Malik ibn Anas

The Muwatta, the well-trodden path, is a book of some seventeen hundred reports arranged by legal topic: purity, prayer, alms, marriage, sales, oaths, inheritance. What makes it unlike the later hadith collections is that Malik does not confine himself to prophetic reports. He gives the rulings of the Companions and of the Medinan authorities who followed them, he gives his own opinion, and at intervals he says that a matter is settled by amal, the practice, meaning the continuous habit of Medina.

That last category is his distinctive contribution and the point on which the school was later attacked. The argument is that a city whose population had learned its religion directly and had gone on doing the same things without interruption carried a form of evidence that no chain of individual reporters could match. A defective chain matters less if the whole community has been doing the thing all along.

Critics answered that this turned local custom into revelation and that the practice of one city could not bind the rest. The exchange is worth reading because it is one of the earliest arguments in Islamic law about what counts as evidence at all, rather than about the answer to any particular question, and because both positions are still recognisable in the way the schools differ.

Malik taught in Medina for decades and did not travel except on pilgrimage, which in a discipline transmitted face to face meant that students came to him. The Muwatta was carried away in several recensions taken down by different pupils, and the differences between them are themselves evidence about how such texts were transmitted; the recension of Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi, an Andalusi, became the one usually printed.

A school in this sense is not an institution with a building. It is a body of doctrine, a chain of teachers, and eventually a set of books that later jurists agree to work within. The Maliki school took shape after Malik through students such as Ibn al-Qasim and Sahnun, whose Mudawwana organises Maliki positions into a working manual, and it travelled west with them into Ifriqiya, the Maghreb and al-Andalus.

His relations with power were not comfortable. The biographical tradition records that he was flogged on the order of the governor of Medina over a ruling touching an oath of allegiance to the Abbasids, and that the episode raised rather than lowered his standing. Later caliphs are said to have proposed making the Muwatta the law of the empire and to have been refused, on the ground that the regions had received different teaching and should be left with it, which if true is an early statement of legal pluralism as a principle.