Abu Hanifa and Malik: the oldest surviving Sunni schools of law

Abu Hanifa al-Nu'man ibn Thabit (699–767), a Kufan dealer in silk cloth whose family is usually thought to have been Persian, studied law under Hammad ibn Abi Sulayman and after Hammad’s death in 737 or 738 became the leading authority on law in Kufa. Modern scholars regard him as the first to adopt analogy (qiyas) as a formal tool of Islamic law, alongside juristic preference (istihsan) and considered opinion (ra'y), for questions that the Qur’an and the hadith did not settle. He refused official posts under the Umayyads and the Abbasids alike; when he declined al-Mansur’s offer of the office of chief judge in 763 he was imprisoned, and he died in prison in Baghdad in 767. He left no legal treatise: his teaching was written down by his pupils Abu Yusuf, whom Harun al-Rashid made the first chief qadi (qadi al-qudat), and al-Shaybani.

Malik ibn Anas (c. 711–795) spent almost his whole life in Medina, where he became the foremost authority on hadith and law, the ‘Imam of Medina’. His al-Muwatta (‘the well-trodden path’), compiled over some forty years, arranges by subject the traditions of the Prophet, his Companions and their successors together with the consensus and practice of Medina, which makes it both a hadith collection and one of the earliest surviving works of Islamic law. Reports say that al-Mansur and later Harun al-Rashid wanted to impose it on the whole empire and that Malik refused, holding that the differences among jurists were a mercy for the people. The work survives in several recensions, of which that of the Andalusian Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi became the standard one.

The schools named after them took shape through their pupils in the following generations, alongside the schools of al-Shafi'i, himself a pupil of Malik, and later of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. The Hanafi school spread under the patronage of the Abbasids and later of the Seljuks and became the official school of the Ottoman Empire; today it is the most widely followed Sunni school, predominating in Turkey and Central and South Asia. The Maliki school became dominant in North and West Africa and, under the Umayyads of Córdoba, in al-Andalus.