The Imam of Medina wrote one of Islam's oldest surviving law books
Malik ibn Anas hardly needed to travel: the learning of early Islam came to him in Medina. His Muwatta is among the earliest Muslim legal texts still in existence, the chain of transmission he used was hailed as golden, and the school named after him became standard practice across North Africa and al-Andalus.
Malik was born in Medina around 711. His family came from the al-Asbahi tribe of Yemen; a great-grandfather, Abu Amir, moved them to Medina after converting in 623, and his grandfather studied under the caliph Umar and helped gather the parchments of the Quran in Uthman's time. As a youth Malik memorised the Quran and earned a licence to teach its recitation from Nafi ibn Abd ar-Rahman.
The city gave him extraordinary teachers, among them Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, Hisham ibn Urwa and the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, though his deepest debt was to Nafi, a freed slave of Abdullah ibn Umar. The sequence running from Malik through Nafi and Ibn Umar back to Muhammad was judged so reliable that al-Bukhari and other hadith experts called it the Golden Chain. Malik in turn taught al-Shafi'i, whose own student Ahmad ibn Hanbal founded yet another school.
His best-known work, the Muwatta, was composed in the early Abbasid period. It tried to survey law, justice and ritual as practised by consensus in Medina and to set a standard for questions that custom had not already settled. Later Sunni tradition read a saying of Muhammad, about seekers riding far for knowledge and finding no one wiser than the scholar of Medina, as a prophecy of Malik, although Ibn Hazm and al-Tahawi doubted that identification.
His theology was careful. He rejected describing God in human terms, defined faith as both speech and deeds, and affirmed that believers will see God in the hereafter. Scholars disagree over his attitude to speculative theology: Abdul-Ghani Ad-Daqr pictured him as its firm opponent, while G. F. Haddad notes he studied for thirteen to sixteen years with Ibn Hurmuz, a master of the discipline. Traditions also show him respecting early Sufis and approving the veneration of relics. He likened the Prophet's example to Noah's Ark, saving all who board it. He died in 795.
Source: Malik ibn Anas
