A person is asking about following the hanafi madhab and in things that may go against the Sunnah.
His question is: “Would I be losing the Rahma of Allah azza wa jal, {the mercy of Allah}, because I am not abiding by the Sunnah or I am not following other schools of thought that follow the Sunnah in this particular issue? Because I heard from my scholars that this is not permissible; they say we have to stick to our madhab!” He is basically asking about timings of Duhr and asr prayer and fajr prayer as we know that there is a difference between fajr and asr in the hanafi madhab than the rest of the madhabs.
In a nutshell, we as Muslims are ordered to follow the Prophet salla Allahu alaihi wa sallam. Now this requires that you have to have knowledge of the Sunnah of the Prophet salla Allahu alaihi wa sallam and knowledge whether it is authentic or not and you have to know whether it is abrogated or not. So, this requires that you may have to have some knowledge of the fundamentals of fiqh {usool al fiqh} so that you can apply this and you have to have a bit of vast knowledge of the Sunnahs as a whole so that you don’t take something that has been generalized or had been specific in another hadith. So if Allah azza wa jal tells us that do not eat the dead meat and then you are stranded and you say I cannot eat dead meat , no, Allah said and told you that if you are in a distress, in a necessity, it becomes mandatory for you to eat from it so that you would not die.
So in essence, you as a Muslim, you are supposed to follow the Qur’an and the Sunnah. However not everyone is equipped, not everyone is capable of understanding the Qur’an and Sunnah by themselves; so those who are unable must follow a school of thought, they must follow a scholar that they trust. Trust, not only his knowledge but also his moral conduct, his commitment, his piety and him being righteous. Because there are so many with PhDs and with lots of knowledge but they don’t fear Allah azza wa jal or they have bad character; they slander, they talk foul language, they maybe deal in riba and so they are not walking the talk! No, you should not follow those. Now, when we come to someone who is a layman, who has no idea of which is right and which is wrong, we tell him to stick to his madhab. So, if you are a devoted hanafi, remain to be devoted hanafi until you are able to differentiate.
As for the time of asr, this is a very big problem, because we know that in the hanafi madhab, they postpone and delay asr by approximately half an hour or 40 minutes from the actual time. Moreover, they have evidence of their own, which is contradicted, by other evidences in the Sunnah and yet they abide by it. It is is not a problem when it comes to asr because asr’s time can be a little bit flexible such that you can pray it in the beginning of the time, in the middle of the time or just before the end of the time of asr. The problem is that when you decide that the appropriate time for asr IS in the middle of the time and someone who didn’t pray Duhr knows that the end of the Duhr prayer is the beginning of asr prayer. This means that this person has prayed Duhr not in its time. He prayed it in the beginning of the actual time of asr, which means that his Duhr prayer is invalid. So this is very dangerous, one should pay attention to it seriously; and Allah azza wa jal knows best!