The Zaydi Madh’hab
The Founder: Imam Zayd (700-740CE)
He is Ali ibn Abi Talib's great grandson through AlHusayn. His father was a great scholar. Zayd was born in Madinah and became one of the leading scholars from the family of Ali there.
He was a scholar of both Hadith and the Qur’an, narrating recitations of the Qur’an. He travelled to Kufa, Basra, Wasit, and exchanged views and discussions with Abu Hanifa, Sufyan Ath-Thawri, and various scholars.
He became involved in a revolt against the Umayyad Caliph Hisham ibn Abdul-Malik against the advice of his family members. The people of Kufa called him to lead them as they had done before for AlHusayn. When he came, they rallied around him in large numbers, and in the course of his talk, they came to realize that he refused to curse Abu Bakr and Umar, and so they rejected and broke away from him.
The forces of the caliphate then caught him and wiped him and his followers out.
His Method of Teaching:
He was a scholar whose mode of teaching in Madinah was narration of Hadiths. He would use the opinions of his contemporaries like Abdul-Rahman ibn AbiLayla. However he didn’t dictate or record his Math’hab himself. It was his students and students students who gathered it.
Sources of Law used by the Zaydi Madh’hab:
1) Qur’an
2) Sunnah
His narration of the Sunnah was mainly from the family of Ali. The narrations which he gave all have comparative narrations in the books of the Sunnah. The Zaydi Madh’hab is so close to the well known 4.
3) Ali’s Opinions
Imam Zayd considered it to be part of the Sunnah when it came to things Ali said and didn’t claim was his opinion. So by default, he considered whatever not attributed to Ali by himself, from the Prophet. He didn’t just take Ali’s opinions blindly.
E.g. Ali held that Zakat could be taken by Orphans, however Imam Zayd ruled that it could not be.
4) Ijmaa of the Sahabah
He accepted the leadership of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, though he felt that Ali was the better choice. This was a personal opinion. Where the mass of the people felt that Abu Bakr, etc. was the better choice he accepted that and didn’t use it as a basis to talk ill of them.
5) Qiyas
6) Aql
As a youth he studied under Wasil bin Ata, the founder of the Mu’tazilites, which held that intellect is given precedence over narration. However, as a result of that position, the Mu’tazilite didn’t accept the opinions of the Sahabah and Qiyas. They placed intellect right after the Qur’an and Sunnah, whereas Imam Zayd placed it in the end and he recognized Qiyas. Therefore it is important to make that distinction between this and the Aql of the Mu’tazilites.
His Students:
1) Abu Khalid, Amr bin Khalid alWasiti
He compiled the narrations of Imam Zayd in Majmoo’ alKabeer
2) AlHaadi ila AlHaqq, Yahya ibn alHusayn
Although he is called AlHusayn, He is from the Hassani side. He was made the Imam of Yemen.
3) AlHasan ibn Ali AlHussayni
Followers of the Zaydi Madh'hab:
The followers of this Madh'hab are mainly concentrated in Yemen. This is the only place where it was adopted. There was also a state in the region of the Caspian sea that was Zaydi, but it was overcome in the period of the Ottomans, and the Hanafi Madh’hab took over.
They are Shi’a, but Shi’a within the Sunnah, because they don’t hold the kinds of beliefs that put them at major odds with the body of the Muslims. They recognize the Sahabah, and their attitude towards Ali is not elevating him to a state of Godhood. Their Fiqh is also very similar to that of the Hanafis.
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