This study claims that the seventh century A.H. was the peak of interaction between the two schools of hadith and opinion regarding the issue of authority of the Sunnah and its centrality in legislation and that it was the century of convergence between the two schools. The study notes that traces of muḥaddiṯīn statements in dealing with the Sunnah gradually emerged in Hanafi books and that they incorporated into their texts expressions of the muḥaddiṯīn such as ṣaḥīḥ hadith (authentic), ḍaʿīf (weak), munqaṭiʿ (disconnected), and muttaṣil (connected), or hadith narrated by Buḳārī or hadith not authenticated by Dāraquṭnī.” They appended these rulings to their original statements such as “practise is upon it or it contradicts practise and interpreted because it contradicts the apparent meaning of the Holy Qur’an or presumptive such that it cannot abrogate the verse,” and so on. However, the facts of the Hanafi books that appeared in the sixth century and later confirmed these observations. The main claim is that the seventh century was the century of rapprochement between the two schools, in the following two ways:

First: the emergence of Ahl al-Aṯar within the school of opinion, who adopted the method of the muḥaddiṯīn in authenticating the Sunnah, the first of which is al-Manbijī in his book “al-Lubāb”, followed by the Hanafi muḥaddiṯūn in Egypt and in India who represented the gateway to the inclusion of the principles of the Hadith school concerning  the authenticity of the Sunnah into the principles of the opinion school. The study focuses on certain chapters from the book “al-Lubāb” as a model to verify this claim.

Second: the emergence of a new approach to authorship in the principles of jurisprudence “Uṣūl al-fiqh”, which is the approach of combining the methods of the jurists and the theologians “mutakallimīn”. The origins and connotations of this newfound approach may be explained first and foremost by the aforementioned issue of convergence, meaning that Uṣūl al-fiqh was a gateway for incorporating issues from the principles of the school of hadith into the principles of the school of opinion. The study focuses on the chapter on the Sunnah from Ibn Assāʿātī’s text”Badīʿu Niḓām” and takes it as a model to verify this claim.

The study adopts an inductive and analytical approach. It proves the validity of its first claim, which is that the Ahl al-Aṯar movement that emerged from within the school of opinion was the first methodological reconciliation and convergence between the schools of opinion and hadith. Its scholars adopted the methods of the muḥaddiṯīn in authentication, and the first of them was al-Manbijī in his book “al-Lubāb”. It also proves the validity of the second claim, which is that the emergence of the method of combining the two methods of the theologians and the jurists in Hanafi jurisprudence was the second methodological convergence between the schools of opinion and hadith, such that it ended up being the gateway to incorporating issues from the principles of theologians into the principles of jurisprudence. With this newly developed methodology, the traditional Hanafi method for authoring completely ended.

The study shows that this rapprochement reduced the distance between the two schools, i.e., the school of opinion and the school of hadith, and bridged part of the gap between them. However, it was a rapprochement from one side, from the side of the Hanafis towards the people of hadith. It was a convergence on the level of principles, such that hadith was given the same centrality that it possessed among the scholars of hadith, a convergence in which the Hanafis abandoned several of their principles “uṣūl”. They retracted a number of the statements of their predecessors, with the intention of defending their Uṣūl, responding to the doubts constantly cast upon it, and winning the favour of the muḥaddiṯīn who succeeded in restricting the term “Ahl al-hadith” to themselves and perpetuating that the term “Ahl al-Ra’i” remains a thorny term containing a lot of criticism and negativity. Accordingly, the more correct name for this shift in methodology is the approach and abandonment that stems from one side, not the rapprochement and reconciliation that is attributed to both sides.

The aforementioned convergence cannot be described as successful because, on one hand, it involved abandoning some of the principles of the traditional Hanafi school and, on the other hand, it seems that it did not achieve the desired goal in its entirety— which is to authenticate the Hanafis’ evidence according to the method of the people  of hadith, which contradicts the intended purpose in the first place. In other words, the results of this approach did not fully agree with the method of the muḥaddiṯīn. However, it was a recognition of their equivalent methodology in dealing with the question of the authenticity and authority of the hadith.

The study suggests that the most important reason behind the aforementioned reconciliation methodology is an internal one emanating from within the maḏhab, reached by scholars of the Hanafi maḏhab in the seventh century and after when they felt the need for it, in order to ward off charges of abandoning Hadith evidence in their maḏhab and to prove that their maḏhab is a maḏhab based on hadith and sunnah like other Sunni maḏhabs.

This is due first to the impact of the criticism directed at them by the scholars of hadith and second to the stability of the methodology of the muḥaddiṯīn and the sciences of hadith in theory and in application, in addition to the breadth of the sciences that serve hadith, such as the sciences of deficiencies in hadith “al-Ilal”, history “at-Tārīḳ”, men “ar-Rijāl”, criticism and praise of narrators “al-Jarḥ wat-Taʿdīl”, and even the prevalence of the chain of transmission system “isnād” in areas other than hadith such as history, Arabic, and other disciplines. However, such transformations had previously occurred in the Hanafi school of thought, such as their shift from the Mu’tazila school of thought in theology to the Maturidi school of thought, due to many factors that are not suitable to mention here. There is no objection in interpreting the issue with other than the internal reasons mentioned, that is, with external reasons that lie outside the maḏhab, such as the sectarian scholarly tolerance that undoubtedly spread in the Mamluk era and the news we have received from the imams of that era about ideological crossing between schools of thought and moving through them.