Death of Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal — jurist, ḥadīth master, and the figure around whom the resistance to the miḥnah (the inquisition over the createdness of the Qurʾān) had gathered — died in Baghdad on Friday morning, 12 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 241, aged seventy-seven.

The chroniclers dwell on the funeral: the crowds that followed his bier became proverbial, with reports running to the hundreds of thousands, and "the day of Aḥmad's funeral" was cited for generations as a public vindication of the position he had suffered for under three caliphs.

His Musnad, arranged by companion rather than by topic, remains one of the largest early ḥadīth collections, and the school that formed around his teaching became the fourth enduring madhhab.