Introduction
In August 2015, with the financial support of the Research Board Award of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we undertook a fieldwork trip in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana within the framework of the research on the West African chronicle known as Tārīkh al-Fattāsh of one of the authors of this report. Footnote 2 The catalogues compiled by Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad and published by the London-based al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation report the existence of thirteen copies of the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh in private collections in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Footnote 3
The recently published Catalogue of the Islamic Manuscripts from the National Library of the Côte d’Ivoire is a problematic work. The English title refers to manuscripts in the National Library, while the Arabic title Dār al-wathā’iq al-waṭāniyya might also refer to the National Archive. However, our first telephone enquiries to the National Library and the National Archive in Abidjan proved unsuccessful, as no one at either institution knew anything of the catalogue nor of the manuscripts. The National Archive does indeed hold some Arabic manuscripts, but after the civil wars in Côte d’Ivoire (2002–2007, 2010–2011) access to them is limited and much material has been misplaced. Footnote 4 Eventually an unidentified office worker at the National Library told us that they do not hold the manuscripts described in the multi-volume catalogue. Footnote 5 Furthermore, the call numbers given in the catalogue do not follow the system of either the National Archives or the National Library. Footnote 6
To ascertain the location of the manuscripts, we contacted the man who compiled the catalogue, Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad. However, he was unable to provide any clarification of the matter so we decided to get in touch with the al-Furqan Foundation directly. Footnote 7 Mohamed Drioueche, head of the Projects & Publications Department, informed us that the manuscripts described in the catalogue are not in any centralized archive, as one might imagine from the title, but in various libraries throughout the country. Mohamed Drioueche kindly shared with us a list of the libraries that were believed to hold the manuscripts described in the catalogue and the correspondence with them. He also gave us the abbreviations used in the catalogue, in a document most probably originally intended to be part of the original publication but which was then left out by mistake. Footnote 8 We discovered from this document that the copies of the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh are from the following manuscript collections, reported according to the spelling of the list received from Mohamed Drioueche:
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• Hajji Abdul Baqi bin Naji Library, Bondoukou, four copies, n°s ABN.AMS/5, ABN.AMS/37, ABN.AMS/54, ABN.AMS/79)
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• Shaikh Boukar Kunti Library, Bouna, n° SBK.AMS/3
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• Suleiman al-Alawi Library, Dabakala, n° SA.AMS/117
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• Sheikh Hudu Salim Library, Odienné, n° SHS.AMS/109
We found some additional information about the libraries in the World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts, also published by al-Furqan, whose section on Côte d’Ivoire was compiled by the same Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad. Hajji Abdul Baqi bin Naji Library in Bondoukou (BP 22) is reported as having been established in 1971, hosting 486 manuscripts and is said to have been founded by the owner, “an itinerant Sufi scholar who inherited the collection from his late father, who died in 1970, and enriched it by purchasing about 283 manuscripts from individual owners in Bondoukou and its surroundings.” As for Shaikh Boukar Kunti Library in Bouna, it is described as being at the “Madrasatul Irshad” where the owner, who founded it in 1970, stores 54 manuscripts “in a wooden box” including “manuscripts dating back to the fifteenth century.” Suleiman al-Alawi Library is claimed to be in Dabakala, “Cercle” de Tagouana (BP 417) and to be a very old library of 228 manuscripts: “[It] contains a number of old Islamic manuscripts which are autograph copies. About half of the manuscripts were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the rest were either copied or written in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Lastly, Shaikh Hudu Salim Library is reported to be a collection located in Odienné, Sofon Zongo, and to include 251 manuscripts “established with the help of the owner’s students and children, because of the dearth of genuine Islamic books in the country.” Footnote 9 In the past, the sections compiled by Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad in the World Survey have been questioned by Jean-Louis Triaud who in his “Deux bibliothèques arabo-islamiques en Côte d’Ivoire au début du XXe siècle” found several problems in the entry on a collection in Mankono, including the conflation of two libraries, problems with names, dating of the libraries, contents, and terminology. Footnote 10
At first sight the Catalogue of the Manuscripts in Ghana Libraries, published in 2000, seems to be easier to navigate. The following collections, reported following the catalogue’s inaccurate spelling, each hold a copy of the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh:
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• Limān al-hāj Abd al-Mūmin Library, Obuasi, Ashante region, n° 36
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• Aḥmad Bāba al Wā’iz Library, Aboabo, Kumasi, Ashanti, n° 185
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• ’Ali ibn Muḥammmad Barau Library, Salaghawi, Salagha, n° 157
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• ’Abd al-’Azīz Ramaḍān Library, Dyinyama, Ashanti region, n° 53
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• Ustaḍh Adam Library, Lamashegu, Tamale, n° 52
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• ’Umar ibn Bakr Library, Kete Krachi, Volta region, n° 702 Footnote 11
None of those libraries is listed in the World Survey whose section on Ghana was compiled in 1990 by B.A.R. Brahimah. Footnote 12 However, three of the scholars reported as owners of manuscript libraries can easily be identified as prominent Ghanaian scholars, such as Aḥmad Bāba al-Wā‘iz, a prominent Tijāni who passed away in 1982, ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-Salghawī, known as Baraw (d. 1956–1957), and ‘Umar b. Abī Bakr b. ‘Uthmān al-Salghawī, known as Umaru Kirki (d. 1934). Footnote 13
In truth, on reading both catalogues our first reaction was scepticism. If the data were accurate, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire would host a treasure-trove of manuscripts, some of them extremely rare. For example, the cases of Tārīkh al-Fattāsh and other, more recent chronicles from Timbuktu illustrate how unlikely are the holdings of the libraries described in the catalogues of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. For the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh we know of the existence of only eight copies, including fragments, in the Institut des Hautes Études et de Recherches Islamiques Ahmed-Baba (IHERI-AB) (Timbuktu/Bamako), the Bibliothéque Nationale de France (Paris), the Institut des Recherches en Sciences Humaines (Niamey), the Boukhary Library (Banikan, Niafunke), plus three non-verified in IHERI-AB and Fondo Kati (Timbuktu). If we were to believe the catalogues of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, thirteen more copies would be available in those two countries. The Izālat al-rayb wa-l-shakk wa-l-tafrīṭ fī dhikr al-‘ulamā’ al-mu’allifīn min ahl al-Takrūr wa-Ṣaḥrā’ by Aḥmad b. Mbārak b. Barka b. Muḥammad al-Mūsā-ū-‘Alī al-Takanī al-Wādnūnī al-Sūsī al-Timbuktī, known as Aḥmad Būl‘arāf (d. 1955) and the al-Sa‘āda al-abadiyya fī ta‘rīf ‘ulamā’ Tinbuktu al-bahiya by Mūlāy Aḥmad [b.] Bābēr al-Arawānī (d. 1997) are two exceedingly rare manuscripts not found outside Timbuktu – with the exception of a copy of the latter made by the author in 1966 and donated to M. ‘Umar al-Naqar at SOAS. This latter copy exists on microfilm and photocopy respectively at the Centre for Arabic Documentation of the University of Ibadan and in the Herskovits Library of Northwestern University. Footnote 14 As for Izāla, there are three copies in IHERI-AB of Timbuktu, namely nos. 492, 991, and 4,989; a fourth copy is in the private library of the Timbuktu scholar Maḥmūd Muḥammad Dédéou, known as Hamou. IHERI-AB also holds three copies of the al-Sa‘āda al-abadiyya, nos. 16, 2,752, and 11,733. Surprisingly, the catalogues of the Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire libraries list copies of these rare works, namely two copies of Izāla and one of al-Sa‘āda al-abadiyya.
Furthermore, what emerges from the catalogues is the enormous scarcity of local scholarly production, while the majority of the works come from the Southern Sahara between Mauritania and Northern Mali, or from Northern Nigeria. It almost appears that the entire scholarly production of those latter areas, as described in the already published materials (such as the al-Furqan catalogue of the IHERI-AB and the series Arabic Literature of Africa), is reproduced in the catalogues of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. A sample test from the Ghana catalogue is illustrated by the works on ‘Aqīda and Tawhīd. Of 172 manuscripts only 14 (8.14%) are copies of unidentified works or existing as single copies in Ghana. That strongly contradicts our own experience with West African libraries that leads us to expect the extensive presence of unidentified works and of single copies in their collections.
Notwithstanding our scepticism about the accuracy of the catalogue, our need to collect information on the copies of the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh listed in the catalogues of manuscripts from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire practically compelled us to plan a fieldwork trip to those two countries, so in the evening of 30 July 2015 we met up in Abidjan. In front of us awaited a long trip of more than 1,350 km along dusty roads, and interviews with many people in different languages, mainly Arabic but French, English, and Jula as well, not forgetting, Hausa and Akan with the help of interpreters. Unfortunately, however, we found no manuscript libraries.
Fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire
The Côte d’Ivoire part of the fieldwork was greatly facilitated by two former students of the Zaytuna University in Tunisia who were in Tunis with Mohamed Diagayeté while he was studying for his PhD. They were Moussa Sanguisso from Burkina Faso who is an independent scholar, and Moussa Konaté from Côte d’Ivoire who is currently a researcher at Institut d’Histoire, d’Arts et d’Archéologie-Africains - Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny and an instructor at the Institut International d’Imamat in Abidjan. Moussa Sanguisso welcomed us in Côte d’Ivoire and helped us to reconnect with Moussa Konaté. Informed of the aims of our mission, Konaté decided to join us on our trip, contacting local scholars and notables and thereby making our research in Côte d’Ivoire possible.
Early in the morning of 2 August 2015 we left Abidjan for the north of Côte d’Ivoire. Our goal was to enquire about the collections of manuscripts described in the Catalogue of the Islamic Manuscripts from the National Library of the Côte d’Ivoire in Bondoukou, Bouna, Dabakala, and Odienné.
As we arrived at our first destination of Bondoukou around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, we met shaykh ‘Aqīl Kamara, director and professor at the madrasa al-Mubajjī. Footnote 15 He denied the existence of any Haji Abdul Baqi bin Naji Library in Bondoukou and said that he knew no scholar of that name. Shaykh Kamara also drove us to see another local scholar, the director of the Madrasat Banī Taymiyya, shaykh Amadu Timité known as Quddūs. At his house, we met another Muslim scholar called Ibrāhīm ‘Abd Allāh Bamba. Although he now lives in Abidjan he was originally from that area and is well acquainted with local Muslim scholars. Neither shaykh Quddūs or Ibrāhīm ‘Abd Allāh Bamba could provide us with any information on Hajji Abdul Baqi bin Naji nor his library. Quddūs promised us he would ask Muḥammad Kolonga Timité, the imām of the main mosque, and said he would make enquiries with other local notables. Disappointed by our first attempt to locate the manuscript library, we decided to go on to Bouna to make the best use of our time. We would return to Bondoukou later during our trip.
We left Bondoukou and drove the 174 km north towards the town of Bouna where the imām of the main mosque, al-ḥājj ‘Abd al-Razzāq Kamara, a man who is well known locally as a “traditional teacher” welcomed us. After an exchange of greetings with the imām and some other notables of the town, we inquired about the Shaikh Boukar Kunti Library and his Madrasatul Irshad. Neither the imām nor the other notables who were with him knew anything about this library, its owner, his family, or his school. The imām even telephoned a local “marabout” called Hamadoun Sidibe from Burkina Faso. Sidibe was described to us as well acquainted with the Muslim community of Bouna, having lived there for thirty-four years. However, Sidibe too was unable to provide us with any information about the Shaikh Boukar Kunti Library. He did however mention that the only people called Kunta who have sometimes visited Bouna are from Mali, but they have never settled in the town and own no manuscript library. Imām Kamara also promised to inquire further about our search and, surprisingly, after the maghrib prayer in the main mosque, he asked the muezzin to make a public announcement asking if anybody by the name of Kunta were present, or if anybody had ever heard of anyone of that name in the town. Nobody responded.
The imām insisted that we spend the night in Bouna under his hospitality and wait until the next morning in the hope that somebody might furnish information on Shaikh Boukar Kunti or the Madrasatul Irshad. However, in the morning of 3 August 2015, when we went to meet the imām, he confirmed what he had told us the night before: no Shaikh Boukar Kunti was known in the town, nor had any Madrasatul Irshad ever existed in Bouna. He added that there are only three madrasas in town today, two named Madrasat al-‘ulūm al-shar‘īya (one elementary and one advanced) and the other al-Madrasa namūdhajiyya al-islāmiyya (elementary only).
Later that morning we drove back to Bondoukou where we met the imām of the main mosque, Muḥammad Kolonga Timité, at around 11:30. Sitting in a room full of other aged notables of Bondoukou, we received the same answer as in Bouna, “nobody named Hajji Abdul Baqi bin Naji is to be found in Bondoukou and nobody knows anything of this library.” The imām himself even went to the post office in person to verify the address (BP 22) given in the World Survey as belonging to Hajji Abdul Baqi bin Naji. Even that attempt proved unsuccessful, for Imām Timité found that BP 22 belongs to a certain Sina Moro who has nothing to do with the library!
The enquiries in the first two towns in Côte d’Ivoire were disappointing. Nobody knew anything about the libraries, the manuscripts, or even the names of the scholars who it was claimed owned the manuscripts. Disillusioned by what we had found we suspected that we would not find any manuscripts in the other two towns on our itinerary in Côte d’Ivoire, Odienné and Dabakala, both huge distances away at the ends very long and bad roads. We decided to call off our search when our preliminary telephone enquiries there too met the same fate. Moussa Konaté rang up the imām of the main mosque of Dabakala, Vaida Diaby, who informed us that he did not know any Suleiman al-Alawi in Dabakala and that to his knowledge the library about which we were enquiring does not exist. Moussa Konaté also contacted the imām of the quartier d’ancienne aviation of Odienné, Mamadou Coulibaly, to whom the name Shaikh Hudu Salim meant nothing and who insisted there was no large manuscript library in the town. On the evening of 3 August 2015 we therefore took our leave of Moussa Konaté. Moussa went back to Abidjan, and we crossed the border between the towns of Soko in Côte d’Ivoire and Sampa in Ghana. Our hope that the situation in Ghana would be different was soon to be frustrated.
Fieldwork in Ghana
After seven hours on the bus, in the middle of the night of 4 August 2015 we reached Kumasi where our fieldwork in Ghana was to start. The plan was to visit Kumasi, Obuasi, and Dyinyama in the Ashanti Region, then to move towards Tamale, Salaga, and Kete Krachi, hoping that the data in the Catalogue of the Manuscripts in Ghana Libraries was reliable. The Ghana part of the trip depended substantially on the help of Mahmud Muhammad Amin, who had been a student at the University of Cape Town when Mauro Nobili was a post-doctoral fellow there. Mahmud Amin is the son of a well-known local Muslim scholar, Muhammad Amin. Muhammad Amin lives in Tarkwa Aboso, Western region and is the nā’ib of the imām of the Gurma people, and director of the local madrasa. Mahmud Amin’s role as our intermediary was crucial, opening the doors of the houses and schools of Muslim scholars both in the Ashanti region and in Accra.
On the morning of 5 August 2015 we visited the family of Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz in the Kumasi area of Aboabo. We were welcomed into the mosque-madrasa where they have a school for Qur’ānic memorization that for the past seventeen years has turned out both male and female memorizers (huffāẓ). They then showed us the Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya al-Islāmiyya founded by Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz himself. The family of Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz warmly helped us with our inquiry and we managed to carry out extensive interviews with some of its members. First, shaykh Yūsha‘, the third son of Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz – and the eldest among the ones still living. Now retired, shaykh Yūsha‘ is still fully committed to the organization of the madrasa. We also met another of the sons of Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz, shaykh Bashīr Bābā who wrote a biblio-biography of his father. Footnote 16 Last, we met Muhammad Sani Waliyu Allāhi b. Yūsuf Niasse, who studied at the madrasa and eventually became its caretaker. All of them agreed in their answers: many people visit them, but nobody could remember a scholar ever working to catalogue the manuscripts. They do have a library of published materials that we saw, and they hold some manuscripts written by Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz in “boxes” which we did not see and which have never been catalogued.
In the afternoon of the same day we went to the Islamic Council of “Ulama” of the Ashanti Region and to Mallam Mohammed Mahey Ibrahim. Mallam Ibrahim spoke to us but the secretary of the council was away and he could not, either, help us in identifying the libraries or the scholars mentioned in the catalogues. Mallam Ibrahim volunteered his opinion that the list of scholars looks very strange and, apart from Aḥmad Bāba al-Wā‘iz and ‘Umar Karki, he could not identify any of the mentioned scholars. He focused his attention on his own hometown of Salaga and on Shaikh Maḥmūd Ibn ‘Abdallah listed in the catalogue. He could not, however, remember anybody with those names. At this he decided to telephone a certain individual whose name we unfortunately did not learn but who was a local man. He was described as knowing the scholars of the region of Salaga very well, but his answer too was that he knew of no Shaikh Maḥmūd Ibn ‘Abdallah. Mallam Ibrahim stressed that there might have been some problem of record keeping, so perhaps the memory of those scholars and their libraries had faded away; or perhaps mistakes had been made in producing the catalogues. It was of course also conceivable that we were dealing with a case of fraud…
Having exhausted our sources in Kumasi, on 6 August 2015 we moved on to Obuasi. In the suburb of Tutuka we met the imām of the local jum‘a mosque, now an old man and completely blind, called mallam al-ḥājj Abū Bakr. He had previously been imām at another jum‘a mosque of Obuasi, the Wangara mosque (the third and last being the Hausa mosque). Mallam al-ḥājj Abū Bakr could not remember anyone by the name of Limān al-hājj Abd al-Mu’min in Obuasi but he added that he could not be sure due to his advanced age. He called his eldest son, the current imām of the Wangara mosque, imām Sirāj for confirmation. In reply to our question, he told us he knew of no Limān al-hājj Abd al-Mu’min, answering straightforwardly in Arabic, “ghayr mawjūd” meaning, roughly, “no such person ever existed!”
Discouraged and suspecting that similarly to those for Côte d’Ivoire the Ghana references too were inaccurate, we decided to forget about the other four locations. Those were Dyinyama which, perhaps because of spelling mistakes in the catalogue we never located; Tamale, Salaga, and Kete Krachi. On 7 August 2015 we moved on to Accra to meet the chief imām of Ghana, ‘Uthmān Nūḥ Sharbutū. Footnote 17 The next day we reached his location in Fadama, Accra, but were able to speak only to his spokesman, al-ḥājj ‘Abd al-Laṭīf. He prevented us from meeting the imām saying that the imām would not have been able to tell us anything more than what we had already found out during our trip to the areas where the libraries were supposed to exist.
Our last meeting, at about noon, was at the Ahlu Sunnat wal Jama‘at. There we met shaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, the assistant of shaykh ‘Umar Ibrahīm Imām, the head of the foundation. Unfortunately, we received the same answer. Shaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥmān knew nothing about the manuscripts, the libraries, nor had he heard of Bābā Yūnus Muḥammad.
Final Observations
These intense ten days of travel and interviews proved to be unproductive, but illuminating. We could not find any manuscripts, nor any of the libraries we were looking for, and nobody knew anything about the cataloguing process. Furthermore, while we realized that some of the scholars referred to in the catalogue of manuscripts from Ghana are well-known (Aḥmad Bābā al-Wā‘iz, Umaru Karki, ‘Alī b. Muḥammad Baraw), in Côte d’Ivoire we were unable to trace any reference to any of those said to be in possession of libraries. In the future, a more accurate analysis of private collections in Côte d’Ivoire will be available thanks to Moussa Konaté. Spurred on by the negative results of our trip, he applied for and was recently awarded an Endangered Archives Program Pilot Project (EAP915) to produce a list of libraries in possession of Arabic manuscripts in the regions of Bondoukou, Mankono, Bouaké, and Kong. Footnote 18
What then did our trip tell us about the accuracy of the catalogues? How were they produced? Were all our informants wrong? In fact we checked only a small percentage of the manuscripts described in the catalogues, but even so our fieldwork casts grave doubt on the credibility of the data provided in the catalogues. How many of the described manuscripts really do exist? Should we wonder too about the other recently published catalogue on Burkina Faso libraries by the same author who produced the other two catalogues? Footnote 19 When we returned from our trip we contacted Sali Shahsivari, Managing Director of al-Furqan, and shared with him our concerns about the catalogues from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. He kindly replied trying to provide possible explanations for our lack of success in locating either the libraries or the manuscripts. First, he pointed out that “[t]he world of manuscripts is dynamic, in a sense that many existing collections either move around or disappear.” Then he added that “[s]ome of the owners of manuscripts [special collections] sometimes conceal information regarding their collection, due to them being over-protective about their treasures.” He went to on to say “these catalogues were produced several years ago, hence in the interim things might have changed.” While this is true, for scholars or libraries to leave absolutely no trace in the respective locations is in fact quite rare. Most importantly, he concluded by adding an argument that seemed rather more convincing. “In such cataloguing projects,” he said, “al-Furqan commissions respective scholars in the field, trusting their knowledge, expertise and ability; therefore in cases of inaccurate data the responsibility falls first and foremost on the author or whoever compiled or edited the catalogues.” Footnote 20 Yet for scholars who wish to invest their time and resources in locating and, they hope, making use of the material described in the catalogues, the catalogues themselves are the only starting points for their research. It is therefore fair to say that a more accurate review process is the least we would expect.
Mauro Nobili is Assistant Professor in African History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also Honorary Research Associate at the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, Huma, University of Cape Town. He is a specialist of West African History and his particular research focuses on Arabic manuscript culture and Islam in Africa. He published the Catalogue des manuscrits arabes du fonds de Gironcourt (Afrique de l’Ouest) de l’Institut de France (Rome: Istituto per L’Oriente C.A. Nallino, 2013) as well as several articles on the Arabic script styles in West African manuscripts and on the Timbuktu chronicles. He is currently working on a book on the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh and the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi. E-mail: Nobili@illinois.edu
Mohamed Diagayeté is Senior Researcher at the Institut des Hautes Études et de Recherches Islamiques Ahmed Baba (IHERI-AB), Timbuktu/Bamako, Mali. He is also a former General Secretary of the IHERI-AB. He holds a PhD from the Zaytuna University in Tunis which he completed in 2006–2007. His dissertation (in Arabic) The Fulani and their Role in the Islamic Culture in Mali is a longue durée examination of the role of Fulani scholars in the development of Islamic culture in the territories that roughly correspond to the modern-day Republic of Mali. He has also published numerous articles, among them bio-bibliographical sketches of Abu al-Khayr, a prominent twentieth century scholar from Timbuktu; and of Aḥmad Lobbo, the nineteenth century founder and first leader of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.
