Malik ibn Anas and the Doctrine of Medinan Practice

Malik ibn Anas (711 to 795), the Medinan jurist whose teaching gave the Maliki school its name, held that the collective, continuous practice of the people of Medina, the city where the Prophet Muhammad lived, taught and was buried, carried legal weight as evidence of authentic prophetic practice in its own right, on the reasoning that a whole community's inherited custom in the very city of revelation was less likely to have been corrupted by error than any single narrator's individually transmitted report. Malik's own compilation, the Muwatta, repeatedly invokes what he calls the amal, the practice, of Medina as a source alongside and at points weightier than individual hadith, a methodological choice later Maliki jurists systematized into a formal legal principle even as scholars in other emerging schools questioned whether an entire city's custom could really be verified and transmitted with the same rigor demanded of a chain of individual narrators. Christopher Melchert's study of the early legal schools situates this doctrine within the broader ninth and tenth century process by which regional legal traditions, Medina's practice-based approach among them, hardened into the distinct, named schools of Islamic law still recognized today.