The Settled Practice of the People of Medina Is a Source of Law

Malik ibn Anas (711 to 795), the Medinan jurist whose teaching gave the Maliki school its name, held that the collective, continuous practice of the people of Medina, the city where the Prophet Muhammad lived, taught and was buried, carried legal weight as evidence of authentic prophetic practice in its own right, on the reasoning that a whole community's inherited custom in the very city of revelation was less likely to have been corrupted by error than any single narrator's individually transmitted report. Malik's own compilation, the Muwatta, repeatedly invokes what he calls the amal, the practice, of Medina as a source alongside and at points weightier than individual hadith, a methodological choice later Maliki jurists systematized into a formal legal principle even as scholars in other emerging schools questioned whether an entire city's custom could really be verified and transmitted with the same rigor demanded of a chain of individual narrators. Christopher Melchert's study of the early legal schools situates this doctrine within the broader ninth and tenth century process by which regional legal traditions, Medina's practice-based approach among them, hardened into the distinct, named schools of Islamic law still recognized today.

The doctrine that Medinan practice constitutes independent legal evidence became one of the clearest methodological lines separating Maliki jurisprudence from the Shafii, Hanafi and Hanbali schools that developed alongside it, each of which built its own hierarchy of sources privileging individually transmitted hadith and, in Hanafi and later Shafii method, analogical reasoning, over the custom of any single locality however historically significant. Mohammad Hashim Kamali's study of Islamic legal theory notes the doctrine provoked genuine debate among early jurists over what exactly Medinan practice was evidence of, whether it preserved a specific ruling traceable to the Prophet's own instruction, or only a general communal consensus that might itself contain later accretions, a question Maliki scholars answered differently across generations without abandoning the underlying principle. Wael Hallaq's work on the formation of Islamic legal method situates the debate within a larger argument about whether the classical schools ever fully closed off independent legal reasoning, since Maliki reliance on a living, geographically located practice rather than solely on fixed transmitted texts left the school's method more open, in Hallaq's reading, to incorporating ongoing communal custom than the more text-centered approaches its rival schools eventually favored.