Malik ibn Anas ibn Malik ibn Abi 'Amir al-Asbahi al-Madani, known by the kunya Abu 'Abdullah, was born around 93 AH (711 CE) in Medina and died there in 179 AH (795 CE), buried at al-Baqi'. He studied under scholars including Hisham ibn Urwah, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, Ja'far al-Sadiq, and Nafi' Mawla Ibn Umar, and taught in Medina for the rest of his life, earning titles such as Imam Dar al-Hijra ("the Imam of the City of Emigration") and Shaykh al-Islam. He became the eponym of the Maliki school, one of Sunni Islam's four major schools of jurisprudence; his most notable student, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i — who later founded the Shafi'i school — called Malik's book "the soundest on earth after the Qur'an." The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur is said to have wanted to make it the empire's single legal reference; Malik himself declined.
Al-Muwatta ("the well-trodden path") was composed, by tradition, over some forty years in the early Abbasid period; its name is said to come from Malik showing the text to seventy jurists of Medina, all of whom agreed (wata'a) on it. It combines hadith attributed to the Prophet with the legal sayings of his companions and of the generation after them, together with Malik's own rulings — by one assessment, the earliest surviving work to fuse hadith and fiqh this way, predating the Six Books by roughly a century. Figures for its size vary with the recension and the count: a commonly cited figure for hadith proper is around 1,720, while Malik is said to have selected just under 1,900 narrations out of the 100,000 said to have been available to him.
At least sixteen recensions of al-Muwatta are known. The one that became the standard reference, especially for the Maliki school, is that of Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi; a rival recension by Ahmad ibn Abi Bakr al-Zuhri runs some five to ten percent longer. Around a hundred commentaries exist on al-Laythi's recension alone. Because it predates Sunni Islam's Six Books, some scholars — the Malikis and Ibn al-Athir among them — argue that al-Muwatta, not [[IBM|Sunan Ibn Majah]], belongs in that canonical list; Ibn Majah's Sunan is generally said to have kept the place instead because its content overlaps least with the other five, not because it is judged sounder.
The Arabic text here is the classical matn, in the public domain. Beneath it in the reader sits an English translation, drawn from the fawazahmed0/hadith-api's eng-malik edition and aligned hadith-for-hadith with the Arabic so the two can be read as a pair — the same companion arrangement this corpus uses for [[BUK|Sahih al-Bukhari]], [[MUS|Sahih Muslim]], [[ABD|Sunan Abi Dawud]], [[TIR|Jami` at-Tirmidhi]], [[NAS|Sunan an-Nasa'i]], [[IBM|Sunan Ibn Majah]], and its Qur'an translations. Which published English translation that file itself descends from has not been pinned down on this corpus's side, which is why its licence is marked under review rather than public domain outright; the Arabic above it carries no such uncertainty.