The Beginnings of the ḥanafī School in Iṣfahān

This essay, based mainly on two early Isfahini biographical dictionaries, describes the introduction of the Hanafi school to Isfahan. I argue that although schools of hadith had a long history in Isfahan, the Hanafi law school was also represented there from an early date. The Hanafi legal method was practiced in the town around the middle of the second/eighth century, and hadlth on the authority of Abi Hanifa, transmitted to Isfahani scholars through Abu HIanifa's pupil Zufar b. al-Hudhayl, started to circulate there around the same time. By the beginning of the
third/ninth century a significant Hanafi community had developed in Isfahan, and although schools of hadith continued to be influential there, the Isfahani Hanafi
community survived into the fourth/tenth century and was strengthened by the Saljiqs in the fifth/eleventh century and thereafter.