The aim of this paper is to reappraise the process by which the Mālikī school came to dominate the religious sphere of the Maghrib, with a focus on the transmission of Maliki legal texts in Fāṭimid Qayrawān, networks of Mālikī scholars, and their memory. I focus on the memory of the famous Qayrawānī jurist Saḥnūn b. Saʿīd, and the transmission of his influential book the Mudawwana in the formation of the Mālikī tradition. I ask why and how this compilation of Mālik b. Anas’s legal opinions, considered notoriously imperfect by some, surpassed the efforts of all jurists in North Africa and al-Andalus. It is difficult to explain the formation of the Mālikī canon the way it did without considering the intellectual and political contexts, namely the Fāṭimid rule in Ifrīqiya, during which the Mālikī legal community consolidated. To make the argument more explicit, I highlight the social function of texts, with a particular focus on the ṭabaqāt and the circulation of legal texts. The Mālikīs’ interest in composing ṭabaqāt will be contrasted with their contemporary Fāṭimid-Ismāʿīlī scholars, as well as the Ḥanafīs (namely the losing sides). What role did texts play in the formation of communal memory and identity and how did they hold communities together, or facilitate the rise of new communities? Answering these questions, the paper will argue that apart from normative and doctrinal aspects of the texts that facilitated homogeneity and conformity, they also created a social connectivity that reinforced group cohesion. For the Islamic Maghrib and al-Andalus, this played an important role in the consolidation of the Mālikī communities, and the disappearance of the Shīʿīs and Ḥanafīs. The case study will include text reuse data featuring the elaboration of the Mālikī ṭabaqāt, and visualisations of book relations and text transmission networks. Using several innovative approaches, such as macroanalysis and distant reading of texts and quantitative methods, this paper sheds a new light on the history of the formation of the Islamic Maghrib and helps us to understand narrative sources better.