These five principles, then, are the very foundation of his school. Yet he would sometimes suspend judgment: when the proofs before him conflicted, when the Companions themselves had differed, or when he had found no report or statement from any Companion or Successor on the matter. He was intensely averse to—and expressly forbade—issuing a fatwa on a question for which no precedent from the early generations existed, saying to one of his students, “Beware of speaking on an issue for which you have no imam.”¹ That is, no earlier authority had ever addressed it.
- His writings
Imam Ibn al-Qayyim² said: “Imam Ahmad, may Allah have mercy on him, had a strong dislike for authoring books. He preferred the unadorned transmission of hadith and was deeply displeased when people wrote down his own words. Nonetheless, Allah—knowing the purity of his intention—caused more than thirty volumes to be recorded from his statements and fatwas, most of which, by Allah’s grace, have reached us, with only a few now lost. Al-Khallal compiled his texts in the Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr, which came to about twenty volumes or more. His legal verdicts and questions were transmitted generation after generation until they became a guide and exemplar for the people of the Sunnah at every level.”
Ibn al-Jawzī said: “Imam Ahmad did not approve of composing books and forbade others to write down his words and legal questions. Had he consented, his works would have been numerous and whole books would have been handed down from him.”³
Thus Imam Ahmad confined his own authorship to works of transmission—that is, compilations of hadith and reports. Among his writings are:
- The Musnad, his hadith collection. He would say to his son ʿAbd Allah, “Preserve this Musnad, for it will one day serve as an imam for the people.”⁴