Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀
The jurist from Tlemcen whose answers to a Songhai emperor dictated for centuries the law under which the Sahel was governed.
Life
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Maghili ﵀ was born around 1440 in Tlemcen, on the edge of what is today Algeria. Tlemcen in those years was no provincial town but a Maliki center with madaris, Sufi lodges, and a stream of pilgrims heading to Mecca. He studied there under the great jurists of the Zayyanids and was formed in a strict Maliki tradition that left no room for juridical half-measures.
In his mid-forties he traveled south, and not by accident: the Sahelian princely courts in these years were actively seeking trained jurists to underpin their young Islamic legal practice. Al-Maghili ﵀ traveled via the oasis of Touat, almost a thousand kilometers to the south, a Saharan way-station where caravans bound for Timbuktu and Gao took on provisions. Here, in the years 1490-1492, the episode took place that lastingly clouds his legacy: he issued fatwas against the Jewish community of Touat, called for the destruction of their synagogue, and contributed actively to what historians call without circumlocution a pogrom. His contemporary al-Asnuni refuted him on legal grounds, since the protection of ahl al-dhimma in Maliki fiqh is non-negotiable, but the violence continued. His own son was later killed in a reprisal action.
From Touat he traveled on to the Hausa cities. In Kano he was received by Sarki Muhammad Rumfa, who asked him to write a manual of governance, and he advised in Katsina as well. Around 1498 he arrived in Gao, on the great bend of the Niger, at the court of Askia Muhammad, who three years earlier had seized the throne of Songhai and now wished to anchor his new power on a recognized Islamic foundation. Askia put seven questions to him about law and state, and his answers, later known as the Ajwibat al-As’ila (Answers to the Questions), would last for centuries.
He died around 1505, probably in Touat, where he returned after his Sahelian years. Tlemcen, Touat, Kano, Katsina and Gao make five cities in one life, and that itinerary is the geographical proof that Sahelian Islam was a Trans-Saharan enterprise rather than an isolated corner.
Faith and culture
Al-Maghili ﵀ is a pure Maliki jurist of the strict North African school. For him, Islam in West Africa is not personal devotion but a form of governance. His theology focuses not on mystical experience but on the applicability of shari’a in princely courts where old, non-Islamic customs such as dynastic sacrifices, magical rituals and the mixing of the sexes at markets shape daily life.
In the Ajwibat he tests Askia Muhammad’s rule against the same standard, asking whether a ruler whom he calls a Muslim may claim a khalifa-like status for himself, and answering that he may, provided that prayers are performed according to the Sunnah, taxes are levied in Islamic fashion, and adjudication is left to qualified qadis. His answers are a template addressed to a sovereign: this is the law, apply it, change the state.
His hard line toward non-Muslims is not representative of the broader Maliki consensus. Al-Asnuni’s refutation shows that within the legal tradition itself there was room for dissent. That al-Maghili’s line nevertheless became dominant in parts of the Sahel has more to do with the political needs of rulers than with juridical logic.
Legacy
The Ajwibat was copied in the following centuries in Timbuktu, Sokoto and Hamdullahi and cited as authority. Usman dan Fodio ﵀ cites al-Maghili directly when in 1804 he legitimizes his jihad against the Hausa rulers: if the Sarki of Gobir fails the criteria that al-Maghili set out four centuries earlier, then revolt is a duty. Ahmad Lobbo in Hamdullahi did the same, and Umar Tall ﵀ likewise. Thus a jurist from Tlemcen became posthumously the theoretical father of three great Sahelian jihads.
His manual of governance for Rumfa, Tāj al-dīn fī mā yajibu 'alā al-mulūk (The Crown of Religion concerning What Is Obligatory upon Rulers), is a blueprint for Islamic governance in a non-Arab context. The work Misbāḥ al-Arwāḥ is attributed to him, although the attribution is disputed in modern scholarship.
His reputation is double. In Sahelian historiography, in the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, he is the great counselor, the man who sealed Askia’s legitimacy, while in the history of Saharan Jewish communities he is the jurist who undermined the protection of dhimmis in Touat. Both pictures are correct, and there is no need to choose between them, since a teacher can be just in one verdict and cruel in another. What remains is the question of what is done with that awareness.
Uncertainties:
The authorship of Misbāḥ al-Arwāḥ is disputed in modern scholarship. The year of death 1505 is an assumed value, since the sources vary between 1503 and 1506. The precise dating of his Hausa journeys depends on the Kano Chronicle, itself a late seventeenth-century compilation.
Sources
- Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, Ajwibat ʿan asʾilat al-amir Askia al-Hajj Muhammad (Gao, shortly after July or August 1498), the seven questions with their replies, among them the second question on Sonni Ali and the three grounds on which a man is adjudged an unbeliever, in the translation of Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 60–95, in particular pp. 69, 73, and the manuscripts and editions in appendix B, p. 136.
- Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, Risala to Sarki Muhammad Rumfa of Kano, published under the invented title Taj al-Din fi ma yajib ʿala al-muluk, and the shorter Jumla mukhtasara for the same ruler (897/1491–2), as described in Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 39–40, 136–137.
- ʿAbdallah ibn Abi Bakr al-ʿAsnuni ﵀, qadi of Tuwat, his fatwa in defence of the synagogue of Tamantit and of the rights of the dhimmis, preserved in the Miʿyar of al-Wansharisi ﵀, as discussed in Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, pp. 35–36.
- ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh as-Sudan: the chronicle is silent on his visit to Gao; only the Tarikh al-Fattash records it, as noted in Hunwick, Shariʿa in Songhay, p. 41.
- 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. 30–32, 34–42, 45–48, 69, 73, 96, 100–101, 136–137.
- pp. 30–32: the birth in Tlemcen, seat of the Banu Zayyan, between 1425 and 1440, of Berber stock; the teachers al-Thaʿalibi ﵀ and Yahya ibn Yadir ﵀; twenty-nine works of which twelve survive; the settlement in Tamantit in the oasis of Tuwat, eight hundred kilometres south of Tlemcen, according to a local source in 882/1477–8.
- pp. 34–38: the doctrine that the Jews of Tuwat had broken their pact and might not keep a synagogue; the qadi al-ʿAsnuni ﵀ who defended the synagogue, the dispute of the 1480s at the latest and the consultation of the scholars of Tunis, Tlemcen and Fez; the reward of seven mithqals for every Jew killed; the destruction of the synagogue and the killing of many Jews; his son ʿAbd al-Jabbar, later killed in revenge while he was staying in Gao.
- pp. 39–42: the audience with the Wattasid sultan of Fez and the expulsion; the journey south in the early 1490s via Aïr and Takedda; the years in Kano with Muhammad Rumfa, the visit to Katsina and the arrival in Gao shortly after the Askia’s return in July or August 1498; the Replies written in Gao; the return to Tamantit and the death in 909/1503–4 according to Ahmad Baba ﵀ or 910/1505–6 according to Ibn ʿAskar ﵀.
- pp. 45–48: the Misbah al-Arwah as a lost work, known only from the notes of Ibn Hilal ﵀; the forged first chapter of the Tarikh al-Fattash in favour of Ahmad Lobbo of Masina; Usman dan Fodio ﵀ who cites the Replies, the Misbah and the work for Rumfa in Taʿlim al-Ikhwan, Bayan Wujub al-Hijra and Siraj al-Ikhwan; al-Hajj ʿUmar ﵀ and Ahmad III of Masina who work with his arguments.
- pp. 96, 100–101: the division into seven questions; the position that there can be only one caliph at a time and the interchangeable titles amir, imam and sultan; the ruler who must personally watch over the welfare of his subjects.