The Maliki School and North African Jurisprudence

Al-Hajwi's treatment of the Maliki school — its founding, its key figures across the centuries, its regional spread across North Africa, Spain, and West Africa, and its distinctive legal characteristics — is the most detailed section of Al-Fikr as-Sami and reflects his identity as a scholar formed in the Maliki tradition of the Moroccan scholarly establishment.

Malik ibn Anas (711–795 CE), the founder of the school, is treated with particular care. Al-Hajwi described Malik's scholarly formation in Madinah — where he studied under the leading scholars of the city and eventually became the foremost legal authority of his era — and his distinctive methodological approach: giving privileged status to the established practice (amal) of the Madinah community as evidence of what the Prophet had actually practiced, not merely what he had verbally commanded.

The transmission of Maliki doctrine from Madinah to North Africa and Spain in the late eighth and ninth centuries is documented by al-Hajwi in some detail. The Moroccan and Tunisian scholars who traveled to Madinah to study under Malik or his immediate students, and who returned to establish the Maliki school as the dominant legal tradition of the western Islamic world, are identified and their contributions described.

For the great Maliki scholars of North Africa and Andalusia — Ibn al-Qasim (whose Mudawwanah became the foundational text of the Maliki school in North Africa), Sahnun ibn Said (who edited and expanded the Mudawwanah), Ibn Rushd (Averroes's grandfather, whose Bidayat al-Mujtahid is a masterpiece of comparative Maliki fiqh), and al-Shatibi (whose Al-Muwafaqat articulated the maqasid tradition) — al-Hajwi provided biographical and intellectual portraits that traced the development of North African Maliki scholarship across centuries.

His treatment of the Moroccan scholarly tradition, centered on the Qarawiyyin, gave particular attention to the institution within which he himself had been formed and in which he had taught.