The death and funeral of Ahmad ibn Hanbal

Ahmad ibn Hanbal died in Baghdad on a Friday in the year 241, aged seventy-seven and some days according to Abbas al-Duri. ^{1 2} In his entry in the History of Damascus, Ibn Asakir gathers many reports on the day of his death and on his funeral. ^{3 4}

• Twelve nights into Rabi' al-Awwal: the report of Hanbal ibn Ishaq, Abbas al-Duri and Muhammad ibn Abd Allah al-Hadrami. ¹
• Twelve nights into Rabi' al-Akhir: the statement of his son Abd Allah, and the reports of al-Fadl ibn Ziyad, Ya'qub ibn Sufyan and Abd al-Baqi ibn Qani'. ^{5 2 6}
• Thirteen nights before the end of Rabi' al-Akhir: the report of Nasr ibn al-Qasim al-Fara'idi. ⁵
• Abu Umayya Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Tarsusi said 242; Ibn Asakir notes that no one followed him in this. ²

On his age there are two reports: seventy-seven years according to most, and seventy-eight in Abd Allah's report. ^{5 2}

Abd Allah ibn Ahmad said: my father died on Friday in the forenoon and we buried him after the afternoon prayer; Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Tahir led the prayer over him, overruling us, though we and the Hashimites had already prayed over him inside the house. ⁵ Bayan ibn Ahmad al-Qasabani reported that the bier was set down in the open ground of Abu Qirat, and that Ibn Tahir had those praying behind him counted: they were 800,000 men and 60,000 women, while those who prayed the afternoon prayer in the Rusafa mosque were some twenty thousand. ⁷ In another report from him the rows stretched from the Maydan to the bridge of Rab' al-Qati'a. ^{10 4}

Other estimates. Fath ibn al-Hajjaj reported that the governor sent twenty men who estimated the crowd at 1,080,000, not counting those in boats; another report says the Commander of the Faithful sent estimators who reached 1,300,000; and Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami reported 1,700,000, not counting those in boats. ^{8 9} Al-Sulami reported from al-Daraqutni, through a chain to Ahmad, that Ahmad used to say: tell the people of innovation, between us and you is the day of the funerals. ⁸ Abd al-Wahhab al-Warraq said: we never heard of a larger gathering of Muslims than at Ahmad's funeral. ⁸

The report of twenty thousand converts. Ibn Abi Hatim relates through his chain from al-Warkani, Ahmad's neighbour, that on the day Ahmad died twenty thousand Jews, Christians and Magians embraced Islam, and that mourning broke out among four kinds of people. ⁹ The edition's editor notes that al-Dhahabi, in Siyar A'lam al-Nubala', called it an objectionable story and showed that al-Warkani died thirteen years before Ahmad. ⁹

Dreams. Ibn Asakir relates dreams reported after his death, among them that the brother of a man killed at Qazwin saw him saying God had ordered the martyrs to attend Ahmad's funeral; they noted the night, and it was the night of his death. ⁷ Such reports are transmitted in the literature of virtues with their chains, and the museum gives them attributed to their narrators.