Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Arabic: مسند أحمد بن حنبل) is a collection of musnad hadith compiled by the Islamic scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. AH 241/AD 855) to whom the Hanbali fiqh (legislation) is attributed.

It is the most famous of the Musnads, and the hadith scholars have placed it after the Kutub al-Sittah.

[2] It contains approximately 40 thousand hadiths of the Prophet, of which approximately 10 thousand are repeated[3] It is arranged according to the names of the companions who narrated the hadiths, as he arranged it by placing the narrations of each companion.

[5] Historians differ about when Ibn Hanbal began composing the Musnad.

[4] Abu Musa al-Madini believed that he began classifying the Musnad when he returned from Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani from Yemen in the year 200 AH when he was thirty six years old but it is more likely that he classified his musnad after the ordeal of the creation of the Quran(220 AH), because Ibn Hanbal did not narrate in his Musnad about those who fell into the ordeal.