Maliki School

One of the four surviving Sunni schools of jurisprudence.

The mosques and manuscript libraries of Timbuktu carry the Maliki learning of the West African Sahel.

Kairouan was the seat from which Maliki law spread across North Africa, and Sahnun compiled the Mudawwana there.

Al-Andalus was Maliki from the emirate onward, and the great mosque of Cordoba was the school's principal seat in the peninsula.

Received as an early record of the terms on which non-Muslim communities lived under Muslim rule rather than as a text of the school.

The Amman Message names the Maliki school among the eight whose adherents are Muslims, and holds that no one outside its qualified authorities may issue a legal opinion in its name.

The transmission of Warsh from Nafi of Medina is the reading of the Maghreb and of West Africa, the lands the Maliki school has held since the ninth century.

Maliki law omits the invocation at the head of the opening chapter in the obligatory prayer, holding that it is no part of the chapter.

In Maliki law khums is the fifth of the spoils of war set aside in the Quran, not a standing annual levy on surplus wealth.

Medina is a source of law in the Maliki school and not only a place of pilgrimage. The settled practice of its people carries evidential weight that no other school grants it.

Independent reasoning in the Maliki school is exercised within its own method, and the classical schools argued at length over whether reasoning outside a school remained open at all.

Maliki prayer is made with the arms hanging at the sides rather than folded over the body. It is the one posture that tells a Maliki congregation apart on sight.

The Maliki school follows the settled practice of the people of Medina on the Ramadan night prayer, which Malik records in the Muwatta, rather than the fixed count of twenty units the other Sunni schools keep.

Innovation divides into good and bad, with local practice weighed as evidence.

Accepts istihsan and gives maslaha, the public interest, a standing that has made this school central to modern reformist theory.

The attribution of the collection to Ali is disputed in Sunni scholarship, which reads it as a later compilation whose material cannot all be traced to him.

Sunni jurists across the schools questioned both the authority claimed for the 1989 ruling and its reach beyond the jurisdiction that issued it.

Maliki jurists admit an unstated public benefit as a ground of ruling, which gives the school more room than the others in matters the sources do not address at all.

The settled practice of the people of Medina is a source of law in the Maliki school and in no other, on the reasoning that a whole city transmits the Prophet's practice more reliably than a single chain of narrators.

Hadith are affirmed as a source of law and doctrine in the Maliki school, drawn from the Sunni six-book canon shared across Sunni Islam.

Consensus binds, and the Maliki school gives particular weight to the consensus of the scholars of Medina.

Ijtihad and taqlid are both foundational method in the Maliki school, which gives particular weight to the practice of Medina as a source of law.

Juristic preference is used in the Maliki school, where Malik is reported to have called it nine tenths of knowledge, though it is applied more narrowly than in Hanafi practice.

Analogy is accepted in the Maliki school, but it yields to the practice of Medina where the two conflict.

Sharia, elaborated through Maliki jurisprudence, the school founded by Malik ibn Anas and historically dominant across North and West Africa, is affirmed as binding.

The Quran, held to be the literal and uncreated word of God revealed to Muhammad, is canonical scripture across every branch of Islam, including this tradition.

The forbidden category is affirmed in Maliki law as the strongest of the five rulings.

Jihad is a chapter of Maliki law, and its treatment in the school shaped the legal argument over rising in the West African jihad movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The poll tax and the protected status it buys are treated in Maliki law, whose application across North and West Africa gave the category a long practical history.

The division into grave and lesser sins is affirmed in Maliki doctrine.

Kaffara is affirmed in Maliki law as a defined expiation, and the Muwatta records the early Medinan rulings on it.

The Maliki school, which gives distinctive weight to the practice of the people of Medina as evidence of the Sunna.

The five rulings are the classification of acts in Maliki jurisprudence.