Al-Muwatta
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The earliest surviving compilation of Islamic law arranges prophetic reports and the settled practice of Medina together, treating what the community does as itself a form of evidence.
- the settled practice of a community treated as legal evidence
- arrangement by legal topic rather than by chain of transmission
- hadith, companion opinion and the compiler's own judgement side by side
- the earliest surviving systematic work of Islamic law
Malik gathered hadith, the opinions of the Prophet's companions and their successors, and his own rulings, organised by legal topic rather than by transmitter. Its distinctive argument is that the continuous practice of Medina carries evidential weight, since the city had preserved the Prophet's example in living form. This gave the emerging Maliki school a source of authority alongside text. The work stands at the point where Islamic jurisprudence begins to be written as a systematic discipline.
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