The four Sunni schools are named for jurists of the eighth and ninth centuries — Abu Hanifa, Malik, al-Shafii and Ibn Hanbal — and their distribution is geographic rather than doctrinal choice: Hanafi across Turkey, the Balkans, Central and South Asia; Maliki across West and North Africa; Shafii in Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen and East Africa; Hanbali in the Arabian peninsula. Twelver Shia follow the Jafari school; Zaydis, Ibadis and Ismailis have their own. The consequential fact is mutual recognition: all four Sunni schools accept the others as valid paths to the truth, so a Hanafi and a Maliki disagreeing about whether touching a woman breaks ablution are not accusing each other of error in religion. That settlement, reached over centuries and never formally legislated, is what allowed the tradition to expand across radically different societies without splintering. It is also what modern reformist and Salafi movements have partly dismantled by arguing that one should follow the evidence directly rather than a school, which sounds liberating and in practice removes the mechanism that made disagreement safe.