Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀

The scholar who, from a Moroccan cell, wrote a fatwa against the enslavement of his own peoples that is cited in defense of their dignity to this day.

Life

Ahmad Baba was born in 1556 in Timbuktu, into the Aqit family: an authoritative branch of the Sanhaja Imazighen originally from Araouane, the oasis to the north of the city and a stop on the salt caravans. His father Ahmad and his uncle Mahmud were already prominent jurists at the Sankoré mosque. He grew up with manuscripts as everyday objects, and his own library would later number, by his own account, 1,600 volumes, of which he emphasized that it was the smallest of the six libraries in his family.

He studied tafsir, fiqh, grammar, logic and astronomy under Mohammed Baghayogho, a Fulani scholar from Djenné teaching at Sankoré. That teacher-student bond is formative: Baghayogho was no narrow-minded jurist but a polymath, and Ahmad Baba ﵀ became one too.

Life broke open on March 13, 1591, at Tondibi. The Moroccan expeditionary force under Judar Pasha, equipped with muskets, crushed the horse-and-lance army of Songhai. Gao fell, Timbuktu followed, and the occupation was brutal. In 1593, Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur ordered the arrest of the scholarly class of Timbuktu on suspicion of supporting Askia remnants. Ahmad Baba ﵀ was led in chains to Marrakesh, more than 2,000 kilometers north across the Sahara, and by his own account he was forced to walk during the desert crossing while shackled. His library was plundered; he lost 1,600 volumes.

In Marrakesh he was held under house arrest, but was allowed to teach, and he kept up a correspondence with the scholarly class of Fez. His reputation was so great that Moroccan scholars came to sit at his feet. Only in 1607, after fourteen years, did Sultan Zaydan grant him permission to return. He arrived back in Timbuktu in 1608 and continued his work there for the last twenty years of his life, until his death in 1627.

Faith and culture

Ahmad Baba ﵀ is a Maliki jurist in the Sankoré tradition: theology, fiqh, biographical-dictionary work, grammar and logic are all of one piece. He published more than forty works, of which his Nayl al-Ibtihāj bi-Taṭrīz al-Dībāj (Achieving Joy through the Embroidery of the Brocade) is a biographical lexicon of Maliki jurists, a standard work to this day.

His tariqa affiliation is not prominent; he is primarily a jurist, not a Sufi sheikh. But his Islam is no cold scholasticism, and his response to the injustice done to Timbuktu is rooted in a deep conviction that Islamic law applies equally to scholar and conqueror. That conviction is also the core of his most famous work.

The Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd ilā Nayl Ḥukm Mujallab al-Sūd (The Ladder of Ascent toward the Verdict on the Importation of Blacks) he wrote in 1615 in answer to questions from Touat about the legality of enslaving Black Africans. His answer is juridically rigorous and morally sharp: skin color is no ground for slavery, and slavery in Islamic law arises only from captivity in a lawful war against non-Muslims. The populations of Bornu, Kano, Katsina, Gao, Djenné, Timbuktu and the Fulani regions are Muslims, so enslaving them is haram. He names by name the peoples who may not be enslaved, and he indicts those who do it.

Legacy

The Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd is no marginal tract. It is the most cited legal text against the slave trade produced from within Sahelian Islam itself, a century before the Atlantic trade reached its peak, and it remains an anchor document for the history of Senegambia, Guinea and the Bight of Benin. The scholar who wrote in 1615 that his own peoples must not be enslaved did so while his brothers and nephews were held in Morocco and his library burned by the same conquerors. That is testimony rather than abstract fatwa.

His broader oeuvre, the Kifāyat al-Muḥtāj (an abridged Nayl al-Ibtihāj), the commentaries on the Mukhtaṣar of Khalil, the works on logic and the works on grammar, shows that Timbuktu in his time was a mature academic center with international reach. Moroccan, Egyptian and Hijazi scholars corresponded with him.

The Tarikh al-Sudan, written by Es-Sa’di in the 1650s, speaks of him with an awe that indicates how heavily his authority still weighed on the generation after him. The historian Mahmoud Zouber reconstructed his biography in the 1970s on the basis of manuscripts preserved in Timbuktu archives.

His double status, victim of the Moroccan conquest and antislavery voice avant la lettre, sets him beyond the one-sided claims of Moroccan historiography, of colonial historiography, and of any contemporary identity politics.

---

Uncertainties:

The figure of 1,600 volumes comes from his own statement and cannot be verified independently, and the size of his library in Timbuktu before the plunder may well be rhetorically exaggerated. The precise date of his return to Timbuktu also varies in the sources, between 1607 and 1608.

Sources

• Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀, Miʿraj al-Suʿud ila Nayl Hukm Mujallab al-Sud (1024/1615), also known as al-Kashf wa’l-bayan li-asnaf majlub al-Sudan: the answer to the questions of al-Jirari of Tuwat, with unbelief as the sole ground for slavery without distinction of race, and the Muslim peoples of Kano, Katsina, Bornu, Songhay, Jenne and the Wolof, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 51–52, 304–306, Hunwick, p. lxi, and Adeleye, p. 9.
• Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀, Nayl al-Ibtihaj bi-Tatriz al-Dibaj (completed in 1004/1596 in Marrakesh) and Kifayat al-Muhtaj (1603), the abridgement with his own biography at the end, as quoted in Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 29, and in Gomez, pp. 171, 175.
• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh al-Sudan, written in 1653 to 1656: the biography of Ahmad Baba ﵀ (ch. 9), the arrest and deportation of the scholars of Timbuktu (ch. 24) and his return in 1608 (ch. 30), in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 31, 49, 223–225, 269.
• Muhammad al-Saghir al-Ifrani ﵀, Nuzhat al-hadi: the account of the arrest, the 1,600 volumes and the audience with sultan al-Mansur, in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 315–316.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. lxi, lxiii, 31, 49–50, 62, 189, 223–225, 269, 315–316, 390.
  • pp. lxi, lxiii, 49–50, 62: the library of 1,600 volumes, by his own account the smallest among his contemporaries, and logic, rhetoric and astronomy in the Timbuktu curriculum; the biography: unique in his time, famous in the Maghrib for his fatwas, unbending before emirs and sultans; the ancestor Muhammad Aqit from Masina via Biru to Timbuktu; the teacher Muhammad Baghayogho al-Wangari; his death in 1627 and his relatives who died in Morocco.
  • pp. 189, 223–225, 269: Tondibi with 12,500 cavalry and 30,000 infantry; al-Mansur’s order to send the scholars in shackles; the imprisonment in Muharram 1002, September to October 1593, the departure on 18 March 1594 and the arrival in Marrakesh on 21 May 1594; the release on 19 May 1596; the return to Timbuktu on 26 February 1608 thanks to Mulay Zaydan.
  • pp. 31, 315–316, 390: the dating of the Tarikh al-Sudan; al-Ifrani ﵀ on the arrest on 19 October 1593, the fall from the camel and the broken leg, the teaching in Marrakesh and the release by Zaydan; Mahmoud Zouber, Ahmad Baba de Tombouctou (1556–1627), Paris 1977.
• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, pp. 19, 29: the Aqit as Masufa Sanhaja, settled in Timbuktu around 1450; more than ten years of lessons with the Dyula scholar Muhammad Baghayogho; the Nayl (1596) and the Kifaya (1603).
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 51–52, 171, 175, 285, 291–292, 304–306, 364.
  • pp. 51–52, 304–306: the Mi’raj: unbelief as the sole condition, no difference between one race and another; the questions of al-Jirari of Tuwat; the voluntarily converted lands of Kano, Katsina, Bornu and Songhay; the Wolof and the people of Jenne; the 107 Muslim tribes in the postscript to al-Isi.
  • pp. 171, 175, 285, 291–292, 364: the Kifaya as abridgement of the Nayl, completed in 1596 in exile; the Mukhtasar of Khalil read eight times with Baghayughu; grandfather al-hajj Ahmad, older brother of Qadi Mahmud, and father Ahmad, born in 1522; Tondibi on 13 March 1591 under Jawdar with musketeers.
• R. A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies, Humanities Press, New York 1971 (Ibadan History Series), p. 9: Ahmad Baba ﵀ referring to Bornu, Katsina and Kano as Islamic states.