Introduction

Al-Mudawwanah al-Kubra is the foundational text of the Maliki legal school and one of the earliest and most authoritative records of Imam Malik ibn Anas's jurisprudence. It reached its definitive form through the work of Abd al-Salam ibn Sa'id Sahnun (160–240 AH / 776–854 CE), the great Qairawan jurist who reworked, reorganized, and transmitted the legal opinions of Imam Malik as recorded by his foremost Egyptian student, Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Qasim (d. 191 AH). Ibn al-Qasim had studied under Malik for approximately twenty years in Medina, absorbing his teacher's legal reasoning, his answers to thousands of juristic questions, and his understanding of the living practice ('amal) of the people of Medina as a source of law. Sahnun traveled to Egypt, studied under Ibn al-Qasim, and returned to North Africa carrying the authoritative transmission of Maliki law that would shape Islamic legal culture across the Maghrib, Andalusia, and sub-Saharan Africa for over a millennium.

The Mudawwanah is organized into books covering the full range of Islamic positive law: purity, prayer, zakah, fasting, hajj, sales and contracts, marriage and divorce, criminal law, and judicial matters. What distinguishes it from later systematic legal manuals is its form: it preserves the question-and-answer texture of actual scholarly exchange, recording the queries put to Ibn al-Qasim and his responses, often with the reasoning behind them. This format gives the Mudawwanah an immediacy and authenticity that more polished later texts lack — the reader encounters Maliki law in the process of being articulated and reasoned through, rather than as a finished edifice. Imam Malik's voice comes through, at one remove, in the transmission of his student, making the Mudawwanah a primary historical source for understanding early Islamic jurisprudence.

Within the Maliki school, the Mudawwanah holds a position of unrivaled foundational authority. Later Maliki scholars engaged with it constantly: commenting on it, extracting rules from it, comparing its positions with other transmissions from Malik, and building their own works upon its foundations. Major Maliki references — from Ibn Rushd al-Jadd's Al-Bayan wal-Tahsil to Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani's Al-Risala and beyond — all take the Mudawwanah as a primary source. No scholar trained in the Maliki tradition can claim a thorough knowledge of the school without direct engagement with this text, and its study has remained central to Maliki education in the traditional learning centers of Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, and beyond to the present day.

Readers coming to the Mudawwanah for the first time are advised to approach it with a basic grounding in Maliki fiqh, using introductory texts such as Ibn Abi Zayd's Risala or Ibn Juzayy's Al-Qawanin al-Fiqhiyya as orientation. The Mudawwanah is not a primer; it is an advanced reference that requires some familiarity with legal vocabulary and the structure of Islamic jurisprudence. Those who invest the effort will gain not only detailed knowledge of Maliki rulings but a direct encounter with the juristic tradition of the Companions' city — Medina — as Imam Malik understood and transmitted it, and with the method by which one of Islam's great legal schools took its definitive shape.