Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d.855) was the fourth and last of the founders of the four Sunni Schools of Fiqh. Famous mainly as a narrator and compiler of Hadith, he was also widely respected for his knowledge of law, in which he preferred to avoid verdicts in which human reason was in danger of straying from the plain sense of the Qur’an and the Sunna.
The hero of the Sunni persecution at the hands of the heretic caliph al-Ma’mun, he won the affection and respect of followers of all the rightly-guided schools of Islam.