Malik ibn Anas: The Imam of Medina

The biography of Malik ibn Anas that opens Ad-Dibaj al-Mudhahhab is one of the most important accounts of the school's founder available in the classical literature. Ibn Farhun draws on earlier sources to provide a comprehensive picture of Malik's life, scholarship, and character.

Malik ibn Anas was born in Medina around 93 AH and died there in 179 AH, spending his entire life in the city of the Prophet. His long life — nearly ninety years — and his unwavering connection to Medina gave him a unique position in Islamic scholarship: he was closer in time to the companion generation than any other major school founder, and his legal methodology was shaped by his access to the living practice of the Medinan community, which he regarded as preserving the authentic prophetic way of life more reliably than any textual source could.

Malik's scholarly formation took place in Medina, where he studied under Nafi' (the great mawla of Ibn Umar, whose transmission became one of the most reliable chains in hadith literature), Ibn Shihab az-Zuhri, and numerous other scholars with direct connections to the companion generation. This formation gave him both an extraordinary breadth of hadith knowledge and a practical understanding of how the prophetic teaching had been implemented in the community.

Ibn Farhun documents Malik's famous refusal to give fatwas on seventy-two questions to which he replied "I don't know" (la adri), which became emblematic of scholarly humility and the proper limits of legal opinion. This anecdote captures a dimension of Malik's character that was crucial to the Maliki school's self-understanding: that the transmission of authentic knowledge was more important than the appearance of comprehensive expertise.

The biography also documents Malik's encounter with the Abbasid caliph's attempt to impose his Muwatta as a unified legal code across the empire — a proposal that Malik famously declined, saying that the companions had spread different rulings across different regions and that imposing uniformity would do violence to the tradition of legitimate scholarly diversity.