Askia Muhammad I

He took an empire from a tyrant and gave it a constitution. He traveled to Mecca and returned with a title that Mali had not borne even under Mansa Musa. And he died blind, deposed by his own son, in the palace he himself had built.

Life

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr Ture was born around 1443 into a Soninke family, probably in the vicinity of today’s Gambia-Senegal border region, in a line that later generations would call Silla. He grew up as a soldier under Sonni Ali Ber and rose to sohoy, governor of the western province of Hombori, a position of heavy strategic weight. He was Sonni Ali’s most capable general, and he was also the most dangerous rival of the son who would succeed him.

When Sonni Ali died in November 1492, his son Sonni Baru succeeded him, and the succession quickly ignited a struggle of faith. Baru openly refused to become a Muslim; he held to the mixed-religious style of his father. Muhammad Ture, supported by the Sankoré ulama who had been driven out under Sonni Ali and now saw their moment, demanded Islamic governance. The two parties met at Anfao, just north of Gao, in April 1493, and Baru lost. Muhammad Ture mounted the throne and took the title Askia, originally a mocking exclamation by Baru’s sisters (“a si kiya”, “he will not be king”), which he turned into a dynastic name.

He reigned for thirty-five years. No ruler in West African history after Mansa Musa had a longer term in office and a more coherent program. In 1496-1498 he undertook his Hajj, with Mecca lying four months of travel away. Al-Maghili ﵀ wrote in those years his Replies to Askia in answer to the legal questions that Muhammad put to him. In Cairo the Askia received from the shadow Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil II the title Amir al-Mu’minin bi-bilad al-Sudan, commander of the believers in the Sahel lands, a title he used until his death.

His military campaigns built Songhai to its greatest extent. To the northeast: Agadez, 1200 kilometers away in the Aïr mountains, fell in 1515 and was incorporated as a vassal sultanate. To the north: Taghaza, the salt mine, was brought under more direct Songhai authority. To the west: Mema and parts of the old Mali heartland. To the south: several Hausa cities were defeated and made tributary. To the east: the Bornu border was probed. Around 1510 Songhai covered an area larger than the Mansa of Mali had ever effectively governed.

In the 1520s he went blind, and government passed more into the hands of his sons and advisers. In 1528 his son Musa seized power, the old Askia was deposed and exiled to an island in the Niger, and only in 1537, when his son Askia Ismail was reigning, was he allowed to return to Gao. He died there in 1538, more than ninety-five years old if we accept the chronology. He was buried in a stepped earthen pyramid in Gao, a structure that still stands, UNESCO World Heritage since 2004.

Faith and culture

Askia Muhammad positioned himself explicitly as the antithesis of Sonni Ali. Where Sonni Ali ruled syncretically, Askia Muhammad sought the strict Maliki line. Where Sonni Ali had driven out the Sankoré ulama, Askia Muhammad financed their return and their patronage. He restored mosques, imposed official Islamic protocols at court, and introduced Qadi adjudication in provinces that did not yet have it. Timbuktu, 260 kilometers to the northwest of his capital, revived under him as an intellectual center.

The Replies to Askia of al-Maghili ﵀ are the key here. This written dossier of answers to Askia’s questions, translated and analyzed in English by John Hunwick in 1985, is one of the most concrete documents we have on early modern West African statecraft. Questions concern: the legitimacy of Sonni Ali’s contracts (al-Maghili ﵀: invalid), the legal status of subjects who maintain both Islamic and traditional practices, the rights of non-Muslim minorities, the correct form of taxation. The Askia applied the answers selectively, since he was at the same time a practical statesman, but the Ajwibat formed the intellectual core of his reign.

At the same time it must be noted that Askia Muhammad did not Arabize Songhai society. Songhai remained Songhai. The griots kept singing, the traditional castes kept functioning, and the sohantyè lost court influence but not their place in villages. The Islamization was deep at the top and more layered among the population, as was usual throughout the entire pre-modern Islamic world.

Legacy

Askia Muhammad left three things behind: an empire, a dynasty, and a legal foundation.

The empire of Songhai would survive for three more generations after his death. His sons, Musa, Ismail, Ishaq I and Daoud, ruled with varying success until 1591, when the Moroccan expeditionary force under Judar Pasha defeated Songhai at the Battle of Tondibi and broke the empire into pieces. But the sixty-three years that Songhai functioned as a unit, from Askia Muhammad’s deposition in 1528 to the Tondibi catastrophe in 1591, rested on the administrative and religious framework he had installed.

The Askia dynasty itself lived longer than the empire. Smaller Askia lines maintained themselves in Dendi and parts of Niger into the nineteenth century, and the title Askia would circulate as a prestigious administrative label as late as the Sokoto era.

The legal foundation, al-Maghili ﵀'s Replies plus Songhai practice under Askia Muhammad, became the basis for the Islamic doctrine of state of later West African rulers. The Fulbe reformers of Sokoto under Usman dan Fodio ﵀ at the beginning of the nineteenth century cited the Askia model explicitly, and the Masina state of Seku Amadu did the same. The pyramid mausoleum in Gao is visited as a place of pilgrimage to this day; local tradition ascribes miracles to the Askia, a popular sanctification that the chronicle-hostility of others in the Sahel has not been able to overgrow.

The contrast with Sonni Ali is also instructive here. The same tarikh sources that call Sonni Ali a tyrant call Askia Muhammad a saint. A modern reading recognizes the political gain for the ulama establishment in both judgments, but also the fact that Askia Muhammad really had built something Sonni Ali had not built: a legal framework, a pilgrimage legitimacy, a diplomatic network reaching as far as Cairo.

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Uncertainties:

The birth year of c. 1443 is reconstructed from a report that he was “almost a hundred” at his death in 1538, and it is uncertain within ten years. His exact ethnic origin is traditionally given as Soninke, although the Tarikh al-Fattash suggests nuances behind the Silla line. The etymology of the title Askia from “a si kiya” is a folk etymology in the chronicles and probably in part folkloric. The dating of al-Maghili ﵀'s Replies is most likely 1497-1498, but a range of 1493-1502 has been debated in the literature. The year of death 1538 is well documented in the Tarikh al-Sudan, while the detailed chronology of his last years is less certain.

Sources

• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh as-Sudan (Timbuktu, written between 1653 and 1656), chapter 13 on the reign of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad and chapters 12, 14 and 15 on his years under Sonni Ali, his deposition, his confinement on the island of Kangaga and his death, with the dynastic list in appendix 3: in the translation of Hunwick, pp. 31, 96, 102–117, 126, 135, 336.
• Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀ and Ibn al-Mukhtar ﵀, Tarikh al-Fattash, the second chronicle of Timbuktu, on his father Baru of the Silla or Ture clan and his mother Kasay, daughter of the lord of Kura, as discussed in Hunwick, p. xl, and in Gomez, p. 229; the forged first chapter that calls him the eleventh true caliph, as discussed in Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 45.
• Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, Ajwibat al-Maghili ʿan asʾilat Askia al-Hajj Muhammad (Gao, shortly after the Askia’s return in July or August 1498), the seven questions on law and state, with the second question on the legacy of Sonni Ali and the verdict that the Askia’s jihad against him was among the most worthy, in the translation of Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 41, 72, 96, 100.
• 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. xxxix–xli, xliii–xliv, 31, 96, 102–106, 108, 113–114, 116–117, 126, 135, 189, 336.
  • pp. xxxix–xli, xliii–xliv: the Tondi-farma, governor of the Bandiagara uplands, who defeated Sunni Baru five months after his father’s death; the Soninke descent from the Silla or Ture clan; the pilgrimage of 1497–1498 and the authority of the Abbasid caliph of Cairo; Agadez as a tributary sultanate and Kebbi asserting its independence in 1517; by around 1520 an empire from the Senegal to the Aïr massif and from Borgu to Taghaza; the new offices of Baghana-fari and Kurmina-fari; the throne held throughout the sixteenth century by his sons and grandsons.
  • pp. 96, 102–103 (TS ch. 12–13): the commander whom Sonni Ali repeatedly condemned to death and reprieved; Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Turi, or al-Sillanki, who defeated Sunni Abu Bakr (Baru) at Danagha on 18 February 1493 and near Gao on 2 April 1493; the titles Amir al-Muʾminin and Khalifa; the daughters of Sonni Ali with their a si kiya; the distinction between civilians and army and the counsel of the scholars.
  • pp. 103–106 (TS ch. 13): the departure for Mecca in Safar 902/October 1496 with fifteen hundred men and three hundred thousand mithqals, of which one hundred thousand went to alms in the holy cities; the investiture as Khalifa by the Abbasid sharif, according to Hunwick the caliph of Cairo; the meeting with al-Suyuti ﵀; the return in Dhu al-Hijja 903/1498; the realm from the land of the Kanta to the salt sea and from Bendugu to Taghaza; the jihad against the Mossi in 904/1498–9.
  • pp. 108, 113–114 (TS ch. 13): the campaign in Aïr in 906/1500–1, against Katsina in 919/1514 and against the sultan of Agadez at the end of 921/1515; the defection of the Kanta of Kebbi and the failed campaign of 923/1517–18.
  • pp. 116–117, 126, 135, 336 (TS ch. 13–15; appendix 3): the blindness at the end of his reign, concealed by ʿAli Fulan; the deposition by his son Musa on 10 Dhu al-Hijja 935/15 August 1529 after thirty-six years and six months; the banishment to the island of Kangaga by Askia Muhammad Bonkana; the release by Askia Ismaʿil in June 1537 and the death in 944/1537–8; the Askias of Dendi into the nineteenth century.
  • pp. 31, 189 (TS ch. 7, 21): the hundred and one years of the dynasty in Timbuktu, from 2 April 1493 to 12 April 1591, and the encounter of Askia Ishaq with Pasha Jawdar at Tondibi.
• 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. 24–28, 41, 45–47, 72, 96, 100.
  • pp. 24–28: the Soninke descent in the paternal line and the oral tradition that he killed Sonni Ali; the new office of Kanfari for his brother ʿUmar; the pilgrimage within four years of his victory and the delegation of authority from the Abbasid shadow caliph in Cairo over the lands of Takrur; the study with al-Suyuti ﵀; the favours to the scholars of Timbuktu; twenty years of expansion from the Senegal to Aïr and Taghaza and the decay after the death of Dawud in 1582.
  • pp. 45–47: the Askia model among the later reformers: Ahmad Lobbo of Masina, Usman dan Fodio ﵀ with his Bayan Wujub al-Hijra and Siraj al-Ikhwan, and al-Hajj ʿUmar ﵀.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 220, 229–230, 243, 328, 364: the reign of thirty-six years, 1493–1529; the father from the Silla clan, originally from Toro; Sunni Baru who rejected the call to convert; Agadez tributary since 1500–1 and subdued again in 1516; the death on 1 Shawwal 944/3 March 1538; the Battle of Tondibi on 13 March 1591 against Pasha Jawdar.