Maliki School

Malik ibn Anas (711–795 CE) was the Imam of Medina and founder of the Maliki school of jurisprudence. His Al-Muwatta was the first systematic work joining hadith with legal reasoning, and his idea of the living practice of Medina as a source of law was a distinctive contribution.

The madhabs, the schools of Islamic law that developed methods for deriving rulings from the Qur'an and the Sunnah. Four Sunni schools and the Shi'a traditions have guided Muslim practice for over a millennium; they are schools of method, not sects.

The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, founded as a mosque in 857-859 CE, is recognised by UNESCO as the oldest existing, continually operating institution of higher learning in the world, and a historic centre of Maliki legal scholarship in the western Islamic world.