The apparent is their doctrine and their history

The Hanbali school of thought and its history still need to uncover its mysteries and understand its true nature, and because the study of Goltseher represented a qualitative shift in the study of Orientalism for the history of jurisprudence and its fundamentals in general, and for the Hanbali school in particular. This importance is not attributed solely to the Islamic Sharia rulings and their reliance on strict formal rules; rather — to a large extent — also to the methodology followed in this Islamic specialization, and to the rules for deriving branches of jurisprudence from the sources of Sharia. If we limit ourselves to merely studying these rulings to understand how the Prophet’s followers dealt with individual incidents related to religious and social life; then our understanding of Islamic institutions would be incomplete. And in order to appreciate the spirit of Islam, we should evaluate the relationship between its development and its sources, so that we know whether this development is governed by intellectual freedom or blind imitation, by a tendency toward progress or by clinging to outdated ideas, by lively intellectual interests or by passive, careless behavior. Within the framework of a series of research that should underpin this evaluation, the research into the roots of jurisprudence, in terms of its historical development, holds an important place alongside the internal history of interpreting the Qur’an and Hadith.