considered him a partisan of the 'Alicia and a helper with his wealth of Ibrahim ibn `Abd Allah in his insurrection at Kufa in 145 (Weil, Geschichte, ii . 53 ff.) . For many personal anecdotes see de Slane's transl. of Ibn Khallikan iii . 555 if., iv . 272 if . For his place as a speculative jurist in the history of canon law, see MAHOMMEDAN LAW .

He was buried in eastern Bagdad, where his

tomb still exists, one of the few surviving sites from the time of al-Manur, the founder . (Le Strange 191 ff.) See C . Brockelmann, Geschichte, i . 169 ff.; Nawawi's Biogr . Diet. pp . 698-770; Ibn Hajar al-Haitami's Biography, publ . Cairo, A.H . 1304; legal bibliography under MAHOMMEDAN LAW . (D . B .