Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

Works

• 1596Achieving Joy by Embroidering the Brocade

  A biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars, written as a continuation of Ibn Farhun’s Dibaj, with entries on the scholars of Timbuktu that are a main source for the intellectual history of the Sahel.

• 1615The Ladder of Ascent towards Grasping the Law Concerning Transported Blacks

  Answers to questions from the Tuat oasis: unbelief alone, not colour, can make a person enslaveable under Islamic law; he names the Muslim peoples of West Africa who must not be enslaved and rejects the claim of a curse on the descendants of Ham.

Position

Ahmad Baba wrote some forty works on law, theology, grammar and biography. His biographical dictionary “Nayl al-ibtihaj” (1596), a continuation of Ibn Farhun’s dictionary of Maliki scholars, is a main source for the scholars of Timbuktu and the Sahel. His best-known text is the legal opinion “Miraj al-suud” (1615), written in answer to questions from the Tuat oasis about slaves brought north from West Africa. He held that under Islamic law the only ground for enslavement is unbelief, never colour or descent; he listed the peoples of West Africa who had long been Muslim and therefore must not be enslaved, and ruled that a slave who claimed to be a free-born Muslim should be believed until proven otherwise. He also rejected the claim, current in his time, that Black Africans were destined for slavery by a curse on the descendants of Ham. At the same time he accepted the enslavement of unbelievers as lawful, in line with the jurisprudence of his time. Historians such as John Hunwick and Chouki El Hamel have discussed both the force and the limits of the opinion, which later scholars cited against the enslavement of free Muslims.

Life & context

Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti was born on 26 October 1556 in Araouane, north of Timbuktu, into the Aqit family, which had produced scholars and judges of Timbuktu for generations. He studied with his father and above all with the scholar Muhammad Baghayogho, and became a teacher and jurist of the Maliki school in Timbuktu, then part of the Songhay empire. In 1591 a Moroccan army defeated Songhay at Tondibi. In 1593 the Moroccan authorities arrested the leading scholars of Timbuktu on suspicion of sedition, and in 1594 Ahmad Baba and members of his family were taken in chains to Marrakesh; he later wrote that he had lost his library of 1,600 volumes, the smallest of his kin. In Marrakesh he was first held captive, then allowed to teach, and attracted many students and requests for legal opinions. After the death of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur he was allowed to return and reached Timbuktu in 1608. He died there on 22 April 1627. The Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu, founded in 1973, which preserves thousands of manuscripts, bears his name.

Further main works

• What Suffices for the Needy (Kifāyat al-muḥtāj, supplement to the Nayl)
• The Ladder of Ascent (Miʿrāj al-ṣuʿūd, 1615)
• Legal opinions and treatises on law, theology and Arabic grammar

Appears in

• Journey ‘African Philosophy’ · Stop 3 of 10