Malik ibn Anas

Malik ibn Anas (Arabic: مَالِك بْن أَنَس, romanized: Mālik ibn ʾAnas; c. 711–795) was a Muslim scholar, jurist, muhaddith and traditionalist who is the eponym of the Maliki school, one of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence in Sunni Islam.

Born in Medina into the clan of Humayr which belonged to the Banu Taym of Quraysh, Malik studied under Hisham ibn Urwa, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, Ja'far al-Sadiq, Nafi ibn Sarjis and others. He rose to become the premier scholar of hadith in his day, Referred to as the Imam of Medina by his contemporaries, his views in matters of jurisprudence became highly cherished both in his own life and afterward, becoming the eponym of the Maliki school, one of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence. His school became the normative rite for Sunni practice in much of North Africa, al-Andalus (until the expulsion of medieval native Iberian Muslims), a vast portion of Egypt, some parts of Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, and Khorasan, and the prominent orders in Sufism, the Shadili and Tijani.

Perhaps Malik's most famous accomplishment in the annals of Islamic history is, however, his compilation of al-Muwatta', one of the oldest and most revered Sunni hadith collections and one of "the earliest surviving Muslim law-book[s]," in which Malik attempted to "give a survey of law and justice; ritual and practice of religion according to the consensus of Islam in Medina, according to the sunna usual in Medina; and to create a theoretical standard for matters which were not settled from the point of view of consensus and sunna." Composed in the early days of the Abbasid caliphate, during which time there was a burgeoning "recognition and appreciation of the canon law" of the ruling party, Malik's work aimed to trace out a "smoothed path" (which is what al-muwaṭṭaʾ literally means) through "the farreaching differences of opinion even on the most elementary questions." Hailed as "the soundest book on earth after the Quran" by al-Shafi'i, the compilation of al-Muwatta' led to Malik being bestowed with such reverential epithets as Shaykh al-Islam, Proof of the Community, Imam of the Believers in Hadith, Imam of the Abode of Emigration, and Knowledgeable Scholar of Medina in later Sunni tradition.