Imam Malik ﵀ and the Muwatta’ of Medina

A Written Book, Decades before al-Bukhari ﵀

In the previous article we followed al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀ in Egypt, the scholar who with his correspondence to Medina showed that the hadith science at the end of the second century AH was no longer the affair of the circle of one city, but a network of writing that connected capitals. We saw how his famous letter to Imam Malik ﵀ travelled back and forth between Fustat and Medina, in a dialogue about the status of amal ahl al-Madina that was possible only because both scholars had their material at hand in ordered written form. The letter of al-Layth ﵀ was, in its genre, an academic document. The addressee was the man who in his own city had completed the book that had given the Egyptian writer the occasion to answer in pen and parchment.

That book is the Muwatta’. The man is Imam Malik ibn Anas ﵀, born in Medina around 93 AH and deceased there in 179 AH. And the book he left behind breaks, in its existence and in its spread, one of the most stubborn theses that the Western hadith criticism put into circulation about early Islam in the course of a hundred years. That thesis, in its sharpest formulation in Joseph Schacht in 1950, holds that an authorised, written and publicly circulating hadith compilation existed only from the third century AH, with the Sahih of al-Bukhari ﵀ in 256 AH as its anchor point. What existed before that would have been either private notes, or oral transmission that no one could consult in published form. The hadith corpus would, in this presentation, have undergone its decisive stabilisation only when al-Bukhari ﵀ carried out his selection upon it.

The Muwatta’ breaks this thesis a hundred years before its proposed moment of birth. The book was set down in writing by Imam Malik ﵀ himself, not put together by a later editor from loose notes. It was not published once by its author and then left to its fate, but revised over decades, with the author himself dictating corrections to his students and rewording passages. It was taught publicly in Medina; hundreds of students read it and measured it textually against him. It travelled, in the heads and in the codices of his pupils, to Egypt, to Iraq, to Sham, to Yemen and, in the most famous journey, to al-Andalus, where in the version of Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi ﵀ it has been transmitted into our own time. And it was treated by al-Bukhari ﵀ himself, a century and a half later, not as a competitor but as a foundation; the most praised isnad chain of the Sahih, the chain that the classical hadith scholars came to call asahh al-asanid, the most authentic of all chains, runs through Malik ﵀ to Nafi’ ﵀ to Ibn Umar ﵁ to the Prophet ﷺ.

This article follows the Muwatta’ in its genesis, its content, its spread and its afterlife. We do this with two aims at once. The first is biographical: we want to see Imam Malik ﵀ standing in his own Medinan surroundings, with his teachers, with his book practice, with his refusal to subject his book to a caliphal legislation. The second is structural: we want to show, by way of his work, what it really means that the hadith science at the end of the second century AH was a published, controlled and internationalised discipline, and not the private practice that orientalist historiography still wished to make of it in the twentieth century.

Who Was Imam Malik ﵀

Malik ibn Anas ibn Malik ibn Abi 'Amir al-Asbahi was born in Medina into a family whose roots lay in the Yemeni tribe of Asbah, but which had settled in the capital of the ummah after the Prophetic period. His great-grandfather, Malik ibn Abi 'Amir ﵁, was a Sahabi and belonged to the generation that had met the Prophet ﷺ in person. He was moreover one of the men from the commission that Uthman ibn Affan ﵁ had charged in 25 AH with the definitive redaction of the Quran mushaf. Through this family line Malik ﵀ stood from his birth in the direct proximity of the highest levels of the Medinan transmission of knowledge. He was no imported scholar who had to win a place among the established families with difficulty; he was himself one of those families.

His year of birth is usually placed by the biographical literature at 93 AH, the same year in which Anas ibn Malik ﵁, the last Sahabi of Medina, passed away in Basra. That is a symbolic coincidence. At the moment that the direct link to the Prophet ﷺ had disappeared from Medina in Anas ﵁, there was born in the same city the boy who would organise this link, through the Tabi’in and the tabi-tabi’in, into a book. Malik ﵀'s education began at an age that would be unthinkable in our time, but that was normal in the Medina of the first decades of the second century AH. He began to memorise hadith at a very young age, and he was, as his later pupil Sufyan ibn Uyayna ﵀ has transmitted, a student who from the very first beginning wrote down what he received.

Azami ﵀ notes in his summary of Malik ﵀'s learning practice a telling detail. He is one of the authorities in the field of hadith. He began to learn hadith by writing. It appears that he wrote from all his teachers and did not rely on memory alone. Sufyan ibn Uyayna ﵀ has said that the scholars followed Malik ﵀ in the testing of the transmitter. If Malik ﵀ had written from him, they would write from him. The detail is not incidental. It says that Malik ﵀'s writing practice was seen in his own time not merely as a personal habit, but as an instrument of testing; if Malik ﵀ had put a transmitter on paper, that transmitter was accredited in the wider circle of scholars.

His teachers were the flower of Medina in the first decades of the second century AH. Two of them stand out in the isnad material of the Muwatta’: Nafi’ ﵀ and al-Zuhri ﵀ were, as Azami establishes, both the principal sources of Malik ﵀ for his book. At the top stood Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀, the systematic compiler whose life and history of attack we followed earlier. Al-Zuhri ﵀ was already an established authority when Malik ﵀ came to sit at his feet as a boy, and he is, in the isnad material of the Muwatta’, the most cited individual teacher. A second pillar was Nafi’ ﵀, the mawla of Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁. Nafi’ ﵀ had spent decades in the household of Ibn Umar ﵁ and was the man who had recorded the gigantic Umar-Ibn-Umar transmission with the greatest fidelity of detail. Through Nafi’ ﵀ Malik ﵀ gained direct access to what the second caliph had judged in legal and ritual questions, and to what the Prophet ﷺ had transmitted through the intermediation of Umar ﵁ and his son across two generations.

A third teacher was Hisham ibn Urwa ﵀, son of Urwa ibn az-Zubayr ﵀, and thus the man through whom the transmission of Aisha ﵂ came to Malik ﵀ in two generations. The Prophetic intimacy that was preserved in Aisha ﵂'s memory entered the Medinan fiqh through this chain, with Hisham ﵀ as the direct link whom Malik ﵀ had heard in person. A fourth was Rabi’ah ibn Abi Abd ar-Rahman, known as Rabi’ah ar-Ra’y ﵀, the Medinan jurist whose analytically reasoning style intensely influenced Malik ﵀ in his young years. Yahya ibn Sa’id al-Ansari ﵀, Abu az-Zinad ﵀ and Ibn Hurmuz ﵀ filled out the row, and from the broader fiqh context came also Ja’far as-Sadiq ﵀, the descendant of Ali ﵁ and Fatimah ﵂, with whom Malik ﵀ stood in dialogue in Medina on several occasions.

A teacher who is missing from no biography, and whose patronage fixed Malik ﵀'s status in his own time, was Ibn Hurmuz ﵀. Malik ﵀ has said of him that he continued to live near his house for almost fifteen years so as to miss not a single session. The figure comes on top of the eight years that al-Zuhri ﵀ had lived near Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib ﵀, as we have seen earlier. Through these two figures together we gain a picture of the formation of scholars in Medina that lies far from the picture of loose lectures. A Medinan student of significance built up his relationship to a teacher in ten to fifteen years of daily proximity, with the intention of taking over his entire material, his entire manner of working and his entire criteria of judgement. What such a student then composed from his teachers was no compilation of loose notes; it was the synthesised execution of an education that was itself the synthesised execution of two preceding educations.

On this foundation Malik ﵀ built his own circle. From his early thirties he gave instruction in the Prophetic Mosque itself. The place where he sat, not far from the minbar, was sought out by all later visitors to Medina and belongs to the history of the city. He gave hadith and fiqh at once; he gave the transmission of the Prophet ﷺ, the athar of the Sahaba ﵃, the practice of the Medinan Tabi’in and his own fiqh conclusions in one synthesised session, and he let his pupils write. When ash-Shafi’i ﵀, decades later, looked back on his years in Medina, he summed up his teacher in one formulation that has become proverbial in the whole history of Islamic learning: When the scholars come to speak of hadith, then Malik ﵀ is the star.

The Muwatta’ as a Book

What is the Muwatta’. The word muwatta’ means literally “the trodden”, or “the made-even”, in the sense of a terrain that has become so smooth through long use that anyone can walk on it. The Arabic name sums up in one word what Imam Malik ﵀ had in view with his book. It was no collection of obscure transmission, no archive of rare chains, no showcase of curiosities. It was a book in which only those hadith and those athar were included that were so much used and so uncontested in the practice of the Medinan community of scholars that they counted as common property, as familiar ground. According to the classical account Malik ﵀ originally considered a much larger body of material for inclusion and reduced it sharply in repeated revisions, because only a core met the criterion of muwatta’.

The book is organised by fiqh subject, not by transmitter and not chronologically. It opens with Kitab Waqut as-Salah, the Book of the Times of Prayer, and then traverses the complete topography of Islamic ritual and legal life: purity, prayer, fasting, hajj, jihad, oaths, contracts, marriage, divorce, inheritance, hudud, qisas, the law of slaves, trade, drink, clothing, etiquette, intercession, qadar. Each chapter opens with the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ that determine the subject, then come the athar of the Sahaba ﵃ who passed judgement in concrete cases, then the practice of the known Medinan Tabi’in, and finally Malik ﵀'s own fiqh conclusion in which he synthesises the three layers. The result is a book that in its structure serves three layers at once, and that carries out three movements at once in its reader: he learns what the Prophet ﷺ has said, he sees how the Sahaba ﵃ applied it, and he is presented with the Medinan legal practice as the worked-out form in which it took shape in a living community.

The number of transmissions in the standard edition of the Yahya recension of Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi ﵀ lies in the order of seventeen hundred, divided over the two categories of marfu’ (ascribed directly to the Prophet ﷺ) and mawquf (stopping at the Sahaba ﵃ or the Tabi’in). The share of Sahaba-and-Tabi’in material weighs heavier in it than the directly Prophetic, which says that the Muwatta’ was deliberately composed not as a pure hadith collection but as a worked-out fiqh handbook. Here the book touches a dimension that is an awkward fact for the whole orientalist separation between hadith and fiqh. The Western historiography of Islam, in the line of Schacht, has tried to present hadith and fiqh as two successive historical layers: first there was fiqh, based on local customs and later-fabricated Prophetic sayings, and only afterwards came the hadith discipline that supplied the early fiqh with retroactive isnad. The Muwatta’ is, in this construction, an impossible book. It is a book in which hadith and fiqh are intertwined from birth, in which Prophetic sayings, Sahaba practice and scholarly reasoning come together in each chapter in the same textual space, and in which the reader’s feat consists precisely in seeing how each fiqh position is rooted in each of the three layers.

That Malik ﵀ did not invent this structure but took it over from his teachers, and merely worked it out to book format, is an important point for our argumentation. The Medinan circle around al-Zuhri ﵀ already worked in this composition of Prophetic words, Sahaba practice and Tabi’in application. The Muwatta’ is, in that respect, not the invention of a genre but the first publication of a method that had already existed in the Medinan chain of teachers for a century in oral and in semi-written form. Malik ﵀ did not make something new; he made something existing available for the first time in book form to the whole Islamic world.

The Golden Chain

At one single isnad chain in the Muwatta’ the hadith tradition wants us to look more closely in this connection, for it is the piece of evidence on which, a hundred and fifty years later, al-Bukhari ﵀‘s own edifice rested. The chain runs from Malik ﵀ to Nafi’ ﵀ to Abdullah ibn Umar ﵁ to the Prophet ﷺ. Four men, three intermediate links, an unbroken concatenation of memory and testing in four successive generations. In the classical ulum al-hadith this chain has become a fixed category. The muhaddithun came to call it asahh al-asanid, the most authentic of all isnads. To whom exactly this ranking must be attributed is not settled among the classical scholars themselves; in the mustalah literature it is variously connected to al-Bukhari ﵀, to Ishaq ibn Rahwayh and to others. What stands firm is that the later hadith scholars, among them Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani ﵀ and adh-Dhahabi ﵀, recorded the Malik-Nafi’-Ibn-Umar chain as one of the most highly valued chains.

What does this chain say in its internal structure. Ibn Umar ﵁ built up, from his early youth until the death of the Prophet ﷺ, in the direct proximity of his father Umar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ and in regular contact with the Prophet ﷺ himself, a memory that preserved with photographic precision the young years of the caliphate, the Hudaybiyya negotiations, the Hajj rite in its definitive Prophetic form, and hundreds of details of the Medinan ritual life. He died in 73 or 74 AH, at an age of well over eighty years, after half a century of issuing fiqh in Medina. Nafi’ ﵀ was his mawla, originally a captive from Khurasan who had been ransomed by Ibn Umar ﵁ and who then lived for decades in his household. When Ibn Umar ﵁ dictated a hadith to a visitor for the umpteenth time, Nafi’ ﵀ sat beside him. When a questioner submitted a point of doubt about a Prophetic act, it was Nafi’ ﵀ who checked the detail. When Ibn Umar ﵁ could not speak for a day because of an illness, it was Nafi’ ﵀ who gave answer in his place. The hadith tradition has written of Nafi’ ﵀ that his transmission of Ibn Umar ﵁ must be read not as an attribution, but as a representation; he did not speak about Ibn Umar ﵁, he spoke for him.

Malik ﵀ heard Nafi’ ﵀ in person in his early years of study. Nafi’ ﵀ passed away in 117 AH, when Malik ﵀ was about twenty-four years old. The young Malik ﵀ sat intensively at Nafi’ ﵀‘s feet in the years between his sixteenth and his twenty-fourth, and he took over the Ibn Umar transmission in its full Nafi’iyya form. It is precisely this datum that Azami brought in against Schacht: teacher and pupil both lived in one city until Malik ﵀ was twenty-four years old, so that the chain cannot be a later reconstruction but is a directly passed-on transmission. His ability to activate this chain in dozens of places in the Muwatta’ is not a literary choice but a simple consequence of what he had personally received.

Four men, three intermediate links, one Prophet ﷺ. None of the three links is an attribution; all three are transmission relationships of decades. It is in this material reality that the classical ranking asahh al-asanid gains its meaning. A chain in which each member heard his predecessor daily for ten years or longer, and in which the predecessor in his turn heard his own predecessor daily for ten years or longer, is a chain in which the possibility of forgery or misunderstanding is structurally out of the picture. When al-Bukhari ﵀ built his Sahih a hundred and fifty years later, he chose precisely this chain as the carrier for many of his most central legal hadith. That is no literary preference. That is the professional judgement of a man who knew all the alternatives and knew which weighed the heaviest.

The Public Circulation

A book that has been written by its author and put away in a drawer is not a publicly circulating compilation. A book that is publicly taught by its author, that is dictated to hundreds of pupils, that is carried by its pupils in dozens of independent transmission lines to different capitals, and that is there recited in comparable form to a third-generation public, is what the hadith science understands by a public work. The Muwatta’ was, in this second sense, a public book from the beginning.

Azami notes that the Muwatta’ was published time and again and that hundreds of students have read the book. He mentions that the book exists in about fifteen transmitted versions, and that ad-Daraqutni ﵀ in the fourth century AH composed a work of his own in which he sets the different versions side by side to document the variants. It was formerly thought that this was the first book composed in Hadith or Fiqh, but now we have, fortunately, some of Malik ﵀'s sources at our disposal. The passing remark is no small one in our argumentation. It says that the Muwatta’ was long regarded, in both the Islamic and the orientalist academic literature, as the first of its genre, and that even this supposition, which already places the Muwatta’ a century before al-Bukhari ﵀, has had recent finds that brought still earlier precursors to light. The thesis that the hadith compilation would have begun only in the third century AH breaks not only on the Muwatta’, but even on the sources on which the Muwatta’ itself in turn leans.

Who were the pupils who carried this publication outward. We follow a number of them in detail, geographically spread, because in their dispersion they show the structural reality that we adduce in the whole argumentation.

To al-Andalus the Muwatta’ went through Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi ﵀, deceased in 234 AH, born in Córdoba in 152 AH. Yahya ﵀ travelled as a young man to Medina, sat for a year and a half in Malik ﵀‘s circle, heard the Muwatta’ from the master himself in its complete form with all chapters but one (a well-known detail in the biographical literature, of which more below), and brought the work back to the Iberian peninsula in 179 AH, the year of Malik ﵀‘s death. His version of the Muwatta’ became in the centuries thereafter the standard text in the whole Maghreb and in al-Andalus, and it is this recension that is dominant in the present-day editions. Yahya ﵀ trained a whole generation of Andalusian fuqaha in Córdoba, and the Muwatta’ became, through the judicial position that the Maliki school occupied in the Umayyad emirate of Córdoba, the carrier of legal practice in cities at the utmost western edge of the inhabited world, thousands of kilometres from Medina.

To Egypt the work went through several chains at once. Abdullah ibn Wahb ﵀, deceased in 197 AH, was one of Malik ﵀‘s most meticulous pupils and himself composed in Fustat a collection that combined the Muwatta’ transmission with material from other teachers. Abd ar-Rahman ibn al-Qasim ﵀, deceased in 191 AH, was a second Egyptian proclaimer, and his pupil Sahnun ﵀ in Kairouan composed, on the basis of Ibn al-Qasim ﵀‘s notes, the Mudawwana, the second great Maliki law book of the western world, which supplemented and elaborated the Muwatta’. The third Egyptian line ran through Abdullah ibn Yusuf at-Tinnisi ﵀, deceased in 218 AH, and it is precisely through this last man that the Muwatta’ enters the Sahih of al-Bukhari ﵀: a considerable number of hadith in the Sahih carry the isnad Bukhari → Abdullah ibn Yusuf → Malik → Nafi’ → Ibn Umar ﵁ → Prophet ﷺ. Azami notes, moreover, that Malik ﵀ recorded in the Muwatta’ eighty Prophetic transmissions from Nafi’ ﵀, good for about fifteen pages in the printed text of Ibn Abd al-Barr. A hundred and fifty years after the Muwatta’ was written, it was a direct source in al-Bukhari ﵀'s own working process, at one single step of transmission from Malik ﵀ himself.

To Iraq the Muwatta’ went through Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ash-Shaybani ﵀, deceased in 189 AH, the most famous pupil of Abu Hanifa ﵀ and the man who fixed the Hanafi fiqh in written book form. Ash-Shaybani ﵀ travelled to Medina, heard the Muwatta’ from Malik ﵀ in person, and on that basis composed his own Muwatta’, a recension in which after each hadith he indicated how the Hanafi school would approach the material. This ash-Shaybani recension circulated in Iraq, in Khurasan and in the eastern world, and for centuries it was the channel through which Hanafi jurists stood in dialogue with the Maliki transmission. That a pupil of Abu Hanifa ﵀ travelled in person to Medina to hear the Muwatta’ at the source, and that he then composed a recension of his own in Iraq, is in itself already a proof of the character of a work that Malik ﵀'s book carried in its own time. A private note is not collected on site by the adversary of the school and worked into a published edition. A published-and-recognised work is.

In Medina itself Abu Mus’ab az-Zuhri ﵀, deceased in 242 AH, provided a transmission line that preserved the work in the capital itself in its full Medinan form. Suwayd ibn Sa’id al-Hadathani ﵀ supplied a fourth important recension. Ibn Bukayr ﵀ in Egypt, Ali ibn Ziyad in Ifriqiya, and a series of others filled out the list. The roughly fifteen fully transmitted versions of which ad-Daraqutni ﵀ made use in his comparative work are the recensions that were still textually consultable in the fourth century AH.

What comes to expression in this dispersed circulation is what the hadith science understands by tawatur lafzi and tawatur ma’nawi. The work of Malik ﵀ was spread within one generation after his death, through a series of independent intermediate links, from Medina to Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Sham, Yemen and al-Andalus. At each point of that spread the text was laid before other pupils and compared with other recensions. An arbitrary addition in one recension stood out immediately in comparison with the others. An arbitrary omission in one recension did the same. It is precisely this method that Azami describes in the early scholars: sometimes they collected fifteen and twenty versions of one work to compare them for errors and deviations. The corrective work that ad-Daraqutni ﵀ did in the fourth century AH, and that has been repeated today in modern critical editions, used precisely this multitude of independent transmission lines to locate and weigh every variant. It is in this material architecture of control that the Muwatta’ was not only a publicly published work, but a controlled publicly published work; a book in which every deviation could be measured against a series of parallel versions.

The Confrontation with Harun ar-Rashid

Among the most famous anecdotes in Malik ﵀‘s biography belongs the episode in which an Abbasid caliph proposed to him to declare the Muwatta’ binding caliphal law for the whole realm. The classical biographers, among them Ibn Abd al-Barr in al-Intiqa’ and Qadi Iyad in Tartib al-Madarik, have preserved the episode in several variants. In some it concerns Harun ar-Rashid, in others his father al-Mansur or his predecessor al-Mahdi, and the wordings diverge from version to version. The core is the same in all variants: an Abbasid caliph offers to make Malik ﵀'s book the universal law of the ummah, and Malik ﵀ refuses. We render the episode here as the classical biographers transmit it, without ascribing a fixed verbatim text to the varying versions.

According to these transmissions the caliph was in Medina during one of his Hajj pilgrimages, where Malik ﵀ was the undisputed first authority. When the caliph had him summoned to the palace, Malik ﵀ is said to have answered that knowledge does not come to the ruler but that the ruler comes to knowledge. The caliph thereupon, reportedly more impressed than offended, came himself to Malik ﵀'s house.

In the interview that the biographers then describe, the caliph praised the Muwatta’ as the best book composed after the Book of Allah ﷻ and offered to have it multiplied in copies and elevated to compulsory law in the courts of the caliphate, so that the ummah would live under one legal system and the division between the fiqh schools would disappear. Malik ﵀ advised against it. His objection, as the transmission renders it, was that the Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had gone out to the various lands after his death and had left behind in each land hadith and judgement that the people there had taken over from them, so that every region had formed a legal practice of its own on that basis. To elevate one book to compulsory law would take from the people what they had received from the Companions ﵃. When the caliph in one variant proposed to hang the Muwatta’ in any case in the Ka’bah so that every pilgrim could consult it, Malik ﵀ advised against that too, with the argument that the Companions had differed among themselves on fiqh matters without falling into quarrel over it, and that his book merely rendered what he had heard in Medina from his teachers: no norm that had to stand above the other fiqh, but a work that lived beside them.

The anecdote is of significance for our argumentation in two respects. The first respect is biographical. Malik ﵀ was no court scholar who sought the favour of the caliphate; he was, on the contrary, a scholar who kept the caliphate at a distance when that caliphate wished to monopolise his work. Whoever wishes to read the Muwatta’ as a state project breaks on this anecdote. The work was neither commissioned by a caliph nor sanctioned by a caliph; it was expressly withdrawn by its author from every caliphal claim.

The second respect is structural. In his refusal Malik ﵀ articulated a vision of scholarly independence that would become the norm in the whole of classical Islamic history. A scholar may advise a caliph, may teach for a caliph, may receive remunerations from a caliph, but may not let his own work be elevated to law by a caliph, because such an elevation takes from the ummah its pluralism of fiqh schools and from scholarship its autonomy. That a scholar of Malik ﵀'s stature formulated this principle not only in his work but against an Abbasid caliph in person has been, in the history of the relationship between knowledge and power in Islam, a marker point to which countless later scholars have referred back.

What This Refutes

We now return to the thesis with which this article opened. The Western hadith criticism, in the line of Ignaz Goldziher in 1890 and Joseph Schacht in 1950, has had as its core idea that the hadith literature does not go back to the Prophet ﷺ and the Sahaba ﵃ but to the legal and theological struggles of the second century AH. In that framework they worked with a chronological schema in which the real hadith compilation would have taken place only in the third century AH, with al-Bukhari ﵀'s Sahih in 256 AH as anchor point. What would have counted as hadith transmission before the third century AH would have been either local fiqh that was later adorned with retroactive isnad, or private notes that had never existed in a publicly verified form.

The Muwatta’ is, in this historical schema, the awkward fact that cannot be reasoned away. We have established in this article six structural properties of the work, and we now set them against the orientalist schema, one by one, to demonstrate where each element of the schema runs aground on the material evidence.

First, the Muwatta’ was set down in writing by its author personally. Malik ﵀ did not, like other scholars, leave the writing to his pupils; he dictated the work himself and revised it himself over decades. The recension of Yahya ﵀ even mentions it expressly in its introduction: this is the book as Malik ﵀ himself composed it and whose author he was. A private note would not have carried such authorship.

Second, the Muwatta’ was revised over decades. The later recensions contain passages that were formulated differently in the earlier recensions, or where Malik ﵀ in his later years had dropped transmissions that he had earlier included. We know this not from a supposition, but from the comparative study that ad-Daraqutni ﵀ carried out in the fourth century AH into the different recensions. A work that is revised by its author over decades is a living public work, no private archive.

Third, the Muwatta’ was publicly taught in Medina; hundreds of students read it. It was not a work passed on in a closed circle; it was the book that the Prophetic Mosque itself regarded as teaching matter, with Malik ﵀ as the teacher who took his place beside the minbar of the Prophet ﷺ. The public character of this teaching is broadly recorded in the biographical literature.

Fourth, the Muwatta’ was physically present, within one generation after the death of its author, in all the great capitals of the ummah, with independent transmission lines that had been measured against the source through personal presence in Medina. Yahya al-Laythi ﵀ brought it to al-Andalus, Ibn Wahb ﵀ and Ibn al-Qasim ﵀ to Egypt, ash-Shaybani ﵀ to Iraq, Suwayd ﵀ to Khurasan, Abu Mus’ab ﵀ preserved it in Medina. A private note does not spread along a series of independent transmission lines across a continent within one generation; a published standard work does.

Fifth, the Muwatta’ was mutually comparable in its different recensions, and the preserved corpus of about fifteen recensions made text-critical comparison possible. We still have today a number of those recensions in complete form, and can subject ad-Daraqutni ﵀‘s fourth-century comparison to a present-day repetition. The results are dramatic for the orientalist thesis: the variants between the recensions exist, but they are marginal, they never touch the legal conclusion and they almost never touch the isnad chain. The material stability of the Muwatta’ across these independent transmission lines is, in the modern text-critical assessment, remarkably high.

Sixth, the Muwatta’ was taken up by al-Bukhari ﵀ himself, a century and a half after its completion, as a direct source in his Sahih, with a considerable number of hadith carrying the isnad Bukhari → Abdullah ibn Yusuf at-Tinnisi → Malik → Nafi’ → Ibn Umar ﵁ → Prophet ﷺ. This fact is the most crushing for the orientalist schema, for it says that the scholar who in that schema is presented as the first inventor of the authorised hadith compilation himself presents his work as a selective continuation of a work that had already existed in public form a century and a half earlier. Sezgin has accordingly characterised al-Bukhari ﵀ as the first who really called the authority of the isnad into question, and not as its inventor. Al-Bukhari ﵀ did not build the Sahih out of nothing; he built it out of a corpus of which the Muwatta’ was one of the fundamental building blocks, and out of an isnad architecture of which the Malik-Nafi’-Ibn-Umar chain formed the most prestigious element.

Goldziher and Schacht based their thesis on a chronological schema. That schema runs aground on a book that exists a hundred years too early, is spread too far in copies, and that a hundred and fifty years later was taken over as a source by the scholar who in that schema would be the anchor point. What they wished to place as the birth of the authorised hadith compilation is in reality a high point in a much longer development of which the Muwatta’ is the first published snapshot.

The Golden Chain in al-Bukhari ﵀'s Sahih

We stay a moment longer with this sixth point, for it is the strongest in the chain of evidence against the orientalist schema. Al-Bukhari ﵀ inherits, through his teacher Abdullah ibn Yusuf at-Tinnisi ﵀ in Egypt, the complete Muwatta’ transmission directly from Malik ﵀‘s pupil. At-Tinnisi ﵀ heard Malik ﵀ teach in Medina in his younger years, took over the Muwatta’ in its own Medinan form, and passed it on in his Egyptian years to generations of pupils. When al-Bukhari ﵀ arrived in Egypt in his journeys through the ummah, at-Tinnisi ﵀ was still a living authority there, and al-Bukhari ﵀ spent years in his circle. What al-Bukhari ﵀ then included in the Sahih under the isnad Bukhari → Abdullah ibn Yusuf → Malik → Nafi’ → Ibn Umar ﵁ → Prophet ﷺ is a transmission that he had heard at two intermediate links from Malik ﵀ himself.

The quantity of hadith in the Sahih that carry this or a variant Malik chain is hard to overestimate. In the Book of the Times of Prayer, in the Book of the Hajj, in the Book of Fasting, in the Book of the Zakah, in the Book of Marriage, in numerous places in the legal chapters this chain returns, often as the opening hadith of a new chapter. When a present-day reader opens a chapter of the Sahih and looks at the first hadith, he finds in a considerable part of the chapters the Malik-Nafi’-Ibn-Umar chain as the carrier. This is no coincidence. It is the deliberate constructional choice of al-Bukhari ﵀, who, when he sought the most carrying hadith for a chapter, fell back on precisely that chain which the muhaddithun came to value as asahh al-asanid.

We can also say it in other words. What is presented in the Sahih of al-Bukhari ﵀ as the most authentic hadith is, in a considerable part of the cases, transmission that he took over directly from a published-and-known book of a century and a half earlier, with only two intermediate links to the author of that book. The Sahih does not lean on a corpus of loose transmission that al-Bukhari ﵀ would have collected out of nothing in the third century AH. It leans on a corpus of publicly circulating books of which the Muwatta’ is the oldest and the most central.

What Was Closed with Malik ﵀ in 179 AH

Imam Malik ﵀ passed away in Medina in 179 AH, in his eighty-sixth year of life. He was buried in the Baqi cemetery of Medina, a few hundred metres from the grave of the Prophet ﷺ. The city whose legal practice his book had codified received him in its soil. His pupils, who on that day sat spread across the realm from Morocco to Khurasan in their own circles of learning, received the news in the weeks that followed, and the whole ummah network in which his book was by then established carried his name in a week of mourning.

What he had left behind was no title, no possession and no institution. He had founded no madhhab in the organisational sense of the word; the Maliki school would grow into a structured fiqh tradition only in the generations after him, through the work of his pupils Sahnun ﵀ in Kairouan, Ibn al-Qasim ﵀ in Egypt and Yahya ﵀ in Córdoba. What he had left behind was a book. A book that had been written by its author, revised by its author, taught by its author, copied by his pupils, compared and passed on by his pupils’ pupils, and that was deployed as a source by al-Bukhari ﵀ a century and a half later in direct adoption. That book still exists today, in the transmitted recensions, and the present-day critical editions that were prepared in the twentieth century by the Maktabat al-Imam Malik and by other publishing houses give every present-day reader access to the same transmission that was recited in 150 AH in the Prophetic Mosque.

In Malik ﵀‘s legacy the whole argumentation of this theme receives its first material anchoring. The Quran compilation, which we followed in eighteen articles in the first sub-map of this theme, had a written anchoring in 25 AH under Uthman ﵁. The hadith compilation, which we follow in this second sub-map, has its first public written anchoring in 150 AH under Imam Malik ﵀, and its definitive canonical anchoring in the Sittah works in the third century AH. Between those two stand figures such as al-Zuhri ﵀, Ibn Sirin ﵀, Ma’mar ibn Rashid ﵀, al-Layth ibn Sa’d ﵀, and in 150 AH the Muwatta’ as the first book that made the whole field systematically and publicly accessible.

Ahead to Narrator Criticism

We close this article with a look ahead. Up to now we have followed the hadith science as a network of people and as a series of transmitted text corpora. The Muwatta’ is, for the aims of our argumentation, the first work of which we possess in publicly preserved form what was once taught in the learning circle of a scholar of the second century AH. But a book is worth no more than the men who transmit it. The Muwatta’ rests on the chain Malik ﵀ to Nafi’ ﵀ to Ibn Umar ﵁, and the strength of that chain depends on what we know about each of those men: their memory, their integrity, the question whether teacher and pupil really heard one another.

Precisely that is the question that the generations after Malik ﵀ built out into a science of its own. What in Malik ﵀‘s time was still an implicit judgement, that one could trust Nafi’ ﵀ blindly when he transmitted Ibn Umar ﵁, became in the decades thereafter a systematic apparatus: a detailed criticism of the transmitters themselves, with its own vocabulary, its own degrees of reliability and its own biographical registers in which every name in the chain could be traced. It is this apparatus that makes the reliability of a book such as the Muwatta’ testable, for it supplies for every man in the golden chain an independently weighed dossier.

And that is what awaits us in the next article. We leave the individual scholar and his book, and we enter the workshop in which the reliability of the transmitters themselves was elevated to the standard: Jarh wa-Ta’dil, the science of narrator criticism. We shall see how the muhaddithun designed an instrument to separate true from false, how they weighed thousands of names against one another, and why precisely this instrument undermines the later sceptical theories about a back-projected hadith transmission. The Muwatta’ of Malik ﵀ in 150 AH was the first public published hadith compilation; the narrator criticism that followed upon it is the science that subjects every link in every chain of such compilations to an independent judgement.