FOUR FOLIOS OF KITAB BAYA' AL-GHURAR WAS AL-MULAMASSAH BY IMAM MALIK IBN ANAS (d. 795 AD) Qairawan, Tunisia, North Africa, 11th - 12th century Arabic manuscript on parchment, each folio with 20ll. of m aghribi script in burnt sienna ink, roundels with central dots marking sentences, titles and headings in bold, within plain margins, from a compendium of Islamic law according to the Maliki school's jurist from Medina Malik Ibn Anas, the content discussing the issues of false declaration of merchandise, recited by Abdul-Rahman bin al-Qasm and Sahnun bin Said, stating '(made) in the city of Qairawan' at the end of the first folio, the folio 29cm x 19.5cm. Provenance: Bonhams, 10 April 2008, lot 5. In the 8th century, the jurist Malik Ibn Anas, founder of the Maliki School of Islamic jurisprudence, is known to have been appointed by the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansour to establish a juridical compendium determining and unifying differing methods applied in different areas of the empire. Ibn Anas thus founded one of the four major madhhabs of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, the Maliki school, relying on the Qur'an and hadiths as primary sources of juridical truth. The doctrine and teachings of the Maliki school became particularly rooted in the areas of the Maghrib and Islamic Spain, later becoming the official school of the Umayyad dynasty in Andalusia. Similar juridical extracts from the Maliki school's teachings on vellum have successfully sold in the London auction market recently, please see Christie's London, 26 April 2018, lot 3; and Sotheby's London, 24 October 2018, lot 3.