The Jurist from Tlemcen: Muhammad al-Maghili and the Law for Black Rulers

In the last years of the fifteenth century, a Maghrebi jurist leaves his birthplace Tlemcen. He travels through the Sahara, gives legal advice to the Askia in Gao, reorganizes the court of Sarki Rumfa in Kano, and leaves behind him a stack of writings that would shape Islamic jurisprudence in West Africa for two centuries. His name: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Maghili ﵀. His reputation: great, influential, and uncomfortable.

A Man Who Was Not Comfortable

Al-Maghili ﵀ is not the friendly scholar one adds to a poetry circle. He is the voice that stands at the edge of the crowd and says what no one wants to hear, the man who decides that the richest merchants of his city have strayed too far and that something must be done about it. He is the sharp pen, the fierce fatwa, the strict application of the law, and with the controversies that arise from it he already carries a controversial name in his own time.

That is the starting point from which we must speak about him: not as a sterile name from a footnote but as a personality with sharp edges, whose influence on West African Islam was real and great, and whose legacy at the same time cannot be discussed without contradictions.

Begin with his birthplace. Tlemcen, on the border between present-day Algeria and Morocco, at 34.88° north latitude and 1.32° west longitude, was a city that in the fifteenth century, under the Zayyanid dynasty, was a considerable center of Maliki scholarship, rich in madaris, rich in libraries, at the same time firmly anchored in the trans-Saharan trade. Al-Maghili ﵀ was born there around 1440. His full name, Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim ibn Muhammad al-Maghili, refers, with the nisba “al-Maghili”, to an Amazigh origin, most probably from the Maghila tribe of the central Maghreb.

He studied in Tlemcen itself, under famous figures such as Abd al-Rahman al-Tha’alibi ﵀ and Yahya ibn Abd al-Jalil al-Maghrawi ﵀, and acquired a reputation for sharpness, for literal Maliki strictness, and for a kind of moral restlessness that made him uncomfortable in his own court. By 1490 that restlessness would become explosive, and not in a way of which we can be proud today.

The Touat Episode: What Must Be Honestly Said

The uncomfortable part must be addressed at once, since the name al-Maghili ﵀ is inseparably bound up with the events in Touat, the oasis region in the south of present-day Algeria, around 1490–1492.

Touat in the fifteenth century was a flourishing trading hub on the trans-Saharan route between Tlemcen and Timbuktu. It was at the same time a region where a Jewish community had lived for generations, integrated into the local economy, with its own trading networks to Tlemcen, Sijilmasa, and North Africa more broadly. They built synagogues, they conducted trade in gold and salt, they paid taxes to the local Muslim authorities, and under the dhimmi status in Islamic law they had a claim to protection of life, property, and religious practice, provided they paid the jizya and adhered to certain social arrangements.

Al-Maghili ﵀ had concluded that the Jewish community of Touat had violated a number of those social arrangements, in particular the rules about the height of buildings relative to mosques, about public religious expression, about certain forms of social contact. Whether the violations had really taken place, in the extent he claimed, is historically contested; modern historians such as John Hunwick have concluded on the basis of the sources that al-Maghili’s complaints rested partly on reality, partly on exaggeration.

In any case, al-Maghili ﵀ issued a fatwa ordering the demolition of the synagogue of Touat, and it did not stop at the fatwa. He, according to several sources, incited the local Muslim population to violence, and a pogrom against the Jewish community followed, in which the synagogue was demolished and Jews were killed. Survivors fled to Tlemcen, to Fez, to more northern oases where they were safer.

This is no event that can be excused by pointing to complexity, though it can be placed in context. In the late-fifteenth-century Maghreb the tensions between ulama and Jewish minorities had become more frequent and more intense, partly under the influence of the Andalusian refugees who came from Granada after 1492 with their own bitterness, partly through competition on trade routes. But the role of al-Maghili ﵀ in Touat is direct and documented: he gave the justification, he mobilized the crowd, he reaped the consequences.

Other Muslim scholars of the time contradicted him for that reason. The prominent jurist Abdallah al-Asnuni and others wrote refutations in which they branded the application of the law by al-Maghili ﵀ as overreaching, as an unjustified violation of the dhimma protection that Muslims were obliged to offer. This means that al-Maghili ﵀ was not free to act unhindered in his own time; there was a debate, and he was not the undisputed winner of that debate.

Time is spent on this here because honesty about our traditions is obligatory. The same man who legally built up West African Islam acted bloodily in Touat, and both are true and both must be said. Whoever presents al-Maghili ﵀ only as the great reformer of Songhai and Kano misses an essential part of who he was, and whoever sees him only as the instigator of Touat misses his broader significance. A mature engagement with our history requires both.

The Journey South

Shortly after the Touat events al-Maghili ﵀ left the Maghreb. The reasons were probably multiple, political pressure from opponents, personal ambition, a desire to apply his legal vision in new contexts; whatever the precise motive, the route is clear: from Tlemcen southward, via Sijilmasa, across the Sahara, to Taghaza and then to the Niger.

The scale of that journey deserves a moment. Tlemcen lies at about 34.88° north latitude, Gao lies at 16.27° north latitude, 0° east longitude, and Kano lies at 12.00° north latitude, 8.59° east longitude. The direct distance from Tlemcen to Gao is well over 2,500 kilometers as the crow flies, across the Sahara, across Tuareg territory, past salt mines where the caravan had to stop for resupply, and from there to Kano another 1,600 kilometers or so.

Al-Maghili ﵀ did not make this journey as a tourist but as a traveling scholar, with a retinue of students and merchants who shared his caravan, with overnight stays in the great oases: Tabelbala, perhaps Taghaza, certainly Taoudenni, Arawan, Timbuktu. In each of these places he probably gave majalis, study circles, in which he explained to local ulama what his juridical vision was, and this was how Islamic scholarship spread: not through grand programs, but through physical presence, through conversation upon conversation, from oasis to oasis.

By 1493 or 1494 he arrived in Gao, at the court of Askia Muhammad, who there shortly before, in 1493, had taken the throne of Songhai in a coup against the sons of Sunni Ali.

The Replies to Askia: Legal Counsel for a New Ruler

Askia Muhammad faced a problem. He had seized the throne against the son of Sunni Ali, so that his legitimacy was not dynastic; it had to be juridically-Islamically underpinned. He needed a jurist who could tell him which decisions of his predecessor were legally to be overturned, which institutions he should reform, which Islamic principles he should implement in daily governance.

Al-Maghili ﵀ offered exactly what the Askia sought, and he offered it in a manner that has proved especially valuable for historians: in written form. Askia Muhammad put to al-Maghili ﵀ a series of questions, seven core questions according to the tradition, each with several subquestions, and al-Maghili ﵀ answered in a written document, what would later become known as the Ajwibat al-Maghili 'an as’ilat Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, “The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad”.

This document, in scholarly literature usually shortened to Replies to Askia, has been preserved in several manuscripts and was translated and annotated by John Hunwick in 1985. It is one of the most valuable juridical sources for the history of West African Islam.

What the Askia asks, and what al-Maghili ﵀ answers, can be summarized under a few core questions.

A core question concerned the legitimacy of Sunni Ali. Ali had, in the eyes of al-Maghili ﵀ and of the Timbuktu ulama, committed large-scale injustices: persecuted scholars, treated Muslims as kuffar, burned Qur’an manuscripts, enslaved Muslim women. Al-Maghili ﵀ answered that Sunni Ali had in fact never been a real Muslim, that he had only preserved an outward show of Islam while his deeds placed him outside the community of faith. With that he declared Ali’s legacy invalid: all contracts concluded under Ali, all judgments, all marriages, were juridically null unless reaffirmed; every Muslim taken captive under Ali had to be released; all goods unlawfully confiscated had to be returned.

This was a juridical atom bomb. It justified the Askia’s seizure of power as a jihadic correction of an unjustified regime, it gave him a free hand to dismantle almost the entire administrative layer of Sunni Ali, and it bound Askia Muhammad to a strict Maliki Islamization of Songhai that went further than what had been envisaged under Mansa Musa or even under earlier Askias.

Another core question concerned the status of the borderlands: could the Askia conduct campaigns against communities who called themselves Muslims but retained traditional practices? Al-Maghili ﵀ said yes, if their practices could be unambiguously identified as un-Islamic, they could be treated as murtaddun, as apostates, and this gave the Askia a legal basis for campaigns against the Mossi, against Hombori regions, and against parts of the Bambara world.

A third core question concerned coinage, taxation, and dealings with non-Muslim minorities within the realm. The answers of al-Maghili ﵀ to these questions are fascinatingly nuanced, since he pleads for strictness in principle, but for pragmatic application that does not endanger trade and stability.

The total effect of the Replies was that Askia Muhammad received a legal framework within which he could consolidate his realm and project an identity as a strict Muslim ruler. Whether Askia Muhammad in practice followed all the advice of al-Maghili ﵀ is another question, since he was also a practical statesman who knew when strictness became counterproductive. But the Replies have continued to circulate: they were copied, commented upon, used by later West African jurists, and they form one of the foundational texts of the West African fiqh tradition.

To Kano: The Counselor of Rumfa

After his time in Gao al-Maghili ﵀ traveled eastward to Kano, probably in 1493 or 1494. There he found another ruler, Muhammad Rumfa, for whom he would be useful in a different way.

Rumfa was no usurper like Askia Muhammad, since his legitimacy was dynastic and uncontested. What he needed from al-Maghili ﵀ was not legal justification for his throne, but a framework for what he wanted the sarauta, the kingship, to become. Rumfa wanted to be a fully Islamic ruler, an al-malik al-adil in the Maliki tradition, rather than a half-Islamic post-iskoki courtier.

For him al-Maghili ﵀ wrote another document, shorter but more influential. It is called Tāj al-dīn fīmā yajib ʿalā al-mulūk, “The Crown of Religion in What Is Owed by Kings”, and it is a “mirror for princes” in the classical Islamic sense, a genre that runs from Kalila wa Dimna to the Nasihat al-Muluk of al-Ghazali ﵀, in which a scholar sets out for a ruler what his duties are in governance, war, justice, and personal piety.

The Tāj al-dīn contains chapters on the following duties.

The duty of the ruler to have ilm, to truly know rather than to pretend, and to gather scholars around him who provide him with real knowledge. The duty not to delegate court cases without supervision, to appoint Qadis who dare to judge independently, to establish the maẓālim court, the court for grievances against authority itself. The duty to perform the salah publicly, to observe Ramadan strictly, to dress and behave as an example for his subjects. The duty to act against injustice, against extortion of merchants, against arbitrary tolls, against favoritism at court.

And, no less important, chapters on how a Muslim ruler should treat non-Muslim subjects. Here al-Maghili ﵀ tempers his own strictness into something more pragmatic, interestingly, given his Touat reputation. In the Tāj al-dīn it is said that non-Muslims within the realm have a right to protection, to economic participation, to honorable treatment, provided they pay the jizya and observe public order. The sharp edges of Touat are absent here.

Under Rumfa’s regime the Tāj al-dīn became the blueprint for court reform. Rumfa appointed a galadima, a prime minister, as al-Maghili ﵀ had advised; he built and improved Friday mosques, regulated the market, and appointed a network of Qadis for various parts of the realm; and he had a palace built that met the descriptions of an Islamic royal residence, the gidan rumfa, which is still inhabited today by the emir of Kano.

The Misbaḥ al-Arwah: The Treatise on the Jews of Touat

A third well-known work of al-Maghili ﵀ belongs not to his writings on government but to the Touat episode. In the Misbaḥ al-Arwah fī usul al-falah he argues that the Jews of Touat had broken their dhimma pact and so forfeited their protection. Ibrahim ibn Hilal al-Sijilmasi ﵀ contested this in notes on the work and in a fatwa in which he called the killing of those Jews and the seizure of their property unlawful. Whether the text itself survives is disputed: Gwarzo held it to be lost and the editions under this title to be a misidentification, while Hunwick later translated passages from it.

His writings on government, above all the Replies to Askia and the Tāj al-dīn, together form a corpus on Islamic governance that was read and cited in West Africa into the nineteenth century. Usman dan Fodio ﵀ cites al-Maghili ﵀ extensively in his own Kitab al-Farq and Bayan wujub al-hijra, and the Sokoto jurist Abdullah dan Fodio ﵀ based parts of his Diya’ al-hukkam on the models of al-Maghili ﵀. Whoever wishes to understand the intellectual history of the Sokoto Caliphate must begin with al-Maghili ﵀.

The Line on the Map

The physical journey deserves to be traced once more, since on the map it draws itself as a long line across Africa.

Tlemcen lies at 34.88° north latitude, in western North Africa, close to the Mediterranean. From there the line runs southeast, across the Atlas, through Sijilmasa, in the fourteenth century a commercial hub, in the time of al-Maghili ﵀ already in decline but still inhabited, and then into the Sahara, the great empty space, about 1,500 kilometers of sand, rock, salt mine, to Gao at 16.27° north latitude, 0° east longitude, the capital of Songhai on the great bend of the Niger.

From Gao, after the time at the Askia’s court, the line runs eastward, through Agadez, the gate of the Air, across the high Saharan plateau with its Tuareg caravans, to Kano at 12.00° north latitude, 8.59° east longitude. Here the journey stops, for al-Maghili ﵀ would spend his last years largely in or near Kano.

One man, two courts, three principal works, and a trail of influence that is twenty-five hundred kilometers wide and five centuries deep: this is what a single mobile scholar in the pre-modern Islamic world could accomplish.

His Death and His Legacy

Al-Maghili ﵀ died around 1505, probably in Kano or on the way back north. The exact circumstances are disputed; some sources place his death in Tlemcen, others in the southern Sahara on the return journey. What is certain is that he, whether in 1503, 1504, or 1506, died as a rich and contested man, with an intellectual oeuvre that was already read and debated among his contemporaries.

His legacy is double. On the one hand he has, more than any other individual figure, given West African Islam of the fifteenth century a juridical backbone. Without al-Maghili ﵀ the Islamization of Songhai under Askia Muhammad would have gone less deep, the court reform of Rumfa in Kano would have been less systematic, and the Sokoto reformers of the nineteenth century would have had to articulate their own program in different terms. The intellectual infrastructure on which the Fulbe jihad of 1804 would build was largely laid by al-Maghili ﵀.

On the other hand, he is responsible for Touat, and for the harshness in his juridical vision that, when applied to vulnerable communities, led to violence and exclusion. His example has not only inspired the good reformers; it has also given cover to the hardliners, the people who in every century pronounced takfir against fellow Muslims of whom they expected religious purity.

This duality is important, since it is tempting to want simple heroes, scholars who can simply be revered, but the real Islamic tradition is richer and more honest than that simplicity allows. It has figures like al-Maghili ﵀, brilliant, influential, indispensable for a particular historical project, and at the same time damaged by decisions that we in our time cannot justify.

To reject him entirely would mean stripping West African Islam of its foundation, while to glorify him without reservation would mean closing our eyes to the people he harmed. The mature attitude lies in between: recognition, learning, and applying a higher standard where he himself did not.

The Paradox of Influence

There is something striking about the long-term influence of al-Maghili ﵀, and it is that this influence consolidated itself above all in West Africa, less in his own Maghreb. In Tlemcen and Fez he became after his death a respected but not centrally canonical figure, since the great names of the Maliki school there remained al-Qadi Iyyad ﵀, Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀, Ibn 'Arafa ﵀, and al-Maghili ﵀ was one of many.

But in Songhai, in Hausaland, in Bornu, and later in the Fulbe-Sokoto Caliphate, he became a kind of founder, because he had been there physically, had taught directly, had given direct legal advice, and his writings were copied and studied on the spot. For the West African ulama he was not a name in a book but a teacher in whose lineage their own scholars stood.

This is a pattern we see more often in Islamic historiography: a figure who in his own center is one of many becomes a founder in an adjacent region, as with Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi in al-Andalus, al-Ghazali ﵀ in some parts of Central Asia, or the Sheikh al-Akbar Ibn Arabi ﵀ in Anatolia and Persia more than in his Andalusian birthplace. Influence does not always move along geographical lines from where the most books stand; it moves along lines from where the greatest hunger is for what a figure can specifically give.

West Africa in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century was hungry for legal consolidation, and al-Maghili ﵀ came walking up with precisely that, so that he was nourished.

The Fifteenth Century in View

Three subjects now lie behind us: the four Hausa cities in their bloom, the Kano Chronicle as historical source, and Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀ as the jurist whose advice shaped the courts of Gao and Kano.

With that the fifteenth century has largely been brought into view, and for West Africa there follows a period of continuation and of growing tension, in which the cities continue to flourish, trade continues to flow and the caravans ride, but beneath the surface new dynamics grow. The first Portuguese ships have already lain at Elmina in 1471, the Atlantic slave trade begins to organize itself, within Songhai itself the rivalry brews between the Askia line and its competitors, and in the north Ahmad al-Mansur is preparing in Marrakesh for an expedition of which al-Maghili ﵀ would never hear but that would in one blow decimate everything he had worked for.

But that is still a hundred years away, and for now the story rests awhile, in that short, flourishing fourteenth–fifteenth-century period in which a Maghrebi jurist could travel through the Sahara to advise rulers, in which a Kano sarki could build up an ulama library, in which four Hausa cities could together form a civilization.

This was an Islamic world in full operation, connected from Tlemcen to Kano, from Cairo to Gao, with scholars who traveled to each other’s courts and wrote texts that commented on one another, and West Africa was a fully fledged province of the ummah, with its own contributions and with its own character.

And those contributions live on, in the Hausa cities that still exist today, in the libraries of Timbuktu, in the legal tradition that has rolled via Sokoto into modern northern Nigeria, and, via the Atlantic detour, among the descendants of the West Africans who were carried across the ocean.

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Sources

• Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karim al-Maghili ﵀, Ajwibat al-Maghili ʿan asʾilat Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, the replies to the Askia’s seven questions, in the edition and translation of John O. Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 73, 75–76, 89: the three-part definition of unbelief and the judgement that the behaviour of Sunni Ali is unbelief without doubt; the return of seized property and the credence given to whoever claims to be free; the Askia who took possession of Sunni Ali’s wealth and slaves and released the self-declared free Muslims; the seventh question.
• Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karim al-Maghili ﵀, the risala to Sarki Muhammad Rumfa of Kano, published under the title Taj al-din fima yajib ʿala al-muluk, and the shorter jumla mukhtasara of 897/1491–1492, as described in Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 40, 136–137.
• Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karim al-Maghili ﵀, Misbah al-arwah fi usul al-falah, the treatise on the Jews of Tuwat, according to Hunwick known only through the comments of Ibrahim ibn Hilal ﵀, as discussed in Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 45, 137.
• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Bayan wujub al-hijra ʿala al-ʿibad, Siraj al-ikhwan and Taʿlim al-ikhwan, with the quotations from the Replies and the tribute to al-Maghili ﵀, as discussed in Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 46–48, and in Hiskett, p. 121.
• Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀, Diyaʾ al-hukkam, written in Kano and later the manual of government of the caliphate, as noted in The African Caliphate, p. 226.
• 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. 29–42, 45–49, 73, 75–76, 89, 96, 106, 129–130, 136–137.
  • pp. 29–31: the meagre sources, Ibn ʿAskar ﵀ and Ahmad Baba ﵀; the birth in Tlemcen, seat of the Banu Zayyan, between 1425 and 1440; the Berber origin and the nisba of the Maghila tribe; the studies under ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Thaʿalibi ﵀ and Yahya ibn Yadir ﵀; the settlement at Tamantit in Tuwat, eight hundred kilometres south of Tlemcen.
  • pp. 32–35: the Jewish communities of the Saharan oases, living from trade and crafts and active in the trans-Saharan trade; Tuwat as the hub of the routes from Fez, Sijilmasa, Tlemcen and Tunis and the Jewish merchants in a symbiotic relationship with their Muslim partners; al-Maghili ﵀ who branded the jizya of Tuwat a bribe and the synagogue of Tamantit unlawful; Hunwick’s judgement that his insistence on jizya and abasement was correct by the norms of the law, but his reading of the broken pact a harsh interpretation; the Portuguese who reached Elmina by 1471.
  • pp. 36–38: the qadi of Tuwat, ʿAbdallah ibn Abi Bakr al-ʿAsnuni ﵀, who defended the right to the synagogue; the controversy no later than the 1480s; the support of al-Tanasi ﵀ and al-Sanusi ﵀ for the demolition; the reward of seven mithqals for every Jew killed; the destruction of the synagogue, the dead and the flight of the survivors to other oases.
  • pp. 39–42: the expulsion from Fez; Kano under Muhammad Rumfa welcoming scholars; the journey south possibly as late as 1493, through Tidikelt and the Ahaggar to Aïr and Takedda; the years in Kano and the Taj al-din; the death of Sunni Ali in late 1492 and the overthrow of his son Abu Bakr within six months; the visit to Gao soon after the Askia’s return in July or August 1498; the murder of his son at Tamantit and his death after his return to Tuwat, in 909/1503–1504 according to Ahmad Baba ﵀ or 910/1505–1506 according to Ibn ʿAskar ﵀.
  • pp. 45–49: the Misbah al-arwah that has not been recovered; Usman dan Fodio ﵀ who names the Replies, the Misbah and the treatise for Kano, summarises the Taj al-din in Usul al-ʿadl and quotes the Replies in Bayan wujub al-hijra and Siraj al-ikhwan; the three hundred years between al-Maghili ﵀ and the Sokoto reformers; the four complete and one incomplete manuscripts of the Replies.
  • pp. 96, 106, 129–130: the division into seven questions; the fifth question on taxation and kharaj; the fourth question on jihad against Muslims without an amir; Sunni Ali and his supporters as unbelievers and the Askia’s seizure of power as one of the worthiest of jihads.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 120–121, 125.
  • pp. 120–121, 125: the Shehu’s debt to al-Maghili ﵀, who visited Aïr, Takedda, Katsina, Kano and finally Gao; the doctrine of the mujaddid and the judgement on Sonni Ali as an unbeliever, taken over by the Shehu.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 7, 25, 226.
  • pp. 7, 25: Rumfa who invited al-Maghili ﵀ to advise him on Islamic government; his departure from North Africa in despondency and his enduring influence in the Bilad as-Sudan.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 177, 200, 230, 244, 253.
  • pp. 177, 200, 230: the death in 908 or 909/1503 or 1504; the Replies that repeat the chronicles’ accusations against Sunni Ali; the visit to Gao after 898/1493 and possibly as late as 907/1502, and the Askia’s seizure of power sanctioned as a jihad.
  • pp. 244, 253: the fourth question on intervention in Muslim-governed lands as a possible justification of the campaigns against Aïr and Hausaland; the confiscation of Sunni Ali’s property, the bayt al-mal and the honoured claims of those enslaved as Muslims.
• Elise Voguet, “La réponse d’al-Sijilmāsī (IXe/XVe siècle) à l’appel d’al-Maghīlī au meurtre des juifs du Touat”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 149, 2021.
  • the Misbah al-arwah fi usul al-falah as the work of al-Maghili ﵀ on the Jews of Touat, with the ruling that they no longer enjoyed dhimma; the notes and the fatwa of Ibrahim ibn Hilal ﵀, who called the killing of the Jews and the seizure of their property unlawful; the editions of the same text under this title and as Kitab ahkam al-dhimma; Gwarzo, who held the Misbah to be lost and such editions to rest on a misidentification; the passages Hunwick translated in 2006.