The Mālikī madhhab or school is one of four main extant schools of law in Sunni Islam. In the postcolonial period, one influential genre within the school has been what might be called “istidlāl” texts. These manuals are evidence-giving texts that provide not just the school’s rulings but also those rulings’ connections to foundational Islamic sources, above all verses from the Qur’an or hadith reports. Although advanced classical and postclassical works within the madhhab also frequently provided such evidence, the recent istidlāl texts adopt the conventions of academic scholarship (footnotes, bibliographies, etc.) and are aimed at both lay and specialist audiences. These texts constitute not just an exposition of the school’s rulings and methodologies but also a field of debate around what the school is and how its canon should inform contemporary Muslims’ practices and identities. The issues at stake go beyond the Mālikī school and intersect with wider negotiations of Islamic religiosity in an era of increasing debate and reflexivity. This paper examines and compares the two most influential Mālikī istidlāl texts, Al-Ḥabīb bin Ṭāhir’s Al-Fiqh al-Mālikī wa-Adillatuhu (Mālikī Jurisprudence and Its Evidences) and al-Ṣādiq al-Gharyānī’s Mudawwanat al-Fiqh al-Mālikī wa-Adillatuhu (the Compendium of Mālikī Jurisprudence and Its Evidences). Bin Ṭāhir comes out of a traditionalist institution in Tunisia, the Zaytūna, whose fortunes have fluctuated under successive postcolonial governments. His text defends traditionalist Mālikī rulings and approaches, but also displays a subtly ambivalent relationship with the traditionalist Mālikī methodology for deriving rulings – an ambivalence that hints at strains faced by traditionalists as they adapt to the challenges other Islamic currents have directed at Mālikism and at the madhhabs generally. Al-Gharyānī, meanwhile, is a Libyan iconoclast who wrote prolifically during the longtime rule of Muammar al-Qadhafi and has now taken on a powerful but controversial role as Grand Mufti in post-2011 Libya. Al-Gharyānī’s text is much more critical of traditionalist rulings and approaches, exemplifying an approach that is favorable to the idea of wide-ranging ijtihād or independent legal reasoning. Comparing these two texts, the paper assesses the intellectual trajectories within contemporary Mālikism and reflects on dynamics of tradition and reform within the school and within contemporary Muslim communities more broadly. In this way the paper connects to the panel's move to rethink “reform and tradition in Islamic law as neither exclusive nor stable categories, looking instead to the ways in which scholars played at the margins of both.”