Schools of thought (madhabs)

Hanafi inheritance

5 min read

The largest Sunni school. Stricter blocking around the grandfather and a distinctive ruling on the Musharakah case.

The Hanafi school is the largest by following — historically the school of the Ottoman empire and today dominant across South Asia, Central Asia, Turkey, and the Levant. Its inheritance rulings agree with the other three schools on most cases but have a few sharp differences worth knowing.

Distinctive Hanafi positions

Grandfather blocks siblings

In the Hanafi school, a paternal grandfather completely blocks the deceased's siblings (full and paternal half) when the father is dead. The other three Sunni schools have him share with the siblings via the special grandfather-with-siblings calculation.

No Musharakah

In the Musharakah case (husband + mother + 2+ maternal half-siblings + full siblings), Hanafi gives the full siblings nothing — they're residuary heirs, and the estate is already exhausted by the fixed shares. Maliki and Shafi'i, by contrast, let them join the maternal half-siblings in the 1/3 share.

Father blocks maternal grandmother

Only in the Hanafi school does the deceased's father block the maternal grandmother. Other schools allow her to inherit her 1/6 even when the father is alive.

What it shares with the others

Everything else: the six fixed fractions, blocking by closer descendants, Awl, Radd (Hanafi applies it readily — even more so than Maliki), and Umariatan.

Further reading