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Songhay And Timbuktu In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries
Following the Moroccan conquest in 1591, under the qadis’ leadership the people of Timbuktu adopted a policy of passive submission and noncooperation with the conquering army. Timbuktu, which had been autonomous under the Songhay rule, became the seat of a military government. The presence of an occupying force disturbed life in this city of commerce and scholarship and led to a conflict between the military and the civilian populations. The pasha (highest-ranking official) and his troops resorted to harsh disciplinary measures when all conventions were broken. The pasha ordered the arrest of the leading fuqaha, and their houses were pillaged. Seventy prominent fuqaha were deported in chains to Marrakesh, among them the qadi Umar ibn Mahmud Aqit and Ahmad Baba. The fuqaha were under arrest in Marrakesh for two years, and Umar died in prison. Even after their release they were not allowed to return to Timbuktu. Only Ahmad Baba returned, after almost twenty years in exile.
After the exile of the fuqaha, according to the seventeenth-century author of Tarikh al-Sudan, Timbuktu “became a body without a soul.” The suffering of the people of Timbuktu increased as the struggle for power among the Moroccan military commanders intensified. The supply of food from the inner delta was cut off, as the routes were intercepted by the Fulbe and the Tuareg. During the seventeenth century the elite of Timbuktu was made up of the arma, descendants of the Moroccan conquerors, who held military and political power, the merchants, and the scholars. The political influence of the merchants increased because the pashas needed their financial support, and the merchants no longer needed the scholars as intermediaries. By the end of the seventeenth century, Timbuktu’s impoverished mercantile community was no longer able to support a large specialized community of scholars. Lesser scholars, known as alfas, earned their livings as traders and artisans, mainly weavers and tailors. By the middle of the eighteenth century the pashalik of Timbuktu was in total eclipse. In about 1770 the Tuareg took possession of Gao, and in 1787 they entered Timbuktu and abolished the office of the pasha. The harshness of the nomads was mitigated by the scholars, whose religious prestige also carried political influence, reaching its peak with the revivalist movement led by Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729–1811).
Linked by the Niger waterway to Timbuktu, the town of Djenné (in south-central Mali) developed as a distribution center for trade to the south. Merchants from the Sahara and North Africa extended their business from Timbuktu to Djenné. Their agents were the Dyula, who carried the trade to the sources of gold and kola in the Akan forest. In Djenné, deep in world of the Mandingue, Islam slowly gained ground, and pre-Islamic customs persisted there until the end of the fifteenth century, when a pious Dyula came from the south and destroyed the “idols’ house,” where people had continued to worship. The ulama in Djenné were all Soninke and Mandingue and were highly respected by the rulers of Djenné, who sought their blessings.
The Bambara state of Ségou (in southern Mali on the Niger River) was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century by Biton Kulibali, who forced greater centralization to overcome older egalitarian patterns of Bambara communal life. He was supported by Muslim merchants and the ulama but was careful to maintain the balance between traditional and Islamic elements. It was customary for chiefs to send their sons to study with a Muslim cleric as part of their princely education. Although they were not meant to become Muslims, some did; some even became scholars. A qadi of Djenné in the second half of the sixteenth century was “from among the sons of the chiefs of Kala. He withdrew from authority and became a scholar.” In this way Biton Kulibali’s son, Bakary, became a Muslim. As the ruler of the young Bambara state, Bakary failed to maintain the balance between Islam and tradition and was therefore deposed and killed. At that point N’golo Diara, a former slave of Biton Kulibali, seized power and established a new dynasty in Ségou. He also communicated on several occasions with the ulama in Djenné and Timbuktu, but he skillfully maintained the balance between traditionalism and Islam. While observing some Islamic rites, N’golo also remained the “great priest of the protecting idols.”
Through chiefly courts, where Islamic rituals were held, Islamic elements penetrated the culture of the Bambara, including the celebration of Islamic festivals as national feasts. The Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806), who visited Ségou in 1796 during the reign of Mansong, N’golo’s son, was impressed by the influence of the Muslims at the court of Ségou. In the rival Bambara state of Kaarta, Park observed that “the disciples of Mahomet composed nearly one-half of the army,” and therefore “the mosques were very crowded” when the entire army gathered into the capital. But Park also recognized the persistence of pre-Islamic beliefs and practices: “Those Negroes, together with the ceremonial part of the Mahomedan religion, retain all their ancient superstitions and even drink strong liquors.”
In the eighteenth century there was an abundant supply of slaves in West Africa. Muslims owned more slaves for farming than did their non-Muslim neighbors. Whereas Bambara peasants owned a few slaves, who worked in the fields alongside members of the household, the Muslim Marka owned many slaves, who worked in the fields under the supervision of a foreman, who was himself a slave. The Marka master was then able to follow his commercial or clerical pursuits. Using slaves for farming gave Muslims the leisure to pursue learning and to teach. This was elaborated by the Jakhanke, who contributed to the growth of a rural tradition of Islamic scholarship.
Dyula traders made the town of Djenné, two hundred miles downstream from Timbuktu, an entrepôt in the fifteenth century. The congregational mosque, built in traditional style on the foundations of an earlier mosque, still provides the backdrop for a large market.
By the fifteenth century Muslims developed a commercial network covering the area from the fringes of the Sahara in the north to the fringes of the forest in the south, and from the Atlantic coast of the Senegambia in the west to Hausaland and Bornu (in northeastern Nigeria) to the east. Most of the traders over this network were extensions of the Wangara, the Mandingue traders who carried on trade and Islam from at least the eleventh century. Those who traded to the west on the Gambia were the Jakhanke. Those Wangara who opened routes to Hausaland merged with the Hausa-speaking traders. Those traders of the middle Niger who entered the Akan forest, where the gold was, in the fifteenth century became known as the Dyula. These traders and the ulama, whether Dyula or Jakhanke, operated in the lands of the unbelievers, and for long periods they had to live in symbiotic relations with non-Muslims. They developed an ideology and a worldview that helped them to survive under these conditions, which Ivor Wilks has associated with al-Hajj Salim Suwari, who lived probably in the late fifteenth century. Suwari is regarded by the Dyula and the Jakhanke as the architect of their ways of life, having formulated precepts for the conduct of Muslims living among unbelievers. Under this ideology, Muslims may accept the authority of non-Muslim rulers, and even support them through the provision if religious services, so far as the Muslims are allowed to strictly observe Islam. Because they were aware of the danger of spiritual backsliding, as they lived in close proximity to unbelievers, the Muslims were also dedicated to Islamic learning. Because of their relative isolation, they were urged to travel to central places of learning in search of knowledge.
In their southern dispersion, west of the Black Volta River where most of the Dyula operated, the Dyula settled among “stateless” peoples, with whom they interacted socially and culturally but over whom they had little religious influence. Sometimes warriors who shared with the Dyula a common cultural Mandingue background moved along the trade routes, perhaps even as armed guards, and imposed their authority over these stateless people, as was the case of the Kong and the Gonja peoples. In the process of the state formation of Gonja, the warriors accepted Islam from the hands of a Dyula cleric who helped them to win a battle. The Gonja rulers were probably the first in the Volta basin to accept Islam. Shortly thereafter, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Islam was introduced to Dagomba, where the king encouraged trade and the migration of Muslims. A study of Islam in Dagomba reveals it to be a model for the cultural, social, and political integration of Islam into a state structure in ways that were typical of Mali and Songhay further north four or five centuries earlier.
Songhay And Timbuktu In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries
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Last Updated: 04/2022
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