MALIKITE RITE. - One of the four schools, or systems, or rites of orthodox Islam. Its founder is the imam and Medina doctor Mâlik ibn Anas, born about 710 and died in 794 A.D. Having lived in the environment where Muḥammad had been the head of the Muslim community, he absorbed the still living tradition expressed through the canonical narratives or hadith, which, alongside the Qur’ān, soon came to constitute for Islam the primary source of all juridical elaboration.
While therefore Abû Hanîfah was building in Iraq a juridical system which, alongside these texts, gave a role to personal criterion and analogical deduction (qiyās), Mâlik based his doctrine almost exclusively on the tradition going back to the Prophet. His teaching has come down through the Kitâb al-mucâta’ (The Levelled Path), the oldest juridical work of Islam preserved to us with a certain authenticity, and which reflects the religious law, the right and the rite as they prevailed in the 2nd century of the Hegira in the Medina environment. Other indirect but no less important sources for the Mālikite doctrine are the Mudawwana of Sahnūn, containing the responses of Mālik’s disciple Ibn Qāsim to questions posed by Sahnūn himself, and the parts relating to Mālik in the Kitāb iḥtilāf al-fuqahā’ of al-Ṭabarī.
The Mālikite rite, which founded its authority on this geographical and environmental continuity with the example and teaching of the Prophet, spread from Medina and the Ḥijāz essentially towards the west. By the 4th-5th century of the Hegira (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-Awzāʿī and Dāwūd al-Isfahānī (Ẓāhirite), and asserting a primacy which it still holds there unchallenged. The entire history—not only religious but also political and social—of North Africa and 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, cannot be explained. Outside this area, strong Mālikite groups exist today in eastern Arabia and in southwestern Eritrea, in some regions of the Delta, Upper Egypt and the Sudan (though here the dominant system is officially Ḥanafite). The total number of followers of the Mālikite rite can today be estimated at about thirty million.
BIBL.:
Gabrieli, Francesco, “Mâlikiti, rito”, in Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. VIII, Città del Vaticano 1952, coll. 105-106.