What a Mansa Builds After He Returns

A Hajj is a moment. A legacy is a generation. Between 1325 and his death around 1337, Mansa Musa built an infrastructure on which West Africa would feed for centuries to come.

A Return With an Architect

The image to begin with is a caravan re-entering Mali, late 1325 or early 1326, much heavier than at its departure. It was heavier in books rather than in gold, since most of the gold had been left behind in Cairo, Medina and Mecca; heavier in ulama, in a small group of Egyptian and Andalusian craftsmen, and in one man in particular, Abu Ishaq as-Sahili ﵀, poet, architect, presumably also jurist, born in Granada, met in Mecca, purchased for a fortune in mithqal of gold.

This is the moment when the Hajj ceases to be an event and begins to become an investment. Musa had ruled Mali for eleven years before he departed, and he ruled another ten to twelve years after his return, depending on where his death is placed, since the sources give 1332 to 1337. In those years, in a way one rarely sees in monarchs, he allowed that one great moment to flow into a long, patient architectural transformation of his realm.

What this meant for a city like Timbuktu can be put in a few sentences. Before the Hajj, Timbuktu was a trading stop, a waystation between the Niger port at Kabara and the desert routes to Taghaza, a place of merchants, of salt markets, of Tuareg caravans coming and going, a place of some importance though not the center of anything. After Musa’s return, Timbuktu becomes a city in the making, with a Friday mosque, a palace, a madrasa, a library and a scholarium, in short the seed of what within a century would become the Islamic intellectual capital of West Africa.

The Djinguereber Mosque

The Djinguereber is the iconic building, and it deserves a pause of its own.

When as-Sahili ﵀ arrived with Musa in Timbuktu, there was already a small Friday mosque, simple, of local clay, with palm-wood supports. Musa commissioned something different, a building that would go beyond the simple and beyond the local in the sense of the improvised, and that would marry the tradition of West African mud architecture to the refinement that as-Sahili ﵀ knew from Granada and Cairo.

The Djinguereber, a word that comes from Songhai and means roughly the great mosque, was built of clay, wooden supports, and a design that combined the square sahn (courtyard) with a raised mihrab tower. The minaret took on the characteristic pyramidal shape with protruding wooden beams that as-Sahili ﵀ drew from the Berber building tradition of southern Morocco, and those beams are not only ornament; they are permanent scaffolding on which restorers can renew the mud layer each year. It was intelligent architecture, a building designed to be maintainable in a climate where rain, dust and termites eat away at every building substance.

Tarikh al-Sudan, written by Abderrahman as-Sa’di ﵀ in 1655, describes the construction and explicitly attributes it to as-Sahili ﵀ and Musa’s commission, and the Tarikh al-Fattash, another sixteenth- to seventeenth-century chronicle, confirms this. Both sources come from Timbuktu itself and had access to court registers that have since been lost, so that they are today the most direct entry point into this building period.

The Djinguereber still stands, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is, after almost seven centuries, still in use as a Friday mosque. Each year, after the rainy season, the community of Timbuktu gathers to renew the mud layers on precisely those wooden beams that as-Sahili ﵀ once built into the design. It is a living building rather than a museum.

The City Behind the Mosque

But the mosque alone was not enough. Near the Djinguereber, Musa had a palace built called madugu, a Mande term for the residence of an important figure. The palace was his base in the north rather than his primary residence, since Niani remained the political capital and Mali’s heartland lay in the south; it was the place from which he could rule when he was managing trans-Saharan affairs.

This constellation, Niani as political center and Timbuktu as cultural-commercial center, was a deliberate division of labor rather than an accident. Niani remained Mande, remained clan-bound, remained the place where the Gbara assembled, while Timbuktu became something new, an Islamic cosmopolitan city, open to merchants from Fez and Cairo, to ulama from Tlemcen and Tunis, to Tuareg traders from Taghaza, so that the two cities complemented each other rather than competed.

Around the Djinguereber and the palace the city grew organically, the southern quarters filling with Berber merchants and the northern quarters with Songhai fishermen who lived from the river, while a separate Wangara quarter arose for the Soninke traders who controlled the gold lines to Bambuk and Bure. To the east later rose the Sankoré quarter, which brings us to the most important part of the legacy.

The Sankoré and the Intellectual Project

Sankoré was originally a Friday mosque founded by a wealthy Mandinka woman, possibly even before Musa’s Hajj, but under Musa and especially under his successors the Sankoré became something more: it became a jami’a, a university in the classical Islamic sense of the word. It was not a single university with buildings and faculties as we picture it today, but a network of scholars who lived around the mosque, held halqas (study circles) in the shadow of its walls, produced manuscripts in their own libraries, and attracted students from Fez to Kano.

In the sixteenth century, under Askia Muhammad, the Sankoré at its peak according to some estimates supported up to 25,000 students, while the total population of Timbuktu lay around 100,000. These figures are debatable, since the population sizes of premodern African cities are difficult to estimate, but the order of magnitude speaks for itself: this was an institution that could measure itself against al-Qarawiyin in Fez, against al-Azhar in Cairo and against al-Zaytuna in Tunis, far beyond anything provincial.

And the foundations were laid under Mansa Musa, who financed scholarships for local students who traveled to Fez and Cairo to study and return, built libraries to house their books, and paid salaries to the first ulama who had traveled from Egypt to Timbuktu in his retinue. Above all, he definitively established the Maliki madhhab as the dominant school of law in Mali, by which West Africa became intellectually plugged into the entire Maghrebi and Andalusian juridical-theological ecosystem.

The Maliki Choice

This choice deserves its own attention, since Mali could in principle have chosen a different madhhab. The Hanafi school was dominant in the Mamluk sultanate that Musa had visited, and the Shafi’i school was strong in parts of Arabia and East Africa. Why Maliki?

There were three reasons. The first was practical: the trans-Saharan trade networks along which Islam had reached West Africa ran via Berber merchants who were almost without exception Maliki, and the Moroccan and Andalusian sphere was Maliki territory, so that a Mansa who made his state Maliki synchronized his legal system with his most important trading partners.

The second was intellectual: the Maliki school, founded by Imam Malik ibn Anas ﵀ in Medina, attached particular importance to amal ahl al-Madina, the practice of the inhabitants of Medina, as a source of law, and this gave the school a certain rootedness in community convention that aligned well with the Mande tradition of the Kouroukan Fouga. Law came out of how a community lived rather than out of nothing, and Musa saw this congruence and built upon it.

The third was availability: as-Sahili ﵀ was Maliki, the ulama whom Musa attracted from Cairo and the Maghreb were Maliki, and the books he had copied and stored in Timbuktu, al-Muwatta, al-Mudawwana al-Kubra of Sahnun ibn Said ﵀ and the commentaries of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀, were Maliki as well. The ecosystem that Musa imported was Maliki, and the state therefore became, logically and inevitably, Maliki too.

This choice is visible to this day, since Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea and the overwhelming majority of Islamic West Africa are Maliki, the direct legacy of what Musa decided after his Hajj.

The Gold Economy After the Hajj

There is a misunderstanding worth clearing up, the notion that Musa’s generosity in Cairo must have impoverished Mali. That did not happen, and the opposite is closer to the truth.

Mali’s gold production in Bambuk and Bure was so abundant that even an expense like the Hajj was only a fraction of the annual yield. Sources such as Al-Umari ﵀ and later Ibn Battuta ﵀ give figures that are hard to interpret but consistently high, and the modern historian Nehemia Levtzion estimates that Mali in the early fourteenth century produced between one and three tons of gold per year, accounting for at least half of the world’s production at that moment.

Musa’s generosity destroyed no wealth but communicated it, and that communication had a reverse effect that he had probably already foreseen. After his Hajj, merchants from Egypt, the Maghreb and Andalusia streamed to Mali, since they wanted to buy the gold at the source, and they brought textiles, books, weapons, luxury goods and horses, so that the trade balance only became more favorable. The gold he had left behind in Cairo returned in the form of investments, craftsmen and intellectual capital: macroeconomics avant la lettre.

What Ibn Battuta Saw

Some thirty years after Musa’s death, in 1352, Ibn Battuta ﵀ visited Mali, where Mansa Sulayman, brother and successor of Musa, then ruled. What Ibn Battuta ﵀ describes in his Rihla is a governed, literate, safe society, and he praises the prayer routine in Niani, the Friday mosques full, the children memorizing the Qur’an who are not allowed to eat until they have memorized their portion, the Qadis applying Maliki law and the hospitality for travelers.

He is also critical, since Mansa Sulayman is frugal where Musa was generous, and some court rituals he finds dubiously Islamic, with women appearing without veil at court and poetic dancers performing for the Mansa, so that he rubs his eyes at a number of customs. But the underlying structure is not in question: this is an Islamic empire, with ulama, with a legal order and with Friday prayers that are performed, and that is Musa’s legacy, visible to the eyes of a traveler who had journeyed from Morocco to China and could thus compare well.

The Rihla is, by the way, a twofold source, since what he personally saw is the first layer and what he later added through travelers is the second; for Mali he was an eyewitness, and that gives his account additional weight.

The Manuscripts and the Atlantic Thread

Timbuktu’s Sankoré libraries contained by the eighteenth century hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, which are now partly in the Ahmed Baba Library, partly in family collections and partly, alas, burned by Ansar Dine in 2013 during the jihadist occupation of northern Mali, although a portion was saved and a portion had been brought to safety in Bamako earlier.

These manuscripts are not only Arabic, since there are texts in Ajami, Arabic script for Mande, Fulfulde, Hausa and Songhai, and there is a written tradition in West Africa that goes directly back to what Musa made possible. This matters for the history of the Atlantic as well, because the people who were brought via the Middle Passage to the Caribbean came in part from regions that were literate, that had Qur’an schools and that had an ulama. That Suriname has a large maroon population with islands of Islamic practice, that Trinidadian Muslims with West African roots can trace themselves back to wangara trade lines, and that names still survive among Caribbean families which come straight from the Mande world that arrived with Islam, all of this is a thread interrupted rather than severed, one that with patience and research can be picked up again.

Mansa Musa’s legacy is, in that sense, also part of the fabric from which Muslim communities in the Caribbean emerged, without any direct bloodline and without any claim of ownership.

The Ulama Infrastructure

A legacy in stones is visible, while a legacy in people is invisible until the generation in which it bears fruit, and Musa invested in both.

What ulama infrastructure means in the fourteenth century can be listed. It means qadis appointed in cities, with salaries from the state treasury and juridical jurisdiction over Islamic affairs; it means muftis who can issue fatwas, in written form, that are recognized by Mali merchants in distant regions as juridically valid; and it means khatibs who deliver Friday sermons, muezzins who call the adhan and imams who lead the prayer. Each of these roles requires training, and training requires schools, and schools require salaries, books and buildings.

Musa financed all of this as state policy rather than as philanthropy, so that the ulama became part of the administrative structure of Mali, as permanent functionaries of the state rather than as a separate clerical class occasionally consulted. This is something that in Europe was institutionalized only in the seventeenth century, and in other Islamic empires earlier; Mali did it in the fourteenth.

A concrete example is given by Tarikh al-Sudan, which tells us of a family called Aqit, originally from Morocco, who under Musa or shortly thereafter migrated to Timbuktu and there generation after generation produced Qadis and head scholars. The most famous descendant is Ahmad Baba ﵀, born in 1556, who in the sixteenth century grew into one of the greatest Islamic scholars of his time; Ahmad Baba ﵀ wrote more than seventy works, including Nayl al-ibtihaj, a biographical collection of Maliki scholars. The Aqit family is, without Musa’s original policy, unthinkable.

The real legacy lies beyond the gold and beyond the mosque in itself: it is the ecosystem that gave employment, status and resources to a class of scholars who would anchor West Africa’s Islamic identity for centuries.

The Wangara Networks

Before Musa’s end comes into view, the Wangara networks deserve attention. The Wangara, a term used variously for the Soninke, for the Mandinka trading caste, or for a specific occupational group of Muslim merchants, formed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the logistical skeleton of Mali’s economy, since they were the ones who organized the gold caravans, who extended credit, and who conducted Arabic correspondence with fellow merchants in Fez and Cairo.

Under Musa the Wangara received something they had not possessed on the same scale before: state protection for their trading activities up to the edges of Mali’s sphere of influence. The Mansa invested in caravan security, negotiated with Tuareg tribes about tolls and established regional garrisons near trading nodes, ensuring, in other words, that the Wangara network could function without each caravan running a risk of total disappearance.

The result was that the Wangara spread out in the centuries after Musa, to the Hausa cities of Kano, Katsina and Zaria, where they would become known as Dyula traders, to the forest border zone in the south, where they began to trade kola nuts for gold, and to the later Ashanti region, where their presence contributed to the Islamization of parts of what is now Ghana. This diaspora, peaceful and trade-driven, was a direct consequence of the stable infrastructure Musa had created.

And this diaspora eventually carried over into the Atlantic world. Muslim Africans who were sold as slaves, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known as Job ben Solomon, from a Fulani family from Bundu, the numerous Fulani and Mandinka slaves who performed their prayers on Jamaican, Trinidadian and Surinamese plantations, and well-known historical figures such as Omar ibn Said, who would write an autobiography in Arabic in North Carolina, came from networks whose roots can be traced to the Wangara system that flourished under Musa. That thread runs on into the history of the Atlantic world, indirectly and factually rather than plaintively.

How It Ended With the Man Himself

Musa dies around 1337, although the sources differ on the year, some saying 1332 and some 1337, while the most common reconstruction places his death in 1337. He had then been Mansa for about twenty to twenty-five years, and he was succeeded by his son Maghan I, and then by his brother Sulayman.

The construction of the Djinguereber is probably already completed during his lifetime, the madrasas he founded function, the Maliki school is established and the books are copied, while Timbuktu is a city, Gao is one Friday mosque richer and Niani is still the center of power. And then he dies, and the question begins which every empire after its greatest builder must answer: Can all this remain standing without him?

What a Legacy Is Worth

He was a builder rather than a king who counted gold on his throne. He built mosques that still stand seven centuries later, he built a legal system that is dominant in West Africa to this day, he built a city that became so famous that Europeans used it as a metaphor for the unreachable, “farther than Timbuktu”, he built an intellectual tradition whose manuscripts are still being studied, and he built an image of West Africa in the Islamic world’s imagination that would never disappear.

It was a deliberate civilization, and Mansa Musa was, in Ibn Kathir’s words, al-malik al-ashraf, the sublime king, not because he had gold but because he knew what to do with it.

No empire is eternal, however, and under his successors Musa’s legacy would take damage in defending itself.

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Sources

• Shihab ad-Din al-Umari ﵀, Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar: the Maliki jurists Musa brought to his country, among them the Granadan poet Abu Ishaq Ibrahim as-Sahili ﵀, as quoted in Gomez, p. 121.
• Ibn Khaldun ﵀, Kitab al-ʿIbar: Musa’s twenty-five years of rule, the succession by his son Magha and his brother Sulayman, and the plastered domed building as-Sahili ﵀ erected for him, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 138, 145.
• Ibn Battuta ﵀, Rihla: the visit to Mali in 1352–1353 under Mansa Sulayman, the full Friday mosques, the children learning the Qur’an by heart, Sulayman’s miserliness and the uncovered women at court, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 141, 147, 158, 160, and in Hunwick, p. 11.
• Tarikh al-Fattash, attributed to Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀: the mosques Musa had built on his return from the Hajj, as quoted in Hunwick, p. 10.
• Ahmad Baba ﵀, Nayl al-ibtihaj bi-tatriz al-dibaj, completed in 1004/1596 in exile in Marrakesh, as quoted in Gomez, p. 175.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 32, 100, 104, 106, 121–122, 124–125, 138, 141, 145, 147, 150, 154, 156, 158, 160, 175, 284.
  • pp. 121–122, 125: the books on Maliki jurisprudence and the Maliki jurists Musa brought back, among them as-Sahili ﵀, also called at-Tuwaijin; the returning caravan as a mixed host of Ethiopians, Arabs, Andalusians and Turks; the Hajj as the formative period of West Africa’s political and cultural transformation; the return to Mali around 726/1326.
  • pp. 124, 138: the building of the Djinguereber, the Great Mosque of Timbuktu, with its minaret; Islam as the quintessential implement of dominion; Ibn Khaldun ﵀ on the commission to as-Sahili ﵀ for a plastered square building with a dome.
  • pp. 156, 158: the Sudanese scholars who went to study in Fez by order of al-hajj Musa, as the beginning of his programme; the commissioning of the Djinguereber in the service of Islam and state alike; Ibn Battuta ﵀ on the fully attended Friday mosque and the children kept in fetters until they knew the Qur’an by heart.
  • pp. 141, 147, 160: the stay of Ibn Battuta ﵀ in Mali from July 1352 to February 1353; Sulayman as a miserly king, measured against what Musa had lavished on strangers; the disapproval of women appearing uncovered before the sultan.
  • pp. 145, 150: the twenty-five years of rule, 1312–1337, according to Ibn Hajar ﵀ and Ibn Khaldun ﵀; the succession by Magha and then by Musa’s brother Sulayman; Musa’s death around 737/1337 and Sulayman’s around 761/1360.
  • pp. 100, 104, 106: Ibn Kathir ﵀ on al-Malik al-Ashraf Musa; the twelve years between accession and Cairo; the estimate of four tons of gold a year from Bure and half a ton from Bambuk.
  • pp. 32, 154: Wangara, Wankara and Wanqara as names of the Jula merchants; Fernandes on the Jula to whom the prosperity of Jenne is attributed.
  • pp. 175, 284: the Nayl al-ibtihaj of Ahmad Baba ﵀; the Maliki canon of teaching, the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas ﵀, the Mudawwana of Sahnun ﵀ and the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀.
• 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. lviii, lx, 10–11, 30–31, 49–50, 88, 390.
  • pp. 10–11 (TS ch. 3): the twenty thousand mithqals of alms in the two Holy Places; the mosque with mihrab outside Gao; the palace in Timbuktu called madugu; the minaret of the Great Mosque attributed to Kankan Musa; the tomb of Abu Ishaq as-Sahili ﵀ in Timbuktu.
  • pp. 30–31 (TS ch. 7): Jingere-ber as the Songhay name of the Great Mosque; the growth of Timbuktu up to the building of the Great Mosque and the Sankore Mosque; the chronicle written between 1064/1653 and 1066/1656.
  • pp. lviii, lx, 49–50, 390: the Aqit family that came to Timbuktu from Masina in the time of the Tuareg sultan Akil (1434–1468) and supplied the qadis of the sixteenth century; the University of Sankore as an individualised tradition of learning, not an institution; the Muwatta, the Mudawwana and the Risala as fundamental works; Ahmad Baba ﵀ (1556–1627), unique in his age, famed for his fatwas.
  • p. 88 (TS ch. 11): the Sankore Mosque, built by a very wealthy woman of the Aghlal, at an unknown date.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, p. 41: Ayuba Suleyman Diallo of Bundu, enslaved as Job ben Solomon on a tobacco plantation in Maryland.
• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, p. 3: the Life, written in North Carolina in 1831, as the only extant Arabic autobiography of a slave in the United States.