Malik ibn Anas, the founding figure of the Maliki school of jurisprudence, also known as "the school of the people of Madinah," was born at Madinah at the height of the Umayyad khilafah. Although Madinah had by his time long lost the political importance it had once had, the town remained the chief center of transmitted information about Islam in all the lands of the khilafah, because it was the original setting of the Prophet's mission in the crucial last ten years of his life, because the overwhelming majority of Muhammad's Companions had continued to reside there after his death, and because their descendants were still living there in Malik's time.