By Ilyass Amharar
Why This Essay Belongs on the Islamic Law Blog
My first essay established that the encounter between Mālikism and Ashʿarism cannot be relegated to a late, politically motivated Almoravid (448–541/1056–1147) or Almohad (524–668/1130–1269) synthesis. From the very first generation of al-Ashʿarī’s (d. 324/936) disciples, it is a Mālikī jurist, Ibn Mujāhid (d. ca. 370/980), who embodies their alliance, and it is another Mālikī, al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1012), who constructs the doctrine into an organized school.
That chronology matters because the received narrative assigns the decisive role to the Berber dynasties that ruled the Maghrib and al-Andalus from the fifth/eleventh to the seventh/thirteenth century. On that account, the Almoravids enforced a narrowly juridical Mālikism hostile to speculative theology, and the Almohads then imposed Ashʿarī doctrine from above as an instrument of state legitimation. Neither claim survives contact with the material assembled below: the Mālikism the Almoravids propagated had already been shaped by scholars trained in Ashʿarī networks, and the Almohads inherited an alliance rather than inventing one.
In this second essay, we turn toward the Maghrib, and more specifically the Baghdad-Kairouan-Fez axis, to examine how these early currents of thought spread to the western Mālikī world. The central figures here are al-Darrās b. Ismāʿīl (d. 357/968), Abū al-Ḥasan al-Qābisī (d. 403/1012), and Abū ʿImrān al-Fāsī (d. 430/1038), three scholars whose trajectories reveal the existence of a lively, bidirectional intellectual network structurally embedded in the ordinary practices of Islamic learning.
Why should this question concern historians of Islamic law at all? Because the diffusion of Mālikī law and that of Ashʿarī theology cannot be told separately.[1] The great compilations of western Mālikism—Saḥnūn’s (d. 240/854) Mudawwana (Compilation) and Ibn Abī Zayd’s (d. 386/996) Risāla (Treatise) and al-Nawādir wa’l-ziyādāt (Rare Cases and Additions)—circulated through the same networks, along the same itineraries, carried by the same scholars as the earliest Ashʿarī texts. To understand the diffusion of these legal texts is therefore, necessarily, to understand the theological framework within which they traveled.
I. Kairouan as Crossroads: The Structural Frame
Before turning to individuals, it is worth recalling the institutional conditions that made the circulation of ideas between the Islamic East and West possible in the fourth/tenth century. Yassir Benhima has shown how Kairouan functioned at this period as a working node of exchange between Ifrīqiya and the rest of the Islamic world.[2] Its geographic position, a link between an East in full doctrinal efflorescence and a West still constructing its scholarly institutions, made it a natural stopping point for scholars traveling to or returning from the pilgrimage. Periods of study in Kairouan could last months or years, transforming the city from a logistical waystation into a place of teaching, text transmission, ijāza (teaching licence) granting, and intellectual encounter.[3]
This network did not operate in one direction only. If scholars from the Maghrib and al-Andalus came to Kairouan to study, Kairouani scholars themselves maintained regular correspondence with their Iraqi counterparts, exchanged texts, solicited legal and theological opinions, and sent their best students as far as Baghdad; it is within this framework that Benhima situates the connection between Iraqi Mālikism and the Maghrib, a connection built from personal relationships, chains of transmission (asānīd), written authorizations (ijāzāt), and a circulation of manuscripts that is itself a subject of historical inquiry.[4] In my study of the genealogy of kalām (speculative theology) from al-Ashʿarī to the Sevillan Mālikī jurist and qāḍī (judge) Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148),[5] I note that Kairouan owed much of its importance to its position as a link between East and West. It functioned as a cultural metropolis that welcomed Maghribīs and Andalusīs. On their way to or from the pilgrimage, they could stop there, sometimes for years, to benefit from the teaching dispensed on site.[6]
It is within this space of circulation that the trajectory of the first of our three protagonists takes on its full meaning.
II. Al-Darrās b. Ismāʿīl: The First Western Relay
Chroniclers and historians of western Mālikism, past and present, have long treated al-Darrās b. Ismāʿīl through an exclusively legal lens, as the scholar who introduced the Mudawwana to Fez. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149), in his Tartīb al-madārik (Ordering of the Stages), devotes a notice to him centered on this role as transmitter of the foundational text of western Mālikism, and Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino has identified him as the first known Moroccan saint of the post-Idrissid period.[7] This legal and hagiographical dimension of al-Darrās’s profile is well established. But it does not exhaust the picture.
The sources also allow us to reconstruct a more complex intellectual profile. Al-Darrās spent a significant period in Kairouan, long enough to teach there before returning to Fez. Kairouan in the mid-fourth/tenth century was, precisely, one of the most active points of contact between the western Mālikī world and the theological currents emanating from the East.[8] It is there, in that effervescent milieu, that al-Darrās most plausibly encountered the thought of al-Ashʿarī.
The most significant evidence of this engagement is the mention of an epistle (risāla) attributed to al-Darrās in defense of al-Ashʿarī. The reference reaches us through the Ẓāhirī jurist Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), who is reported to have written a reply to the epistle himself.[9] The witness is a partial one: Ibn Ḥazm’s polemic against kalām colors his reports. But that he troubled to answer the epistle suggests it was no marginal text. The mention is all the more significant because al-Darrās died in 357/968, barely a generation after al-Ashʿarī himself (324/936). If the epistle is correctly dated, it would place the beginning of Ashʿarī influence in the far western Maghrib at a remarkably early point in the doctrine’s history; it would lead one to believe that al-Darrās had adhered to al-Ashʿarī’s theses and was transmitting them to his disciples.[10] Those disciples are of the first importance: among them are Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī and Abū al-Ḥasan al-Qābisī (d. 403/1012), two of the most influential authorities in the entire history of the Mālikī school.[11]
What the trajectory of al-Darrās illustrates, beyond the residual uncertainties, is the way in which Mālikism and nascent Ashʿarism traveled together. The Mudawwana arrives in Fez in the luggage of the same scholar who, according to the tradition, was defending the thought of al-Ashʿarī. The two travelled by the same route because they travelled in the same hands.
III. Abū al-Ḥasan al-Qābisī: The Kairouani Theologian
If al-Darrās offers the first trace of an Ashʿarī presence within the western Mālikī milieu, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Qābisī represents the first solidly documented case of sustained personal theological engagement with the school. Al-Qābisī is a Kairouanī scholar of considerable importance in the formation of North African Mālikism; teacher of Abū ʿImrān al-Fāsī, he is one of the tutelary figures of an entire generation of Maghribī and Andalusī jurists.[12] But the sources also designate him explicitly as a mutakallim (speculative theologian).[13]
The most revealing episode in his career is the response he offers to Tunisians who questioned him about al-Ashʿarī’s doctrine. Al-Qābisī composed an epistle defending Ashʿarī theology, claiming expertise in it, invalidating any disparaging characterization of it, and insisting on its soundness.[14] Those are the acts of an advocate, not of a jurist keeping a prudent distance from theology.
Some Eastern biographers go further still, classifying al-Qābisī directly among the Ashʿarīs of the third generation, at the same level as Abū Manṣūr al-Baghdādī (d. 429/1037).[15] For these biographers, al-Qābisī is not a Mālikī who sympathizes with Ashʿarism from a distance; he is, fully and in his own right, an Ashʿarī.
This classification needs its chronological context. Al-Qābisī died in the same year as al-Bāqillānī: 403/1012. He is therefore an exact contemporary of the great architect of the Ashʿarī school. His adherence to al-Ashʿarī’s doctrine is not the deferred reception of an already-consolidated tradition; it is participation in its very emergence, from the western periphery of the Islamic world.
That this dual belonging, Mālikī in law and Ashʿarī in theology, appeared unremarkable to al-Qābisī’s contemporaries is suggested by the absence, in the extant published biographical sources, of any sense of contradiction or controversy surrounding him on this score. This is a negative historiographical indicator, but a telling one.
IV. Abū ʿImrān al-Fāsī: The Network Embodied
The figure of Abū ʿImrān al-Fāsī is the clearest illustration of the centrality of the Baghdad-Kairouan-Fez network in the simultaneous transmission of Mālikism and Ashʿarism. Born in Fez, a student of al-Qābisī in Kairouan, he reached Baghdad in 399/1008; there he attended the sessions in uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory) given by al-Bāqillānī himself, who awarded him an ijāza authorizing him to transmit the entirety of his works.[16] That al-Bāqillānī should grant such authorization to a scholar from Fez, trained in Kairouan, is a sign that Ashʿarī transmission networks were consciously and deliberately extended as far as the far western Maghrib.
Upon his return to Kairouan, Abū ʿImrān himself became a pole of scholarly radiation. He taught al-Bāqillānī’s works, most notably the Tamhīd (Prolegomenon), as well as texts by al-Ashʿarī and Ibn Mujāhid, to an audience composed of Maghribīs and Andalusīs.[17] He thus became what one might call a network hub: a scholar in whom traditions emanating from Baghdad converged, and from whom they radiated westward.
A dimension of Abū ʿImrān’s career that exceeds the history of ideas alone must be mentioned here: his direct role in the birth of the Almoravid movement. It is to him that Yaḥyā b. Ibrāhīm, chief of the Berber Lamtūna tribe, turns during his passage through Kairouan on his return from the pilgrimage, asking him to designate a student capable of teaching Islam in Berber territory.[18] Abū ʿImrān designates his disciple Waggāg b. Zalū, who undertakes the instruction of ʿAbd Allāh Yāsīn, the future founder of the Almoravid dynasty.[19] The link is direct and documented: the scholar who received al-Bāqillānī’s ijāza and taught Ashʿarī texts in Kairouan is the same whose legal-theological teaching provided the initial doctrinal framework for the movement that would unify the Maghrib and al-Andalus under the banner of Mālikism.
Those who present Ashʿarism as an imposition upon a reluctant Mālikism under Almohad pressure overlook this foundational fact: the Mālikism that the Almoravids propagated was precisely the one that Abū ʿImrān, a direct disciple of al-Bāqillānī, had helped to shape.
V. A Living Network, not a Unilateral Transmission
These trajectories reveal the bidirectional and dynamic character of the intellectual network linking Baghdad, Kairouan, and the major cities of the western Maghrib in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries.[20] Scholars do not travel only from West to East in search of formation; they return, teach, maintain correspondence, send manuscripts and ijāzāt, and train students who in turn depart for the East. The connection between Baghdad and the Maghrib is not a center-to-periphery relationship; it is a relationship of interpenetration in which both poles influence one another.
A particularly striking example of this bidirectionality is the correspondence between Ibn Mujāhid, the Mālikī Ashʿarī of Baghdad, and Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī. As early as 368/979, Ibn Mujāhid wrote to Ibn Abī Zayd requesting two of his works on the Mudawwana, which had become celebrated as far as Iraq.[21] Ibn Abī Zayd sent two students to Mecca and then Baghdad to deliver the texts in person, accompanied by an autograph ijāza.[22] One of these students, Ibn ʿAdhrā, became a disciple of Ibn Mujāhid and brought back to the Maghrib Ibn Mujāhid’s Risāla fī ʿuqūd ahl al-sunna (Epistle on Sunnī Doctrine), a theological text. Simultaneously, a disciple of Ibn Mujāhid, Ibn ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, settled in Kairouan to study under Ibn Abī Zayd.[23]
Conclusion: Before the Almoravids, the Network
The standard narrative on the Ashʿarization of western Mālikism places its decisive moment under the Almoravids, in the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries.[24] But the evidence gathered in this essay suggests that the narrative begins too late. From the 340s/950s to the 400s/1010s, and perhaps earlier still, Mālikī scholars in the Maghrib such as al-Darrās in Fez and al-Qābisī in Kairouan already testify to an engagement with Ashʿarī thought that bears no resemblance to passive or coerced reception. And at the turn of the fifth/eleventh century, Abū ʿImrān al-Fāsī personifies the accomplished synthesis: transmitted from al-Bāqillānī himself, re-diffused toward the far western Maghrib, and inserted into the very networks that would give birth to the Almoravid movement.
What this history reveals is less the Ashʿarization of Mālikism than a co-construction of the Mālikī-Ashʿarī intellectual tradition in the Islamic West, a co-construction carried by individuals who travelled, wrote, corresponded, and trained disciples in a space that did not yet know the rigid doctrinal borders that centuries of subsequent polemic would help to erect.
Notes:
[1] On the theological substance embedded in Mālikī legal theory itself, see Ilyass Amharar, “Du mālikisme dans les Nukat al-maḥṣūl d’Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī,” Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques 78, no. 1 (2024): 103–34.
[2] Yassir Benhima, “Le mālikisme irakien et le Maghreb: Réseaux, circulations et transferts entre Orient et Occident musulmans,” in Connected Stories: Contacts, Traditions and Transmissions in Premodern Mediterranean Islam, ed. Mohamed Meouak and Cristina de la Puente (De Gruyter, 2022), 111–30.
[3] Ilyass Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville: étude d’une généalogie du kalām, d’al-Ashʿarī à Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī,” in Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (543/1148): Legacy and Transmission of the Thought of al-Ġazālī (505/1111) in al-Andalus (Brill, 2024), 152.
[4] Benhima, “Le mālikisme irakien et le Maghreb,” 111–30.
[5] On his theological formation and his legal theory, see Ilyass Amharar, Langage et théologie chez le Qāḍī Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (543/1148): les informations subtiles de la somme de théorie légale (Nukāt al-Maḥṣūl fī ʿilm al-uṣūl) (Gorgias Press, 2023).
[6] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 152.
[7] Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino, Fès et sainteté, de la fondation à l’avènement du Protectorat (808–1912) (Rabat: Centre Jacques Berque, 2014), 145–60. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, Tartīb al-madārik, 6:81–82.
[8] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 152.
[9] H.R. Idris, “Deux juristes kairouanais de l’époque zīrīde,” Annales de l’Institut d’études orientales 12 (1954): 134.
[10] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 152.
[11] They are often referred to as al-shaykhān (the two shaykhs) in Mālikī literature. By comparison, in Shāfiʿī literature, the term al-shaykhān designates later figures, namely al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) and al-Rāfiʿī (d. 623/1226). On them, see Idris, “Deux jurists,” 122–98.
[12] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 154; Idris, “Deux juristes,” 122–23.
[13] Muḥammad Naṣīr, “Dawr al-Bāqillānī fī talqīn al-asānīd al-ashʿariyya bi-bilād al-maghrib,” in Al-fikr al-ashʿarī bi’l-maghrib: Khilāl marḥalatay al-taʾsīs wa’l-tarsīm, ed. Jamāl ʿAllāl al-Bakhtī (Rabat: Publications de la Rābiṭa Moḥammedienne des Savants, 2016), 71.
[14] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 153.
[15] Naṣīr, “Dawr al-Bāqillānī,” 73.
[16] Naṣīr, “Dawr al-Bāqillānī,” 77.
[17] On the diffusion of the Tamhīd in al-Andalus, see J. M. Fórneas Besteiro, “Al-Tamhīd de al-Bāqillānī y su transmisión en al-Andalus,” Miscelánea de estudios árabes y hebraicos 26–28 (1977–79): 433–40.
[18] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 155; Lagardère, “Une théologie dogmatique,” 80.
[19] Vincent Lagardère, “Une théologie dogmatique de la frontière en al-Andalus,” Anaquel de estudios árabes 5 (1994): 80.
[20] For a further, hitherto unknown Maghribī Ashʿarite belonging to this milieu, see Ilyass Amharar, “À la découverte d’un Ašʿarite maghrébin inconnu,” MIDEO 35 (2020): 265–300.
[21] Benhima, “Le mālikisme irakien et le Maghreb,” 123.
[22] Lagardère, “Une théologie dogmatique,” 72.
[23] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 152–53.
[24] Delfina Serrano Ruano, “Los almorávides y la teología ašʿarí: ¿Contestación o legitimación de una disciplina marginal?,” in Identidades marginals, ed. C. de la Puente (Madrid: CSIC, 2003), 461–516.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Ilyass Amharar, Kairouan, Baghdad, Fez: The Early Networks of Mālikī Ashʿarism in the Maghrib (Aug. 13, 2026), https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/08/13/kairouan-baghdad-fez-the-early-networks-of-maliki-ash%ca%bfarism-in-the-maghrib/.
Suggested Chicago citation: Ilyass Amharar, “Kairouan, Baghdad, Fez: The Early Networks of Mālikī Ashʿarism in the Maghrib,” Islamic Law Blog, August 13, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/08/13/kairouan-baghdad-fez-the-early-networks-of-maliki-ash%ca%bfarism-in-the-maghrib/.
