First published in 1989. This is the first translation of the Muwatta' in the English language. Imam Malik came from a family of learning and grew up in Madina al-Munawarra which was the capital of knowledge at that time, especially the knowledge of hadith. Known as one of the great reciter’, Malik's predisposition for retention and understanding of knowledge he took it upon himself to serve the shari'a and to preserve the Prophetic sunna. He did this by relaying it from those notable Tabi'un with whose knowledge he was satisfied and whose words he thought worthy of conveying and by his work he opened the way for all later writers and cleared a path for the compilation of Islamic law.
First published in 1989. This is the first translation of the Muwatta' in the English language. Imam Malik came from a family of learning and grew up in Madina al-Munawarra which was the capital of knowledge at that time, especially the knowledge of hadith. Known as one of the great reciter’, Malik's predisposition for retention and understanding of knowledge he took it upon himself to serve the shari'a and to preserve the Prophetic sunna. He did this by relaying it from those notable Tabi'un with whose knowledge he was satisfied and whose words he thought worthy of conveying and by his work he opened the way for all later writers and cleared a path for the compilation of Islamic law.
"This small treatise of Ibn Taymiyya (661/1263-728/ 1328), the extremely influential medieval Hanbali jurist, has an importance belied by its size since it is, in fact, an investigation into the origin and nature of the Prophetic Sunna. In it he discusses the value of the consensus of the people of Madina and its standing as evidence. He also deals with the lawful and unlawful, food and drink, usury, acts of worship and other matters, and compares the school of the people of Madina regarding all these things with the other schools, making it clear that the Madinan school is the soundest of all of them and the closest to the Sunna and the practice of the Salaf. Although usually associated with hadith-based legal reasoning, in this work Ibn Taymiyya demonstrates the unquestionable authority of the practice of the people of Madina, showing how it remained indisputably the authentic expression of the Sunna of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, during the first three generations of Islam when it was definitively recorded by Imam Malik ibn Anas. The conclusion he reaches is that: "In the time of the Companions, the Followers and their Followers, their school was the soundest of the schools of the people in all the lands of, Islam, east and west, both in respect of its fundamentalprinciples and its secondary rulings"."--
If the Qur'an is the first written formulation of Islam in general, Malik's Muwatta' is arguably the first written formulation of the Islam-in-practice that becomes Islamic law. This book considers the methods used by Malik in the Muwatta' to derive the judgements of the law from the Qur'an and is thus concerned on one level with the finer details of Qur'anic interpretation. However, since any discussion of the Qur'an in this context must also include considerations of the other main source of Islamic law, namely the sunna, or normative practice, of the Prophet, this latter concept, especially its relationship to the terms of hadith and amal (traditions and living tradition), also receives considerable attention, and in many respects, this book is more about the history and development of Islamic law than it is about the science of Qur'anic interpretation. This is the first book to question the hitherto accepted frameworks of both the classical Muslim view and the current revisionist western view on the development of Islamic law. It is also the first study in a European language to deal specifically with the early development of the Madinan, later Malik, school of jurisprudence, as it is also the first to demonstrate in detail the various methods used, both linguistic and otherwise, in interpreting the legal verses of the Qur'an. It will be of interest to all those interested in the underlying bases of Islamic law and culture, and of particular interest to those involved in studying and teaching Islamic studies, both at undergraduate and research level. It will also be of interest to those studying the relationship between orality and literacy in ancient societies and the writing down of ancient law.
The first written treatise of Islamic law, Imam Mālik's 8th century CE Muwaṭṭaʾ provides an unparalleled window into the lives, rituals, laws, and customs of Medina's early Muslim community. Based on the 2013 Muwaṭṭaʾ, The Royal Moroccan Edition, this translation with extensive notes makes this early legal text widely accessible.
Al-Murshid al-Mu'een is a widely recognised primary text for learning Islam in North Africa. In it the author, Abd al-Wahid ibn 'Ashir, summarises in verse the three sciences of Islam, Iman and Ihsan: Maliki fiqh, Ash'ari 'aqida and Junaidi tasawwuf. This is its first complete translation into English. Dr. Asadullah Yate is also the translator of Shaykh Ahmad bin al-Bashir al-Qalawi ash-Shinqiti's (1216 AH/1802 CE- 1276 AH/1853 CE) Mufid al-'Ibad, a very full commentary on al-Murshid al-Mu'een, which is published by Diwan Press in English as "Islam in the School of Madina".
Al-Muwatta of Imam Malik Ash-Sh fi' said, "After the Book of Allah, there is no book on the face of the earth sounder than the book of M lik." 'Al ' ad-D n Maghla y al- anaf said, "The first person to compile the a was M lik." Ibn ajar said, "The book of M lik is sound by all the criteria that are demanded as proofs in the mursal, munqa i' and other types of transmission." As-Suy followed Ibn ajar's judgement and said, "It is absolutely correct to say that the Muwa a' is sound ( a ) without exception." Al-Bukh r and Muslim transmitted most of its ad ths and included them in their a collections. The authors of the rest of the six books, the Im m of the ad th scholars, A mad ibn anbal, and others did the same. In addition, the Muwa a' contains a record of the practice ('amal) of the people of Mad nah of the first generations, a transmission of the ethos that permeated the city, and Im m M lik's painstaking clarification of the Sunna, the ad ths, the practice and legal judgements. Im m M lik ibn anas (93 AH/711 CE - 179 AH/795 CE) Imam M lik's full name is M lik ibn Anas ibn M lik ibn Ab ' mir al-A ba and he was related to Dh A ba, a sub-tribe of imyar. He was instructed in the learning and recitation of the Noble Qur' n by Im m N fi' ibn 'Abd ar-Ra m n ibn Ab Nu'aym, the Im m of the reciters of Mad na and one of the 'seven reciters'. Among the huge number of his teachers in ad th and fiqh were N fi', the mawl of 'Abdull h ibn 'Umar, and Ibn Shih b az-Zuhr . He sat to give fatw when he was seventeen years old after seventy Im ms had testified that he was worthy to give fatw and teach. His own students included Im m ash-Sh fi' and Im m Muhammad ibn al- asan ash-Shayb n the anaf mujtahid, as well as a great number of Im ms of ad th and fiqh, and thus he is known as Im m al-A'immah 'the Im m of the Im ms'. He is recognised to be the subject of the hadith from Ab Hurayra i: "The Messenger of Allah @ said, 'There will come a time when the people will beat the livers of their camels in search of knowledge and they will not find an ' lim with more knowledge than the ' lim of Mad na.'"
Almost unique among the works of Muslim scholars, this book, which for Malikis is THE Risalah, was written for children when the author was 17 years old. The sheer pedagogical audacity of introducing children to what is in effect a complete overview of life and human society escapes most people and most Muslims today. The author commences with usul ad-deen - the roots of the deen - a survey of the vital Muslim worldview, proceeding then through purification and the acts of 'ibadah, the ordinary transactions such as marriage, divorce, buying and selling and so forth, and concluding with chapters of a general and miscellaneous nature. The book is here matched by the outstanding lucidity of the translation which reveals a book written in a narrative descriptive style rather than in a didactic scholarly tone, making it breathtakingly accessible. So significant was the book's authorship and so quickly was it recognised that its author became known as the "Young Malik" and his work became a foundational pillar of the madhhab of the School of Madinah and has endured for a millennium, in use both to teach absolute beginners as intended and as a resource for scholars. This edition presents the translation in parallel with the Arabic text without vowellisation (tashkeel). Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (310 AH/922 CE - 386 AH/996 CE) was born in Qayrawan in Tunisia, arguably one of the most important Muslim cities after Makkah and Madinah, which was always famous for learning and in particular for its staunch adherence to the school of the people of Madinah as transmitted by Imam Malik. His life was overshadowed by the Fatimid dynasty, during which he and the other teachers of Qayrawan calmly kept alive the teaching of the Book of Allah and the Sunnah. Among his other well-known works are the massive multi-volume an-Nawadir wa'z-Ziyadat and a mukhtasar-abridgement of the Mudawwanah of which only the Kitab al-Jami', a comprehensive work containing a wide variety of topics, is extant. Aisha Bewley is the translator of a large number of classical works of Islam and Sufism, often in collaboration with Abdalhaqq Bewley, notably The Noble Qur'an - a New Rendering of Its Meanings in English; Muhammad, Messenger of Allah - the translation of Qadi 'Iyad's ash-Shifa'; the Muwatta' of Imam Malik ibn Anas; and Imam an-Nawawi's Riyad as-Salihin.
