As I'm going down my Academia.edu mentions I find Christian Lange. He's doing a computational analysis of the Sunna across the five best-documented schools: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and (for the Shi'a) Ja'fari. Not Zaydi or Ibadi; but their texts might not be digitised so well as the other five, those five having governments behind them. Oman, I think, would be advised to step it up.
Over the last two decades I've grown skeptical at "computer analysis" although, for translations at least, artificial-intelligence is improving. (Especially for Romance, I can attest. I remain unsold on Latin itself.) Computers are a wondrous timesaver for a human when s/he goes through a text for (say) parallels. But computers don't do a human's job.
Lange finds the Malikis to be the least Quranist of the schools. I take Lange's word for the Malikis. Imam Malik himself always struck me as the Shi'ite for the family of 'Umar; Malik also (lest we forget) transmitted much sunna from the early 'Alids. It was well into the 'Abbasi era, really the post-'Abbasi era, when both the ahl al-hadith (Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal) and the Shi'at 'Ali (Ja'far) came to pound the Quran for their jurisprudence. The Hanafis - well, they were Iraqis, caught between these schools, where Malikis in Greater North Africa (+Sicily+Spain) weren't. So the Hanafis gamely followed.
BACKDATE EASTER MONDAY
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