Mālik ibn Anas

His mother is normally named al-ʿĀliya bint Shurayk al-Azdiyya, and there is a complication that should not be harmonised away. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ also quotes the Taymī judge Muḥammad b. ʿImrān saying, "He is an Arab of Ḥimyar, of their own stock; there is no lineage between us and him except that his mother was a client of my paternal uncle" — on which basis ʿUmar Abd-Allah Wymann-Landgraf writes that on his maternal side Mālik "was of unspecified non-Arab background." Both are in the record.

Two well-known traditions about him ought to be flagged rather than repeated. His mother is said to have carried him three years, which Ibn al-Mundhir calls the well-known view; de Slane's footnote to Ibn Khallikān makes the sharp observation that on Ibn Khallikān's own chronology this would put Mālik's birth three years after his reputed father's death — and notes that Mālik's own doctrine set the maximum pregnancy at six years, longer than any other jurist's. And his great-grandfather Abū ʿĀmir is claimed as a Companion on the authority of one fourth-century Mālikī judge; al-Dhahabī: "I have not seen anyone mention him among the Companions."

His grandfather Mālik b. Abī ʿĀmir was one of the senior Successors, transmitted from ʿUmar, Ṭalḥa, ʿĀʾisha and Abū Hurayra, was one of the four who carried ʿUthmān by night to his grave, and was among those who wrote out the copies of the Qurʾān when ʿUthmān collected them — a claim ʿIyāḍ supports by noting that Mālik mentions it himself in the Jāmiʿ of his own Muwaṭṭaʾ, which is as good as this material gets.

The father is thinner. Two isolated reports survive and they are about different people. Abū Muṣʿab says Mālik's father was crippled and lived by making arrows, with a house at al-Ḥarf known as the Cripple's Palace; that report's attribution is anonymous. Ibn Bukayr says that his brother al-Naḍr sold cloth and Mālik was a cloth merchant with him before he sought knowledge — and that report has a named Muwaṭṭaʾ transmitter behind it. The English retelling that has him trading in grain is a mistranslation; ʿIyāḍ's word is bazz, drapery.

The trade is the source of the epithet. Anas b. ʿIyāḍ: "Mālik was with us that day, and he was known only as Mālik, brother of al-Naḍr; then his zeal in seeking knowledge continued until we came to say: al-Naḍr, brother of Mālik."

And there is the story of the pigeons, in his own words: "I had a brother the age of Ibn Shihāb. One day my father put a question to us; my brother got it right and I got it wrong, and my father said to me: the pigeons have distracted you. I was angered, and devoted myself to Ibn Hurmuz for seven years." Al-Aʿẓamī objects on chronology — if the brother was al-Zuhrī's age he was forty years older than Mālik, and a father does not test a fifty-year-old and a ten-year-old together — and adds that this kind of thing is common in the literature of virtues, "what is written in the manāqib of Abū Ḥanīfa and al-Shāfiʿī is worse still."

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Hurmuz al-Aʿraj (d. 117) is the teacher he says he shut himself away with. How long is genuinely unsettled: the pigeons narrative says seven years, another transmission says eight, and al-Dhahabī's Siyar has Mālik say in the first person, "I sat with Ibn Hurmuz thirteen years, learning knowledge I did not divulge to anyone."

Nāfiʿ, the client of Ibn ʿUmar (d. 117), gives him the chain al-Bukhārī judged the soundest of all — Mālik from Nāfiʿ from Ibn ʿUmar. The reports about him are unusually domestic. Nāfiʿ had gone blind, and Mālik used to lead him by the hand from his house to the mosque. And: "I used to come to Nāfiʿ at midday, with no tree shading me from the sun, until he came out… then say: how did Ibn ʿUmar say concerning such-and-such? — and he would answer me. He had a sharp temper." The epithet "golden chain" is later usage; who coined it could not be established, and rival claims for the soundest chain exist — Aḥmad preferred al-Zuhrī–Sālim–Ibn ʿUmar, Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn preferred al-Aʿmash–Ibrāhīm–ʿAlqama–Ibn Masʿūd. The circulating figure of eighty golden-chain hadith in the Muwaṭṭaʾ is uncited and should not be repeated.

Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124) — "we used to crowd at Ibn Shihāb's door" — and Rabīʿa b. Abī ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, "Rabīʿat al-Raʾy," whom Schacht calls the most important of his teachers. His mother sent him to Rabīʿa with an instruction worth keeping: "Go to Rabīʿa and learn from his manners before his knowledge." On Rabīʿa's death Mālik said the sweetness of jurisprudence departed. The "tension" between them that circulates in English writing could not be verified; the sources positively deny it, and he names Rabīʿa among the scholars who suffered for their stand as he had.

His criteria for a teacher survive better than most things about him. "Knowledge is not to be taken from four: a fool who parades his folly, though he be the most copious transmitter of people; an innovator who calls to his whim; one who lies in ordinary speech, though I do not accuse him regarding hadith; and a pious, worshipping, excellent man who does not memorise what he transmits." And to his nephew: "This knowledge is religion — so look to whom you take your religion from."

On the numbers, treat with care. A late formula has him taking from nine hundred shaykhs, three hundred of them Successors; al-Suyūṭī says ninety-five; al-Dhahabī names over a hundred and thirty and gives no total. The low figure is the defensible one.

Four Egyptians and one Andalusian did most of the work of turning a Medinan teaching circle into a school with a geography.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Qāsim (d. 191) kept his company about twenty years and is the substantive authority behind the Mudawwana; Mālik called him a true jurist, as against Ibn Wahb, who had merely learned. ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb (d. 197) also gave him twenty years, heard from more than four hundred teachers, and produced some thirty volumes of Mālik's material; his own line is worth quoting — "had it not been that God rescued me through Mālik and al-Layth, I would have been lost." Ashhab (d. 204) survives only because Qayrawān kept his books. Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Laythī (d. 234), a Berber from Algeciras, carried the Muwaṭṭaʾ to Córdoba, and his recension became the vulgate because Mālikism became the state school of Umayyad Spain.

Al-Shāfiʿī came to him having already memorised the Muwaṭṭaʾ and read it to the assembled circle over eight months, with al-Layth b. Saʿd and Ibn al-Qāsim among the listeners; Mālik handed him the book. And Muḥammad al-Shaybānī, the Ḥanafī, took a recension away with him and printed his own school's answers underneath.

Saḥnūn, on whom the whole Western school rests, never met him. Mālik died before he could reach Madīna, and he learned the doctrine through Mālik's pupils, chiefly ʿAlī b. Ziyād of Tunis.

In 146 or 147, on the governor's order, Mālik was stripped and flogged in Madīna, and his arms were pulled until his shoulders came out of their sockets. He never recovered the full use of them. Ibrāhīm b. Ḥammād: "I used to watch Mālik, when he rose from his session, carry one hand with the other."

The occasion was a hadith. He transmitted, from Thābit b. al-Aḥnaf, that there is no valid divorce upon a man under compulsion — and the inference is immediate: if a coerced divorce is void, so is a coerced oath of allegiance, and the oath to al-Manṣūr had been taken in Madīna under compulsion. Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya had risen in Madīna in 145 and been killed; Jaʿfar b. Sulaymān, the caliph's cousin, arrived to restore the oath, and courtiers who envied Mālik told him what Mālik was saying. Abū'l-ʿArab's account records the method: Jaʿfar "planted upon him someone Mālik would not fear to be attacked from — and one is attacked from where one feels safe — who asked him about it in secret, and he gave him the fatwā, out of trust in him and out of sincerity."

What he said under the lash comes from al-Dārāwardī, who says he was the closest of creation to him at that moment: "I heard him say at every single lash: O God, forgive them, for they do not know." And Mālik's own memory of it, which is not edifying at all and is better for that: "Nothing on the day I was beaten was harder on me than the hair on my chest; my izār was torn and my thigh showed through it — so I vowed to God that if I got a new one, I would leave no hair on me."

Afterwards, and this is the part the sources agree on most strongly, it made him. Ibn al-Nadīm: "he never ceased after that to be in elevation and eminence — as if those whips had been jewellery upon him." Al-Layth b. Saʿd: "I hope God raises Mālik a degree in Paradise for every lash." Al-Dhahabī's own gloss is drier: "this is the fruit of a praiseworthy trial, that it raises the servant in the eyes of the believers; and in any case it is by what our own hands have earned."

A caliph is supposed to have proposed making the Muwaṭṭaʾ the law of the empire, and Mālik is supposed to have refused. The refusal is the most quoted thing about him after the book itself, and it exists in at least five incompatible versions.

In one, al-Manṣūr commissioned the book — "compose for the people a book by which I may carry them" — and Mālik had not finished it when the caliph died. In another, al-Manṣūr proposed to write it out in liquid gold, hang it in the Kaʿba and carry the people upon it. In a third group, and this is the family al-Aʿẓamī accepts, the book already existed and the caliph merely saw it on pilgrimage and proposed to impose it. In a fourth, the request comes immediately after the flogging, from a caliph who has just apologised. And in a fifth, preserved by Abū Nuʿaym, it is Hārūn al-Rashīd, not al-Manṣūr, who consults him about hanging the book in the Kaʿba.

In every version he refuses, and the reason he gives is always the same shape: the Companions dispersed into the lands and each gave judgement in his own city according to what he saw. Al-Wāqidī has him say it at length — "leave the people and what they are upon, and what the people of each land have chosen for themselves" — and the caliph answer, "by my life, had you obeyed me in that I would have ordered it."

The threat in the caliph's mouth is what makes the anecdote worth reading. When Mālik says the people of Iraq will not accept Medinan knowledge, al-Manṣūr's reply in one version is: "their commonalty will be struck over it with the sword and their backs cut over it with whips," and in another, "whoever opposes it, I strike off his neck."

Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ's preamble to his own chapter on Mālik's other works is the most important sentence in the whole question, and he wrote it in the twelfth century: "Mālik has noble compositions transmitted from him, most of them by sound chains, in more than one branch of knowledge; but none of them became widely known from him, and he was not assiduous in having any of them heard and transmitted, except the Muwaṭṭaʾ — deleting from it and abridging it little by little."

Schacht's counterpart is shorter: "as for whether Mālik produced works other than the Muwaṭṭaʾ — this is a matter of doubt." So: one book, plus a penumbra of short epistles of varying and sometimes indefensible authenticity, plus a great mass of school literature that is not his at all.

And even the one book is not one book. Around ninety to a hundred students are named as having transmitted it whole; ʿIyāḍ knew of about twenty textual recensions "and some have said thirty"; four survive complete in print. The most divergent of them shares less than a quarter of its text with the standard one.