Overview
Among the four established Sunni schools of legal thought in Islam, the Hanafi school is one of the oldest and by far, the largest in parts of the world. It has a reputation for putting greater emphasis on the role of reason and being more strict than the other three schools. The Hanafi school also has many followers among the four major Sunni schools. This is largely to its being adopted as the official madhab of The Abbasid Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire. As such, the influence of the Hanafi school is still widespread in the former lands of these empires. Today, the Hanafi school is predominant in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, China (Xinjiang) as well as in Mauritius, Turkey, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, North Caucasus Republics, Russia, and the Crimea peninsula in Ukraine. It is also practiced in large numbers in other parts of Muslim world, particularly in parts of the Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Palestine.
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