Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ibrahim al-Ansari, the foremost student of Imam Abu Hanifa and the first man in Islam to hold the office of Qadi al-Qudat, chief judge of…
Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ibrahim al-Ansari, the foremost student of Imam Abu Hanifa and the first man in Islam to hold the office of Qadi al-Qudat, chief judge of the whole empire, is buried in Baghdad beside the Quraysh graveyard in Kazimiyya. From Kufa to the court of Harun al-Rashid He was born in Kufa in 113 AH into poverty, a descendant of the Ansar of Madinah. His father wanted him earning a wage; Abu Hanifa, seeing what the young man could become, took on the cost of his upkeep so that he could stay in the study circle. He remained with his teacher for years, and after Abu Hanifa's death he became the man through whom the Hanafi school was transmitted, written down and put to work. He also studied under Ibn Abi Layla in Kufa and heard hadith widely, including from Imam Malik in Madinah. His narrations and his legal reasoning made him a rare combination in his generation: a jurist of the Iraqi school who was also a recognised transmitter. He was appointed judge under al-Mahdi, served al-Hadi, and then under Harun al-Rashid was given authority over judicial appointments across the Abbasid lands, a post created for him. Judges from Khurasan to Ifriqiya were named on his word. Kitab al-Kharaj Harun al-Rashid asked him to set down how the state should raise and spend its revenue. The result, Kitab al-Kharaj, is the earliest surviving Muslim work of public finance: land tax, tithe, the treatment of non-Muslim subjects, the wages of officials, the upkeep of canals and bridges, and the limits on what a ruler may take from those he governs. It opens not with administration but with a warning addressed directly to the caliph who commissioned it. Allah, may He be exalted, has placed you in charge of a great affair, for which the reward is the greatest of rewards and the punishment the severest of punishments. He has entrusted to you the affairs of this Ummah, and you have risen in the morning as a shepherd over those whom Allah has placed in your care. Abu Yusuf, Kitab al-Kharaj The book made the Hanafi position the working law of the Abbasid administration, and it circulated far beyond Iraq. Much of what later scholars of siyasa and taxation wrote begins from it. The grave He died in Baghdad in 182 AH, in his seventieth year, and was buried in the Quraysh graveyard on the western bank of the Tigris, the burial ground that grew around the grave of Imam Musa al-Kazim (RA) and gave the district of Kazimiyya its name. A structure stands over his grave within the quarter, a short distance from the larger complex.