Oldest Surviving Manuscript of Imam Malik’s Muwatta’

Early Manuscripts and Fragments of the Muwatta’

Imam Malik’s al-Muwaṭṭa’ was compiled in the 2nd century AH (8th century CE) and was transmitted by many of his students in slightly variant versions. The very earliest physical evidence of the Muwatta’ dates back to Malik’s own lifetime. For example, a papyrus fragment ( PERF No. 731) from the Austrian National Library has been dated to the late 2nd century AH (around 795 CE, the time of Malik’s death).

This single-page papyrus contains a portion of the text (from the section Bāb al-Targhīb fī al-Ṣadaqah) and is written in an early angular Arabic script with diacritical marks. Such fragments confirm that written copies of the Muwatta’ were in circulation by the late 700s CE, though they are too incomplete to represent the whole work. Other early partial manuscripts include, for instance, a parchment fragment dated 288 AH (901 CE) preserving chapters of Muwatta’ as transmitted by ʿAlī ibn Ziyād. These early witnesses, however, consist only of fragments or sections – no fully intact copy from the 2nd–4th centuries AH has survived to the present.

Different Transmissions

Currently, there exist sixteen different versions of the Muwatta, of which the most famous is the one transmitted by Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi, who studied and received the Muwatta in the last year of Malik’s life. Al-Laythi’s recension is considered the ‘vulgate’ or standard version in the Maliki school of law. The recension of the Muwatta produced by Ahmad ibn Abi Bakr al-Zuhri is approximately five to ten percent larger than the recension of al-Laythi. According to al-Ghafiqi, the total number of hadiths across twelve versions of the Muwatta he analyzed is 666, out of which 97 differ in the different versions of the book, while the rest are common to all the various recensions.