MALIKITE, RITE. - One of the four schools, or systems or rites of orthodox Islam. Its founder is the imam or Medinese doctor Malik ibn Anas, b. around 710 and d. in 794 A.D. Having lived in the environment in which the life of Muhammad as head of the Muslim community had unfolded, he absorbed its still-living tradition, expressed through the canonical narratives or ḥadīṯ, which alongside the Qur'an came soon to become for Islam the primary source of all juridical elaboration.
While therefore Abū Ḥanīfah was building in the ʿIrāq a juridical system which, alongside such texts, gave a part of its own to the personal criterion and to analogical deduction (qīḍis), Mālik based his doctrine almost exclusively on the tradition going back to the prophet. His teaching has come down to us through the Kitāb al-muwāṭa' (The Leveled Path), the oldest Islamic juridical work to have reached us with certain authenticity, and which reflects the religious law, the law and the rite as they were in force in the 2nd century of the ēgira in the Medinese milieu. Other indirect but no less important sources for the Mālikite doctrine are the Mudaw-waṇah of Saḥnūn, containing the answers of Mālik's disciple ibn Qāsim to certain questions put to him by Saḥnūn himself, and the parts relating to Mālik in the Kitāb iḥtilāf al-ḥuqahā' of aṭ-Ṭabarī. The r. m., which founded its authority on this geographical and environmental continuity with the example and teaching of the prophet, spread from Medina and the Ḥiḡāz essentially toward the west. By the 4th-5th century of the ēgira (11th-12th centuries A.D.) it had conquered the whole of the Maghrib (north Africa west of Egypt) and Spain, supplanting there the minor schools of al-Awzā'ī and of Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī (zāhirite), and asserting a primacy which it there still holds unchallenged. The whole history, not only religious but political and social, of north Africa and of Muslim Spain is strongly marked by the prevalence, and in certain periods the totalitarian omnipotence, of Mālikism, without which important phenomena of that history, such as the Almoravid and Almohad Empires, can scarcely be explained. Outside that zone, strong Mālikite groups exist today in eastern Arabia and in southwestern Eritrea, in certain regions of the Delta, of Upper Egypt and of the Sudan (although here the officially dominant system is the ḥanafite one). The total number of followers of the r. m. may today be estimated at some thirty million. Francesco Gabrieli