Early Islam in Medina: Malik and His Muwatta

Reviewed by: Imran Arif - Derby, UK

Published by: London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 144pp. ISBN: 978-1350261860.

The book under review aims to elucidate the intellectual environment of early Medina – of scholars in action engaging with the Sunnah and, more specifically, with developing and making legal judgements on how to live the way of life of Islam (dīn), i.e., to enact and to transact, in all spheres, according to the guidance taken from the Qurʾān and Sunnah. The book aims to achieve this by examining the judgements of the great legal scholar Imām Mālik ibn Anas (d.179 AH/795 CE), as preserved within Mālik’s al-Muwaṭṭaʾ (‘The Well-Trodden Path’); as well as surveying important scholars involved in the transmission of these judgments, i.e. Mālik’s teachers and students.

In making this in-depth study, Dutton instils in the mind of the reader a sense of how the third generation of Muslims of Medina manifested a collective reality known in the concept of ‘amal’, i.e. the ‘Practice of the People of Medina’. Thereby, Dutton achieves both his stated aim, as well as opening a window onto the lived experience of early Islam in Medina. This living practice of the Sunnah, as inter-generational emulation (en mass) of the life and teachings of the Prophet Muḥammad (blessings and peace be upon him), is considered in its central significance as a prime source used by Imām Mālik, and those who follow his school. This volume therefore advances a deeper understanding of the nature and development of Islamic law, as well as that of Islam itself in Medina.