died in 179 AH, whereas all these scholars had died before then. It is therefore well known that, after their deaths, no one in the Muslim community at that time was more learned than Mālik. No Muslim disputes this. Nor did people ever travel to any scholar of Medina, before or after him, as they travelled to Mālik. They came to him from the East and the West, from every walk of life: scholars, ascetics, kings and ordinary people. His Muwatta’ spread throughout the lands, so much so that no book other than the Quran is known to have circulated more widely at that time. People from the Hijaz, Syria and Iraq learned the Muwatta’ directly from him. Among his younger students were al-Shāfi'ī, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan and others like them. When Muhammad ibn al-Hasan narrated in Iraq from Mālik and the scholars of the Hijaz, his house would fill with people. When he narrated from the scholars of Iraq, fewer people attended, knowing that the learning of Mālik and the scholars of Medina was sounder and more firmly established.
The two most eminent scholars under whom al-Shāfi'ī studied were Mālik and Ibn 'Uyaynah. Everyone knows that Mālik was more eminent than Ibn 'Uyaynah; indeed, the latter used to say:
“Mālik and I are as the poet said:
‘A young camel, tethered alongside the others,
Cannot match the charge of mighty, full-grown camels.’”
As for anyone who claims that the man to whom people drove their camels hard in pursuit of knowledge was al-'Umarī the ascetic—although he was a righteous man, an ascetic who enjoined what is right