This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most later Islamic legal collections built their authority the same way: by tracing individual reports back through a chain of named transmitters to the Prophet Muhammad himself, and judging each report's reliability largely on the strength of that chain. Malik ibn Anas built Al-Muwatta on that method too, but he added something the later, purely hadith-focused collections generally did not lean on nearly as heavily, the argument that the ongoing, living legal practice of the city of Medina itself carried real authority, because Medina was where the Prophet had actually lived, taught and been observed by a whole community across a generation, not merely quoted by individual narrators.
That is a genuinely different kind of evidence than a chain of names. A single transmitted report depends entirely on the reliability of the people in its chain; a community's continuous, unbroken practice depends on nothing being forgotten or corrupted across an entire population living the tradition day to day. Malik's confidence in Medinan practice as a check on individually transmitted reports is what gave Al-Muwatta its distinctive shape, and it is also why the Maliki school of law that grew from his teaching has always placed unusual weight on communal practice alongside textual transmission.
The book Malik left behind is not even a single fixed text. He kept revising his teaching across a long career, and the different recensions his students carried away, most famously those of Yahya al-Laythi and al-Shaybani, preserve slightly different snapshots of a body of legal reasoning that was still being worked out even as it was being written down.