Malik ibn Anas

Arab Islamic jurist, theologian and hadith traditionist (711–795)

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Lived 711–795, aged 84

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66 languages
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Era
711–795
Aged 84

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

An eighth-century jurist in Medina whose legal rulings became doctrine across half the Sunni world. His compilation of hadith and law, al-Muwatta', earned praise as "the soundest book on earth after the Quran" and made his name shorthand for orthodoxy from North Africa to Iraq.

Biography

About

Born around 711 in Medina into the Humayr clan of Quraysh, Malik studied under scholars including Ja'far al-Sadiq and Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, rising to become what his contemporaries called the Imam of Medina—the premier hadith scholar of his generation. In the early Abbasid period, amid fierce disagreement over even elementary questions of Islamic law, he compiled al-Muwatta', an attempt to chart a "smoothed path" through jurisprudence by tracing the consensus and practice of Medina. The work became one of the oldest surviving Muslim law books and earned Malik epithets like Proof of the Communit…

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