The four schools of Sunni law are named for the scholars who gave them final shape. Thus, the Hanafi school was founded by Abu Hanifa, from the Afghanistan area (though he taught in Kufa, Iraq); the Maliki school, by the Moroccan jurist Ibn Malik (though he worked and taught in Medina); and the Shafi’i school, by Imam al-Shafi’i of Mecca (though he settled finally in Egypt.) The last to crystallize was the Hanbali school, founded by the rigidly uncompromising Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, about whom I will say more later in this chapter.
