Scholars, Secrets, and Sultans

Available historical sources for West Africa's Middle Niger c. 1450–1650 reveal that the ‘indigenous’ (non-Arab) Islamic scholarly class was already a self-conscious, independent social entity long before the clerical revolutions of later centuries. The influence of Muslim scholars was not limited to urban environments like Timbuktu, and clerical elites claimed a number of mostly independent communities throughout West Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. Mostly based on a reading of Arabic texts such as Muḥammad al-Kābarī's Bustān al-fawāʾid (‘Garden of Beneficial Prayers’) in dialogue with the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār and Tārīkh al-Sūdān (‘Timbuktu Chronicles’), this article argues that Muslim scholars were engaged in a spiritual war for independence clearly on display since the beginning of the Songhay empire. Scholarly texts display deep concern for tempering unjust political power and the protection and attraction of women, discourses that reveal a perilous clerical struggle to assert community independence. Later armed jihads were thus not so much a break from earlier traditions of clerical pacificism, they were the natural evolution from this earlier spiritual jihad

Ancient history · Archaeology · Empire · Independence (probability theory · Indigenous · Islam · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · African history and culture analysis · African Studies and Geopolitics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

• Love’s grammar

  Open Access•Katrina Daly Thompson•Contemporary Islam•2026

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• From the Time of Ignorance to the Afterlife

  Open Access•Katrina Daly Thompson•Signs and Society•2025

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• Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts

  Farouk Yahya•Magic and Divination in Malay…•2016

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• Social History of Timbuktu

  Patrick Manning, Elias N Saad•The American Historical Review•1984

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• Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith

  Open Access•Mauro Nobili•Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer…•2020

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• Tafw?ḍ al‐Ṭal?q

  Open Access•Fareeha Khan•The Muslim World•2009

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• Arguing sovereignty in Songhay

  Open Access•Bert S Hall•Afriques•2013

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• Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions

  P E Lovejoy•Jihād in West Africa During the…•2016

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• West African Sufi. The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal

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