Recent scholarship has emphasized the contributions of the great Maliki jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (626-84/1228-85) to Islamic legal thought. However, al-Qarafi’s compilation of legal canons and distinctions, al-Furuq, has not yet been studied, nor has the collection of his teacher, the prominent Shafi'i jurist 'Izz al-Din b. 'Abd al-Salam (577-660/1181-1262), entitled al-Qawa'id al-kubra. This paper analyzes and compares these two works to demonstrate that al-Qarafi based his collection in large part on that of his teacher and incorporated most of the material from the Qawa’id al-kubra into his Furuq. To date, this intellectual debt has remained undetected, in part because al-Qar?f? reordered, refined, and supplemented his teacher’s canons. Moreover, al-Qarafi never directly acknowledged his borrowings from his teacher’s work, and instead relied on Maliki doctrines and authorities to substantiate his canons. This ‘Malikization’ effectively obfuscated al-Qarafi’s debt to Ibn 'Abd al-Salam, while successfully indigenizing in the Maliki school a discursive analysis of the law in the language of canons. The ‘anxiety of influence’ displayed by al-Qarafi offers a unique window into the tensions surrounding cross-madhhab influence and borrowing in Mamluk Cairo, particularly among Maliki jurists vis-à-vis their more dominant Shafi'i contemporaries. It also contributes the development of a theory of borrowing and textual attribution in the early Mamluk era. Finally, this paper argues against imposing rigid genre-boundaries on legal literature in this period, and instead emphasizes that the parallel and interrelated developments in legal canons, distinctions, and purposes (maqasid) are best understood when studied synchronously.