Malik ibn Anas (711–795)

Key dates

A family of traditionists of Yemeni origin

Malik was born in Medina around the year 93 AH, corresponding to 711 of the Christian era, although some biographers retain a slightly later date, around 715^[14]. His complete lineage — transmitted with unusually lavish precision by the Muslim biographical tradition — was Malik ibn Anas ibn Malik ibn Abi Amir ibn Amr ibn al-Harith al-Asbahi^[15]. His ancestors belonged to the Yemeni tribe of Himyar; his great-grandfather Abu Amir is said to have converted to Islam and settled in Medina shortly after the Prophet's Hijra, in 623^[16]. This Yemeni origin, non-Arab in the Qurayshite tribal sense, explains why Malik's family lived in Medina as a client by alliance (mawla) of the Qurayshite clan of Banu Taym ibn Murra, without belonging to it by blood^[17].

His father, Anas ibn Malik — not to be confused with the famous Companion of the Prophet of the same name, Muhammad's servant for ten years — and his mother, Aaliya bint Shurayk al-Azdiyya, already belonged to families where the transmission of prophetic traditions (hadith) had been a matter of several generations: Malik's great-grandfather, grandfather, father and uncles had all been recognized transmitters^[18]. Malik thus grew up in a household where the study of hadith and law was not a career choice, but an already well-established family heritage.

Training under dozens of Medinan masters

Medina, at the turn of the 8th century, remained the great intellectual capital of nascent Islam, even though political power had moved to Damascus and then Baghdad: many of the Prophet's Companions and their direct disciples, the Successors (tabi'un), had withdrawn there^[19]. Malik memorized the Quran in childhood under the direction of Nafi' ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Nu'aym (Abu Ruwaym), from whom he received the ijaza — the formal authorization to teach in turn^[20].

His legal and traditionist training rested on several major masters of the generation of the Successors and their own disciples: Abd Allah ibn Hurmuz, with whom he is said to have studied for several years without ever publishing what he had learned there; Rabi'a ibn Abi Abd al-Rahman, nicknamed Rabi'at al-Ra'y for his use of legal reasoning; Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, the great collector of prophetic traditions in Medina; and Hisham ibn Urwa, grandson of Abu Bakr through his mother Asma' bint Abi Bakr^[21]. The biographical tradition, generous by nature, credits him with several hundred masters in total — a figure to be taken as evidence of his exceptionally broad training rather than as a verifiable statistic in the modern sense^[22].

Among these masters, one name towers above all others: Nafi', the freedman of Abd Allah ibn Umar, son of the second caliph. The transmission chain "Malik from Nafi' from Ibn Umar", thus going back directly to a close companion of the Prophet, would later be described by classical traditionists, including al-Bukhari, as the "golden chain" (silsilat al-dhahab) — the most reliable of all recognized transmission paths in Sunni law and hadith^[23].

A teaching method of rare rigour

Having in turn become a master in the Prophet's Mosque, Malik taught there for more than half a century, hardly ever leaving Medina — except for the pilgrimage to Mecca^[24] —, refusing even the pressing invitations of the caliphs of Baghdad to settle there^[25]. This obstinate refusal to leave, combined with the authority conferred on him by his closeness to the very places where the Prophet legislated, earned him the honorific title of Imam Dar al-Hijra, literally "the Imam of the Abode of Emigration"^[26].

His method stood out for its deliberate slowness and marked reluctance to rule lightly. A certain Khalid ibn Khidash recounts having made the whole journey from Iraq to Medina with forty questions in his pocket: Malik resolved only five of them for him, preferring most often to answer "I do not know"^[27]. This avowed humility became in him an explicit principle:

"The shield of the scholar is to say "I do not know". If he neglects this shield, he will receive a mortal blow." — Malik ibn Anas, quoted in the English-language Wikipedia from the biographical tradition^[28]

This caution is not timidity: it reflects a precise conception of authority in religious matters, where only the word of the Prophet carries absolute weight, and where every human opinion — including his own — remains fallible and revisable. Malik demanded of his pupils a scrupulous respect for the prophetic text, to the point of holding that faithfully following the Sunna was the very condition of the spiritual salvation of the community:

"The Sunna is Noah's Ark. Whoever boards it is saved, and whoever stays away from it perishes." — Malik ibn Anas, quoted in the English-language Wikipedia from the biographical tradition^[29]

An imposing figure and ritually prepared teaching

The physical descriptions preserved by the biographers show him "tall, corpulent, imposing of stature, very fair-skinned, with a white beard [...] bald [...] and blue eyes", always dressed in fine clothes, particularly white ones^[30]. Before transmitting a single hadith or delivering a legal opinion, Malik would purify himself ritually and pronounce a formula of invocation — a sign of the quasi-liturgical character he attached to the prophetic word, which he would consent to transmit only in a state of purity comparable to that required for prayer^[31].

This formal rigour went together with a constant methodological principle: differences of opinion among legitimate jurists are not, in his eyes, a scandal to be corrected, but a mercy granted by God to the community, provided each remains faithful to the recognised sources^[32]. It is this principle that would later structure his most resounding refusal — that of imposing his own Muwatta as the single law of the entire Abbasid empire.

A work composed and revised over forty years

The work by which Malik entered the history of Muslim law is the Muwatta, whose title means approximately "that which has been levelled", "the path made easy for people"^[33]. According to the biographical tradition, Malik himself explained the choice of the name by a test of scholarly consensus:

"I showed this book to seventy jurists of Medina, and all agreed (wata'a) with me on its content; that is why I called it the Muwatta." — Malik ibn Anas, quoted by Abu Hatim al-Razi and reported in the English-language Wikipedia^[34]

The Muwatta was not born in a single draft: Malik composed, revised and pruned it over a period of about forty years^[35], reducing, according to some biographers, an initial corpus of some ten thousand traditions to a little under two thousand retained as reliable^[36]. The work interweaves three distinct materials: sayings of the Prophet (marfu' hadith), opinions and practices of his Companions (mawquf hadith), and Malik's own personal judgements supported by the practice observed at Medina (maqtu' hadith)^[37].

In its most widespread recension — that transmitted by the Andalusian Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi, who received the work directly from Malik during the last year of the latter's life —, the Muwatta contains about 1,720 traditions, divided between 600 going back explicitly to the Prophet, 613 attached to Companions, 285 to Successors, and 222 transmitted incompletely^[38]. Several thousand disciples of Malik transmitted, over the course of his life, slightly different versions of his oral teaching; sixteen recensions of the Muwatta are known today, of which al-Laythi's is authoritative in the Maliki school as the "Vulgate version"^[39].

The living practice of the Medinans as a source of law

What fundamentally distinguishes Malik's method from that of the other nascent major legal schools is the central role he grants to the continuous practice of the inhabitants of Medina ('amal ahl al-Madina (practice of the people of Medina)). For him, the city where the Prophet lived, preached and legislated for ten years preserved, through the generations of its inhabitants, a living and reliable memory of the concrete application of the Law — sometimes more trustworthy than an isolated hadith reported by a chain of transmitters scattered across the empire^[40].

The British Islamic scholar Yasin Dutton, in his reference study The Origins of Islamic Law: The Qur'an, the Muwatta' and Madinan 'Amal (Curzon Press, London, 1999), argues that this Medinan practice constituted for Malik a distinct normative authority, capable of prevailing over certain hadith transmitted in isolation — a thesis that renewed the scholarly understanding of the formation of the earliest Islamic law^[41]. On this reading, the Muwatta would represent the very first systematic written record of "Islam in practice" as it was concretely lived in the city of the Prophet, before the later legal schools came to favour a method founded almost exclusively on the chain of transmission of hadith^[42].

This conception earned Malik a reputation for rigour and methodological caution: he did not admit just any marfu' hadith attributed to the Prophet, but subjected each tradition to the test of continuous Medinan practice before integrating it into his teaching^[43].

An authority recognised up to the summit of the Sunni tradition

The reputation of the Muwatta quickly outgrew the Maliki school itself. Al-Shafi'i, who studied for years under Malik before founding his own school of law, paid it the most famous tribute in all Muslim legal literature:

"There is no book on earth sounder, after the Book of God, than the book of Malik." — al-Shafi'i, quoted in the English-language Wikipedia^[44]

This authority earned Malik, in the later Sunni tradition, a series of cumulative honorific titles: Shaykh of Islam (Shaykh al-Islam), Proof of the Community (Hujjat al-Umma), Imam of the believers in matters of hadith, and of course Imam of the City of Emigration^[45]. Some later traditionists, including the historian Ibn al-Athir (d. 1233), even held that the Muwatta deserved to rank among the six great canonical collections of Sunni hadith (Kutub al-Sitta), in place of the Sunan of Ibn Maja – a debate that remained open in the scholarly tradition, the place of Ibn Maja having ultimately prevailed only because his collection contained traditions absent from the five other great books^[46].

The revolt of Muhammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya (762–763)

In the year 145 of the Hijra (762–763), the Muslim world went through a major crisis. Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, a descendant of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima and his son-in-law Ali, nicknamed al-Nafs al-Zakiyya ("the Pure Soul"), rose up against the young Abbasid caliphate and briefly seized Medina, contesting the legitimacy of the reigning caliph, Abu Ja'far al-Mansur^[47]. Historians agree that Malik was caught up in this episode, without personally taking up arms^[48].

A few years earlier, the Abbasid authorities had required the inhabitants of Medina to take an oath of allegiance (bay'a) to al-Mansur, with a formidable clause attached: anyone breaking this oath would, by that very fact, see his marriage annulled and his slaves freed — a threat designed to make perjury morally and socially unbearable^[49]. When Muhammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya took the city, Malik issued a legal opinion of considerable scope: this oath, having been obtained under compulsion, did not bind those who had taken it — relying for this on a well-established legal principle, namely that divorce and manumission pronounced under compulsion are invalid^[50].

The punishment ordered by Ja'far ibn Sulayman

This fatwa, in practice, legitimised the rallying of the Medinans to the Alid camp against the caliph in place. The Abbasid governor of Medina, Ja'far ibn Sulayman, saw in it a seditious stance^[51]. According to the account handed down by the classical biographers, an emissary of the governor presented himself secretly to Malik to sound him out; the imam, unsuspecting of the trap, reiterated his opinion. The governor then ordered that he be publicly flogged^[52].

The punishment was severe: Malik was beaten until he lost consciousness, then tied upside down on a mount and paraded through the streets of Medina^[53]. The repeated blows dislocated his shoulder^[54] — an injury so serious that he could no longer pray with his hands joined before him, which, according to some later commentators, partly explains the Maliki practice of praying with arms at one's sides (sadl) rather than crossed over the chest, although this practice rests first, for Malik and his disciples, on its own legal foundation and not on this incident^[55]. While he was being punished, he was ordered to publicly retract. His reply, which has remained famous in Maliki memory, was this:

"Let him who knows me know me; and let him who does not know me know that I am Malik, son of Anas, and that I hold that the divorce of one who acts under compulsion has no effect." — Malik ibn Anas, quoted in The Flogging of Imam Mālik, Islam21c^[56]

On hearing what Malik kept proclaiming in the streets of the city despite the torment, the governor ordered him to be untied^[57].

An authority that grew after the ordeal

Far from discrediting Malik, this persecution durably strengthened his prestige throughout the Muslim world: the firmness he had shown before power was read as living proof of his doctrinal integrity^[58]. Tradition reports that, on learning what had happened, Caliph al-Mansur himself travelled to Medina to present his apologies to the imam, claiming never to have given such an order to his governor, and then urged him never again to issue legal rulings without consulting Malik^[59]. Received with the caution required by any late apologetic account, this anecdote faithfully reflects in any case the place Malik already occupied in the religious balance of the nascent Abbasid empire.

The request of al-Mansur, then of Harun al-Rashid

The most significant episode for understanding Malik's legal thought is not, however, that of the whip, but the less spectacular one of his stubborn refusal to see his Muwatta imposed as the single code for the whole Muslim empire. According to the biographical tradition, Caliph al-Mansur, eager to unify a legal practice fragmented by the diversity of the nascent regional schools, asked Malik, as early as 148 of the Hijra (765–766), to "take in hand the discipline of law" and to compose a systematic work, purged in his view of the "rigours of Ibn Umar", the "accommodations of Ibn Abbas" and the "singular views of Ibn Mas'ud"^[60]. Malik refused, in the name of the legitimacy of local traditions — a refusal he maintained until the caliph's death, which occurred in 158 of the Hijra (775)^[61].

The argument he opposed to caliphal power deserves to be quoted in full, so clearly does it illuminate his conception of legitimate legal pluralism within one and the same community of faith:

"The Companions of the Messenger of God differed on these secondary questions, and they scattered into different lands, and they were all right." — Malik ibn Anas, reply to the caliph reported in the biographical tradition and quoted by Ulum al-Hadith^[62]

The same refusal, in a more detailed version, is attributed to Malik facing al-Mansur himself:

"If you now turn them away from what they know towards what they do not know, they will see unbelief in it. Rather confirm the people of each land in the knowledge proper to them, and leave them that knowledge." — Malik ibn Anas, quoted in English-language Wikipedia^[63]

Al-Mansur, impressed by the rigour of Malik's answers to his questions, had nevertheless first considered having his writings copied and authoritatively disseminated throughout the empire, even threatening — according to a tradition reported by several biographers — anyone who opposed it^[64]. It was precisely this temptation of forced standardisation that Malik helped to set aside.

'They were all right': Harun al-Rashid and the wisdom of diversity

A generation later, Caliph Harun al-Rashid (reign 786–809) took up the same project on his own account, with an even more spectacular intention: he wanted to hang the Muwatta on the Kaaba itself and compel all Muslims to conform to it^[65]. Malik opposed to him exactly the same reasoning as that already offered to al-Mansur — the legitimacy of the diversity of the schools stemming from the Companions dispersed across the provinces of the empire. The caliph, says tradition, bowed to this argument with deference:

"May God grant you success, O Abu Abd Allah." — Harun al-Rashid, replying to Malik, quoted by Ulum al-Hadith from the classical biographical tradition^[66]

This refusal, opposed successively to Caliphs al-Mansur and then Harun al-Rashid, who nevertheless had the power to compel him, is one of the most significant episodes in the whole history of classical Islamic law: it establishes the principle, still recognised today throughout the Sunni world, that the plurality of the four great legal schools is not an anomaly to be corrected but a legitimate richness of the tradition^[67].

Al-Shafi'i, the pupil turned founder in his turn

Among the many disciples trained in Malik's circle, one name dominates all the others by its own posterity: Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (767–820), who studied for several years in Medina before in turn founding the Shafi'i school, the third of the four great Sunni schools in chronological order^[68]. Al-Shafi'i never ceased to pay tribute to his master, whose teaching structured his entire legal method, before departing from it on several points of method — notably on the normative status granted to Medinan practice, which al-Shafi'i judged too particularist to ground a universal legal method.

Other direct disciples ensured the transmission and geographical spread of Malik's teaching: Abd Allah ibn Wahb (d. 813) and Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Qasim (d. 806), both trained in Medina before returning to Egypt, where they in turn trained the following generations of Maliki jurists; and above all the Andalusian Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi (d. 848), who received the Muwatta directly from Malik's mouth during the last year of the latter's life and brought back the recension that became the reference version throughout the Muslim West^[69].

A next generation that codifies and systematises

A generation later, Sahnun ibn Sa'id al-Tanukhi (776–854), trained notably under Ibn al-Qasim, compiled the Mudawwana al-Kubra, a vast collection systematising the legal teaching of Malik and his first Egyptian disciples — a work which became, with the Muwatta itself, one of the two textual pillars of the classical Maliki school^[70]. Later generations of Maliki jurists, among them the Andalusian qadi Iyad ibn Musa (1083–1149) and the Quranic commentator al-Qurtubi (d. 1273), explicitly claimed this doctrinal heritage without having been its direct pupils, ensuring its transmission down to the late Middle Ages^[71].

The geographical spread of the Maliki school

The following table situates the Maliki school among the four great Sunni schools of law, three of which were founded, a generation apart each, by a master and his own pupil.

The Maliki school thus became, over the centuries, the dominant legal rite in almost the whole of the Maghreb, in Muslim Andalusia — until the expulsion of Muslim populations from Spain in the 17th century —, in much of West Africa, in certain regions of Egypt, Sudan, Yemen and the Gulf, as well as in several major Sufi orders such as the Shadhiliyya and the Tijaniyya, both originally of Maliki allegiance^[72]. The Cordoban jurist Averroes (1126–1198), before becoming the great commentator of Aristotle we know, himself exercised the functions of Maliki qadi in Seville and then in Cordoba — a sign of the depth of the Maliki implantation in medieval Andalusia.

A peaceful death after a life wholly devoted to Medina

Malik died in Medina in 179 AH (795), at the age of 83 or 84 according to the biographers^[73]. According to the account given by Isma'il ibn Abi Uways, Malik's nephew, questioned afterwards about his uncle's last moments, the latter is said, in the terminal phase of his illness, to have recited the Muslim profession of faith and then a Quranic verse on the sovereignty of the divine decree^[74]. His funeral was led by Abd Allah al-Zaynabi, Abbasid governor of Medina and Mecca at the time — a sign that, whatever the past tensions with Abbasid power, Malik's religious authority was then fully recognised by that same power^[75].

He was buried in the cemetery of Baqi' al-Gharqad, located just opposite the Prophet's Mosque — the oldest and most venerated necropolis of Medinan Islam, where several wives and relatives of the Prophet also rest^[76].

The destruction of the funerary dome (1806, then 1925–1926)

A funerary dome was erected over Malik's tomb at a late medieval date, in the style common to the great venerated tombs of Baqi'. This funerary architecture, like all the cemetery's domes, was destroyed a first time in 1806 by the Saudi-Wahhabi forces of the Emirate of Diriyya, during their first capture of the Hejaz^[77]. Rebuilt in the mid-19th century under Ottoman administration, these same domes were razed a second time and definitively in 1925–1926, after the reconquest of the Hejaz by Ibn Sa'ud's forces: the demolition, begun on 21 April 1926 by the Wahhabi religious militia of the Ikhwan with the religious approval of qadi Abd Allah ibn Bulayhid, explicitly targeted every structure raised over a tomb, judged by Wahhabi doctrine as a form of blameworthy innovation (bid'a) bordering on idolatry^[78].

The British convert to Islam Eldon Rutter, present in Medina shortly after these events, described the result of this systematic demolition in terms that convey the scale of the undertaking: "Across the whole cemetery, nothing more could be seen but vague little mounds of earth and stones, pieces of wood, iron bars, blocks of stone, and a litter of broken cement and scattered bricks"^[79]. Among the tombs thus levelled was explicitly that of Malik ibn Anas, alongside those of the Prophet's parents and several relatives^[80]. Since then, despite regular appeals from across the Muslim world, the Saudi authorities have never authorised the reconstruction of any of these graves — Malik's tomb remains today a simple anonymous pit among others, in the middle of Baqi'^[81].

A model of intellectual rigour and moral firmness

Beyond the legal school alone that bears his name, Malik ibn Anas remains, in Muslim memory, a figure of reference on two distinct levels. On the one hand, the methodological rigour shown by the Muwatta — forty years of verification and critical selection of a considerable traditional material — made him, in the eyes of generations of scholars, a model of scrupulous sourcing, long before modern historical criticism laid down the same requirements in other terms^[82]. On the other hand, his firmness in the face of political power — whether the corporal punishment inflicted by Ja'far ibn Sulayman or the repeated pressures of al-Mansur and Harun al-Rashid to impose his work as the law of the empire — made him a lasting symbol of the independence of the religious magisterium from temporal power, even when that power itself claimed to speak for Islam^[83].

A Catholic view of authority and living tradition

The case of Malik ibn Anas invites, from the strict standpoint of a Catholic encyclopedia, a substantive remark on the nature of the religious authority he embodies. The Catholic Church looks with real respect on the intellectual and moral effort represented by a life wholly devoted to seeking faithful practice of the revealed Law: the Second Vatican Council invites Catholics to esteem, in Muslims, their worship of the one God, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth^[84]. But Malik's very method — grounding part of normative authority in the collective practice of a city, even the city where the Prophet lived — highlights by contrast what radically distinguishes classical Sunni Islam from Catholicism on the question of doctrinal authority.

The Catholic Church never entrusts the authentic interpretation of Revelation to the custom of a place, however venerable, nor to the accumulation of equally legitimate competing local jurisprudences: it entrusts it to the living Magisterium, exercised in continuity with the Apostles and assisted, according to its faith, by the assistance of the Holy Spirit so as not to err on points defined as belonging to the deposit of faith^[85]. Where the Sunni tradition assumes and legitimises, as Malik himself did before al-Mansur and Harun al-Rashid, a plurality of legal paths "all equally true", the Church affirms on the contrary the existence of a single organ of authentic interpretation, precisely to avoid the doctrinal dispersion that Malik, in a sense, deliberately chose to preserve as a richness rather than resolve by a unifying decree. Readers wishing to explore the doctrinal question of Islam and the Catholic position on it will find a full treatment in the dossier Islam and the Catholic answer.

• Muhammad (c. 570–632) — the founder of Islam, whose teaching structures Malik's whole legal method
• Aisha bint Abi Bakr — one of the great Medinan hadith sources used by Malik and his masters
• Abu Hanifa (699–767) — the founder, at Kufa, of the Hanafi school, Malik's older contemporary
• Al-Shafi'i (767–820) — Malik's pupil turned founder of the Shafi'i school
• Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855) — pupil of al-Shafi'i and founder of the Hanbali school
• Averroes (1126–1198) — Maliki qadi of Cordoba before becoming the great commentator on Aristotle
• Islam and the Catholic answer — the overall doctrinal dossier on Islam and the Church's position