In al-Dibaj al-mudhahhab fi ma’rifat a’yan al-madhhab (i.

In al-Dibaj al-mudhahhab fi ma’rifat a’yan al-madhhab (i.e. al-Maliki), Ibn Farhun writes: Atiq al-Zubaydi said: Malik compiled al-Muwatta’ with about ten thousand traditions. He every year kept on reviewing it and dropping from it till only the extant traditions remained of it, and had very few of them remained he would have dropped it as a whole.

551 In Sharh al-Muwatta’ al-Zarqani writes: He (Malik) year to year kept on extracting and refining them to the extent he found more convenient for Muslims and more typical in religion. 552 Ibn al-Habbab states that Malik narrated a hundred thousand traditions recording ten thousand from among them in al-Muwatta’, which he kept on subjecting them to the Book and Sunnah, and testing them with old traditions and akhbar till clearing them into five hundred traditions.

Al-Kia al-Harras says: Malik’s Muwatta’ contained first nine thousand traditions, which he kept on clearing and selecting till they became only five hundred ones, (p.11 of the introduction to Sharh al-Zarqani ala Muwatta’ Malik). Al-Abhari Abu Bakr says: The total number of traditions recorded in Malik’s Muwatta’, reported from the Prophet (S) and the and Followers were 1720 traditions, of which 600 were musnad, 222 mursal, 613 mawquf and 285 utterances of the Followers.

Al-Suyuti in his al-Taqrib reporting Ibn Hazm as saying: When enumerating the traditions stated in al-Muwatta’ and in the hadith of Sufyan ibn Uyaynah, in every one of them 500 plus musnad, 300 mursal and seventy plus traditions, can be found, acting according to which was forsaken by Malik himself. Some ulama’ said: Malik was the first to compile and record sahih traditions, but he did not confine himself to them alone, but inserted also the mursal, munqati’ and balaghat (reports).

Among his reports there were uncommon traditions, as mentioned by al-Hafiz Ibn Abd al-Barr. Divergence of His Narrations: From Malik incongruous narrations were reported that differ in order of chapters, and in number till reaching twenty different copies, and they amounted to thirty according to other traditionists. 553 Al-Shaykh Abd al-Aziz al-Dihlawi (d.

1139 H), in his book Bustan al-muhaddithin, writes: The copies of al-Muwatta’ that are extant nowadays in the Arab countries are numerous, of which sixteen copies were referred to, each one reported from a certain narrator.