The Maliki School & Its Contribution to Islamic Culture

By the middle of the eleventh century the imami Shi'a had established a worldly mode of living which was based on "the perpetual expectation of the world to come." His vision was established in intentional opposition to the reigning political powers. Here imamism can be seen emerging as a religion of salvation. In order to obtain this salvation a good Muslim must live in accord with the hadith of the Prophet, by emotional identification with martyrdom or through gnostic vision and mystical union with the divine being. Through consolidation of these doctrinal beliefs the Badhadi Shi'a emerged as a sectarian community within Islam. During this same time period students of law and theology formed their own study groups in an attempt to establish autonomous authority in religious matters. What was emerging was an increased institutionalization of Islam. The Maliki school, one of the dominant schools of law originating in the late seventh century, evolved in response to these structural changes in Islamic society. To understand and evaluate the role of the Malikis in Islamic society is to better understand the unique history of Andalus.

The law applicable to Muslim subjects of the Umayyads was the Koran. Although many regulations were herein specified, it was still necessary for a scholarly class of people to interpret these holy writings. What transpired is that several rival schools of Islamic

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forbid the wrong." At the same time Shari'ah law could not ignore how social duties should be carried out even if it refused to legitimize any formal organization for carrying them out. A pattern was needed to order human behavior which helped both to order the surrounding chaos and to connect Muslim believers with the divine. What emerged was a social pattern. This social pattern allowed the Islamic society to be configured around the dominance of social concerns rather than political ones. "The rejection of bid'ah, innovation, was erected into a system of law." The natural selection of the law school to be favored was the one associated with the community which Muhammad had established at Medina. The Maliki school established at Medina served as a prime ideal. It accommodated this transfer of power from political concerns as in the days of the Marwani to social ones brilliantly. Since the tradition of the legist of Syria insisted that their code followed the original and unbroken tradition, those searching for a new way of organizing Islamic society were not magnetized to this approach. The approach of the Syrian legists clearly favored the pre-existing power of the ruling Marwanis. In contrast, the tradit
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Approximate Word count = 1363
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)