Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: imam maliks reliability — June 15, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

1. According to Yasin Dutton in "Early Islam in Medina - Malik and His Muwatta'", Malik narrates from 98 teachers just in his Muwatta'. One of his teachers, ibn Shih'hab al-Zuhri, was infamous for not writing hadith down. On this point, Dutton writes,

"It was during Ibn Shihāb’s lifetime – and, it could be argued, to a large extent due to his activities – that there was a shift away from the earlier practice of simply memorising ḥadīth (‘knowledge’) to one where it became increasingly normal to write it down as well. We hear of him being initially averse to writing down ḥadīth – ‘I never used to write anything down on these slates!’ – but by the end of his life, at caliphal insistence, he not only allowed it but also earned the accolade of being the first person to make a comprehensive collection of ḥadīth. Indeed, it was this shift from the purely oral transmission of ‘knowledge’ to parallel oral and written versions that was to result, in the generation after Ibn Shihāb, in the production of ‘books’ such as Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ."

Much later in the book,

"After ʿUmar’s \[ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz\] death, and particularly in the time of Hishām (r. 105–25/724–43), this project was expanded by Ibn Shihāb, to the extent that it is Ibn Shihāb who is credited with being the first to make a comprehensive collection of ḥadīth. Despite this collection, however, Ibn Shihāb seems not to have organized this material into a book, which is what Mālik and his contemporaries began doing, resulting in collections such as the Muwaṭṭaʾ. This activity thus marks the transition from an initially oral method of transmission to one which becomes associated with writing and, by extension, the production of ‘books’ and all that that entails in terms of authorship and presentation. In Mālik’s time it is still primarily individual pieces of material, that is, reports, that are being transmitted, rather than a fixed overall form... ."

We know that Malik had many more teachers than those 98, and we don't have extant copies of the fragmentary hadith collections that his numerous teachers have. According to slightly later books on the adab of narration (such as Muslim's introduction to sahih), there are several ways hadith compilers indicated that a teacher was either reading from his book, or shared his book with his student, or had his student read from the book to the teacher - and it's clear that this happened with Malik in his Muwatta if you do careful analysis.

I don't know if anyone has actually sat down, gone narration by narration, and tried to determine which narrations from the Muwatta came from previously written sources and which ones came from oral hadith transmission - however I think it's something certainly doable. You wouldn't be able to put an exact number, but you could determine the broad strokes.

2. Mass-Corroboration - there are plenty of instances of the people of Madina all agreeing on something which found its way into Malik's fiqh, such as his approach to the Awqaf set aside by the Rashidun caliphs. Additionally, the Muwatta itself was corroborated by a large number of the scholarly class at the time of its "publication" so to speak, and while their works or manuscripts don't survive, Malik's does.

3. I don't think I was trying to argue that this necessarily means everything Malik said was accurate, historical, or came from the Prophet. I said, "I agree that the post is a misrepresentation of 'amal ahl al-Madina. It wasn't just memories people passed along." and "But human memory along with written sources, many witnesses, landmarks, etc. is totally different." There is a different historical veracity between a memorized statement being transmitted across centuries and "this is a physical landmark here in our city and this is what people have said about it."