Maliki law travelled with the armies, the scholars and the merchants who moved west, and it settled where they settled. It became the school of Ifriqiya, of the Maghrib, of al-Andalus for as long as Muslim rule lasted there, and of the Sahara and the Sudanic belt as far as the Niger. It remains dominant across North and West Africa today, and is followed in Upper Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait and Bahrain.
The literature the school works from is layered rather than single. The Mudawwana, compiled by Sahnun at Qayrawan out of the answers of Ibn al-Qasim, who had studied with Malik, is the foundational body of positions. The short Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani is the manual generations of students memorised. The Mukhtasar of Khalil ibn Ishaq, written in the fourteenth century, compresses the preferred rulings into a text so dense that the commentaries on it, rather than the text itself, are the working library of West African jurists, and copies of both are well represented in the surviving manuscript collections of Timbuktu.
Two Maliki instruments have had reach beyond the school. Istislah, ruling with the public interest in view where the texts are silent, gave jurists room to address questions the sources had not anticipated, and it is a Maliki argument that later reformers across the Muslim world reached for. Amal, the recognition that the established practice of a court can settle what the books leave open, gave regional judiciaries a way to adapt without claiming to legislate.
Sources The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) with Principles of Islamic JurisprudenceMohammad Hashim Kamali