Imam Malik Biography

Imam Abu Abdullah Malik ibn Anas ibn Malik al-Asbahi was the eponymous founder of the Maliki school of Sunni jurisprudence, one of the four enduring madhhabs of Sunni Islam, and the compiler of al-Muwatta — the earliest surviving major compilation of hadith and Islamic law. Born in Madinah in 93 AH / 711 CE into a scholarly family of Yemeni origin (his grandfather had migrated to Madinah and studied directly under several Companions of the Prophet ﷺ), he received the title Imam Dar al-Hijrah — 'The Imam of the City of Migration.'

Malik is reported to have studied under approximately three hundred Tabi'in and compiled his understanding of the Madinan tradition over forty years of careful selection. His al-Muwatta ('The Well-Trodden Path'), which he showed to seventy Madinan jurists for review before publication, combines roughly 1,720 hadith with the legal opinions of the Companions and Tabi'in and Malik's own analyses. Imam al-Shafi'i, who studied under him, said of it: 'There is no book on earth, after the Book of Allah, more authentic than the book of Malik.' Malik's chain of narration — Malik from Nafi' from Ibn Umar from the Prophet ﷺ — was celebrated by later hadith scholars as Silsilat al-Dhahab, the Golden Chain.

A distinctive feature of Malik's legal methodology was his treatment of the continuous practice of the people of Madinah ('amal ahl al-Madinah) as a source of law, on the reasoning that Madinan practice preserved the lived Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ across generations. He was famously firm in scholarly independence: publicly flogged by the governor of Madinah for issuing a fatwa against the wishes of the caliph al-Mansur, and refusing the same caliph's later proposal to impose al-Muwatta as the empire's single legal code. He died in Madinah in 179 AH / 795 CE and was buried at al-Baqi'. The Maliki school he founded remains the dominant madhhab across North and West Africa, much of the Gulf, and parts of Egypt and Sudan.