This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A legal school entry records one of the named traditions of Islamic legal interpretation, the madhabs, each built around a founding jurist's own method for deriving rulings from the Quran, the hadith, scholarly consensus and analogical reasoning, and each carrying its own documented geographic spread and following. The atlas records eight: the four schools historically classed as Sunni, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali, alongside the Twelver Shia Jafari school, the Zaidi school associated with Zaidi Shia Islam, the Ibadi school whose origin predates the Sunni and Shia division as it later hardened, and the largely historical Zahiri school of strict textual literalism.
Wael Hallaq's account of Islamic legal institutions records a structural fact worth stating plainly in every entry: Sunni Islam has no ordained clergy and no church-like central authority comparable to Christianity's, so a school's standing rests instead on its own accumulated body of legal reasoning and on the qadi, the judge trained in its method, rather than on any single office empowered to declare doctrine for the whole tradition.
An entry records a school's founding jurist, its distinctive method for weighing the recognized sources of law, and the regions where its rulings have historically prevailed, since the schools differ genuinely in method and not merely in the conclusions they reach on any single question. An entry keeps a school's own documented reasoning separate from any single ruling it has produced, since the method, not any one verdict, is the school's defining and lasting feature.