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dealt with. And the people living in the city had been taught Islam by their ancestors who had been Companions of the Prophet or students of the Companions. He thus reasoned that if all of the people of Madinah practiced a particular action and it did not contradict the Quran and Sunnah, then it can be taken as a source of law. He is unique among the four great imams of fiqh in this opinion. In order to ease the study of fiqh and hadith, Imam Malik compiled a book known as the al-Muwatta. This was the first book that attempted to compile only sound and reliable sayings of Prophet Muhammad into one book. Imam Malik said that he showed his book to seventy scholars in Madinah, who all approved it, thus he gave it the name al-Muwatta, meaning The Approved.
Al-Muwatta was a landmark book. It helped establish the science of hadith, particularly the judging of chains of narrations for hadith. Imam Malik was so thorough in his selection of hadith that it has been placed on the same level (and sometimes above) the hadith compilations of Imams Bukhari and Muslim. Imam Shafii even stated that there is no book on earth, after the Quran, that is more authentic than the Muwatta. Imam Maliks work was so influential as a book of fiqh that the caliph of the time, Harun al-Rashid, demanded that it be mass-printed and made the official book of fiqh for the Abbasid Empire. Imam Malik, however, refused. He knew that no one interpretation of Islamic law was perfect and all-encompassing. As such, he refused to allow his fiqh to become official, even under threat of persecution and imprisonment.
imposed on Muslims as the sole school of Islamic law. Instead, it complemented the other three schools that took precedence in the Sunni Muslim world the Hanafi, Shafii, and Hanbali schools. The Maliki school became very popular in North and West Africa, as well as Muslim Spain. Today it remains the main madhab of North and West Africa. Imam Malik died at the age of 85 in the year 795. He was buried in the Baqee Cemetary in Madinah.
Bibliography: Haddad, Gibril. The Four Imams and their Schools. Muslim Academic Trust, Print. Khan, Muhammad. The Muslim 100. Leicestershire, United Kingdom: Kube Publishing Ltd, 2008. Print.
Imam Maliks seminal work, al-Muwatta