Chapter 1

Timbuktu Studies

The Geopolitics of the Sources

At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in its northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.
—Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel1
IN THE FIRST DECADE of the twenty-first century, a few treaties on Sufism written by West African scholars were translated into European languages, including Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse’s magnum opus, Kashif al-Ilbas (Removal of Confusion).2 In this treatise centered on clarifying the doctrines of the Tijaniyya tariqa and establishing his own authority as the spiritual heir of Ahmad al-Tijani, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse cites works on exegesis of the Qur’an (tafsir), prophetic traditions (hadith), jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘aqida), grammar (nahw), religious principles (usul), the biography of the Prophet (sira), and of course Sufism (tasawwuf). Authors cited by Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, as well as many other West African Sufis, come from a variety of regions, including Turkey, India, North and West Africa, Persia, and Al-Andalus, which is evidence that they participated in a global network of intellectual exchange.3
As I grew up, I often heard conversations about the Kashif al-Ilbas and Sufi worldviews during the religious festivals and lectures that punctuated our lives. In the past eight decades, Kashif al-Ilbas has been widely debated in West Africa, not only by learned scholars who could read and grasp its meaning in Arabic, but also by individuals from a variety of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, most of whom knew little to no Arabic and were taught the content of Kashif al-Ilbas orally in their mother language (Hausa, Hassaniyya, Pulaar, Yoruba, etc.) by literate shaykhs. Quite a few shaykhs or shaykhas of the Tijaniyya who were taught Kashif al-Ilbas orally have been teaching it to larger audiences in West Africa. It is only one of the many Sufi treatises taught in West Africa. By the time of the publication of the English and French translations, the field I call Timbuktu studies (meaning the inquiry into the intellectual history of Islam in Africa) had matured considerably.
Here I try to shed light on the invisibility of the Bilad al-Sudan in the academic study of Islamic ideas in the West until the recent developments in the early twenty-first century. I cannot overemphasize the extent to which colonialism was responsible for this neglect. As highlighted by late Columbia University professor Edward Said4 in his study linking the intellectual labor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars of the Orient to the European project of imperial hegemony, the interaction between power and knowledge has been obvious in the creation of European representations of the Orient in general, and of Islam in particular. Especially in early colonial West Africa, the construction of imperial hegemony—that is, domination based more on consent than coercion—shaped the academic division of labor. Because they faced fierce opposition from Muslim leaders in North and West Africa during the colonial conquest, one of the greatest fears of European colonial powers throughout their rule was Pan-Islamism (i.e., a large transnational coalition of African Muslims against colonial rule). To exorcize that fear, the powers conceived of Africa as two main zones along the lines of Hegel’s representation: the North and the South separated by the Saharan desert, a barrier that they strove to maintain both by restricting the movement of colonial subjects between North and West Africa and by colonial hegemonic discourses. Considered part of the center of the Islamic world, the Arabic-speaking North received greater attention from Orientalists trained in Semitic philology, who focused on the collection, edition, and translation of Arabic texts. Assumed to be superficially Islamized, peripheral to the Islamic world, intellectually inferior, and completely outside of history, West Africa was to a large extent left to African studies scholars who had little interest in Islam.

The Neglect of Orientalists and Arab Compilers

A look at two early Orientalist reference works on Islamic intellectual history will confirm this neglect of West African Muslim communities. The first is the Encyclopaedia of Islam, of which two complete editions have been published and a third is being compiled. The first edition was started at the beginning of the twentieth century and completed in 1938. Published by the world-renowned publisher in Islamic studies E. J. Brill, it covered essential aspects of the social, political, and intellectual history, as well as the geography, theology, and culture of the Islamic world. The first edition provides a thorough coverage of the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian world that hosted the largest historical Islamic empires, such as the Umayyad, the Abbasid, and the Fatimid, as well as the Ottoman and Sassanid Empires.
The first edition was published in the heyday of European imperial hegemony and consequently was influenced by its epistemologies and stereotypes. West African Islam was largely absent from this edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. To a great extent, the same prejudice affected the second edition, work on which started in the early 1960s. It was only from the 1990s on, when Islam in sub-Saharan Africa became a recognized field of research, that its experts were invited to contribute entries to that second edition. The ongoing third edition is likely to devote greater attention to Sudanic Africa, not least because its editorial team includes one Africanist, Dr. Roman Loimeier, who is in charge of selecting and assigning entries dealing with the Bilad al-Sudan.
Another notable effort at mapping Islamic intellectual history in a European language was the work of the German Orientalist Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956). Titled Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur (History of Arabic Literature),5 it was first published in 1909 in Leipzig, Germany, and later republished by the Dutch publisher E. J. Brill. Divided into chronologically organized sections subdivided by literary genres, this five-volume compilation of several thousand pages provides biographic and bibliographic information about Arabic writings and authors, with particular reference to the classical period. It devotes only four pages to West Africa, despite the fact that a couple of libraries including writings from the Bilad al-Sudan had been confiscated and taken to Europe by the colonizing armies in the late nineteenth century.6 However, until the 1980s, none of them was analyzed, let alone catalogued.7
A look at encyclopedic dictionaries in Arabic shows the same neglect on the part of Arabic compilers. Two examples of major compilations in Arabic are the Al-A‘lam by Khayr al-Din Al-Zirikly (1979) and the Mu‘jam al-Mu’allalifin by ‘Umar Rida Kahhala (1957). Entitled Biographical Dictionary of Arab Authors, Arabophones, and Orientalists, Al-Zirikly’s work, which was first published in 1927, has since appeared in three updated editions in 1957, 1969, and 1979.8 It is composed of eight volumes and contains biographical information on many Arab and Orientalist authors and their works. The Mu‘jam al-Mu’allalifin (Dictionary of Authors) of ‘Umar Rida Kahhala (1957)9 is another encyclopedic reference work on Arabic writings. In fourteen volumes, the Mu‘jam, as its title indicates, aims to give maximum information about works written in Arabic, their authors, the genealogy of those authors, and their field of specialization. However, these two major reference works give the impression, left by the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the Geschichte of Brockelman, that sub-Saharan Africa has not contributed to Islamic intellectual history.

Early Mapping Efforts

The first notable effort to map Arabic sources in African history can be traced to the work coordinated by Prince Youssouf Kamal. Entitled the Monumenta Carthographica Africae and Aegypti and compiled by a team of researchers of different nationalities,10 it remained until the late twentieth century the greatest cartographical work ever undertaken in terms of its broad range. The Monumenta include an inventory of written texts in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and other medieval European languages that concern Africa from Pharaonic Egypt to the arrival of the Portuguese in 1434. But until recently, they were very little cited, for two main reasons: first, because only one hundred copies of the first edition were produced by Brill between 1926 and 1951, of which seventy-five were offered to libraries; second, because the sixteen volumes that composed the work measured 75 × 60 centimeters and were very heavy.11 This made the resource cumbersome to use, until 1987, when Fuat Sizgin prepared a second more accessible edition.12 Thus, for a long time, the Monumenta were very seldom cited in African historiography.13
This endeavor was followed by the work of Father Joseph Cuoq entitled Recueil des sources arabes concernant l’Afrique occidentale du VII au XVe siècle, published in 1975.14 It covered all Arabic sources concerning West Africa west of the Nile and south of the Sahara. This corpus, which includes twenty-five authors not mentioned in the Monumenta, dealt only with Arabic sources and provided crucial testimonies on the medieval states of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, and Kanem Borno, among others.
A third compilation of Arabic sources on African history15—this one much cited by historians—was sponsored by the University of Ghana in 1957 at a time when Pan Africanist agitation had reached its peak. It...