The Kitāb al-turjumān fī tārīḫ al-Ṣaḥrāʾ wa al-Sūdān wa bilād Tinbukt wa Shinqīṭ wa Arawān wa nubaḏ ʿan tārīḫ al-zamān fī jamī ʿal-buldān is a twentieth-century Timbuktu tārīḫ (chronicle). Authors writing in Timbuktu's tārīḫ tradition produced chronicles between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries CE.Footnote 1 However, beginning with Octave Houdas's edited French translation of the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān at the end of the nineteenth century and until as recently as 2018, modern scholars have concentrated their attention on Timbuktu's famous seventeenth-century tārīḫs at the expense of later tārīḫs from Timbuktu.Footnote 2 The present article addresses this dearth of modern scholarship on Timbuktu's post-seventeenth-century tārīḫs by offering a reading of the Kitāb al-turjumān. The article's central concern is to discern what motivated Muḥammad Maḥmūd bin al-Ŝayḫ (hereafter bin al-Ŝayḫ), the author of the Kitāb al-turjumān, to write a history of the southern Sahara and Sahel.Footnote 3 It will seek to situate the author and his work in historical context while delimiting the particular tārīḫ genre to which the Kitāb al-turjumān belongs. In addition, the article will compare the Kitāb al-turjumān with other works in the Timbuktu tārīḫ tradition, specifically the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān and Timbuktu's biographical dictionaries.Footnote 4
This article draws on Paulo F. de Moraes Farias's incisive and novel reading of Timbuktu's seventeenth-century tārīḫs to understand the Kitāb al-turjumān within the longer tradition of history writing in Timbuktu.Footnote 5 Moraes Farias shows that the authors of the seventeenth-century tārīḫs were not simply informants and providers of raw evidence, but intellectual innovators and politico-ideological actors who invented a new idea of the Sahelian past.
The chroniclers introduced synthetic historical narrative to Timbuktu literature. . . . [T]heir histories gaze on the past from a new and holistic point of view required by a novel type of political project [that] could not have emerged in earlier centuries and became pointless in the century that followed. One central feature . . . was the representation of the Soŋoy [Songhay] state as a continuous thread running across three successive dynasties. . . . In pursuit of this aim, the chroniclers put together lengthy kinglists. . . . At the core of the Timbuktu ta'rīkh genre of the seventeenth century AD lies an exercise in catastrophe management. . . . [T]he chronicles cater to intellectual and emotional needs . . . aim[ing] at comprehending disastrous events and coming to terms with painful losses. They make sense of the Moroccan invasion, which had abruptly destroyed the Soŋoy empire and which had reduced the Askyia lineages to ‘puppet’ roles and had brought personal suffering to the literate urban patriciate and lowered its political and social standing. . . . This rendered their literature highly political and their politics highly dependent on consolidating the Soŋoy and Timbuktu past into a single and taut narrative, endowed with chronological depth and political continuity.Footnote 6
Moraes Farias cogently makes the point that modern historians should appreciate the Timbuktu chronicles as the emergence of an innovative form of historical writing. Their combination of themes, harnessing together of sociologically diverse interests, and the bias of the interventions in history they attribute to God are testimony to it. This article examines the Kitāb al-turjumān as a prime example of this genre of innovative historical writing. Like the seventeenth-century chroniclers, bin al-Ŝayḫ was an ideological and intellectual doer. Drawing on Moraes Farias's point that the seventeenth-century chronicles could not have emerged earlier and became pointless later, this article suggests that the writing of the Kitāb al-turjumān became both possible and necessary only in the mid-1950s in light of the political realities created by the looming but certain departure of French colonial rule from the Soudan Français. It could not be written before that date, while its creation in the postcolonial era would have been highly improbable.Footnote 7
In its aim to delineate bin al-Ŝayḫ's motive for writing the Kitāb al-turjumān, this article foregrounds the two leitmotifs of the Kitāb al-turjumān. The first is the presence of foreign powers, namely the Saʿdian dynasty and France, that invaded and conquered the Sahel at the end of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. The second is the figure of Aḥmad bin Ādd, the patriarch of the Ādd clan in the town of Arawān, from which bin al-Ŝayḫ hails. Thus, Aḥmad bin Ādd's offspring and bin al-Ŝayḫ himself are integral parts of the second leitmotif. The two themes forcefully capture bin al-Ŝayḫ's motive for writing the Kitāb al-turjumān and delineate it as a unique work within the larger and longer history of Timbuktu's chronicle tradition.
Despite its unique qualities, the Kitāb al-turjumān has rarely been the subject of systematic inquiry. John Hunwick's Arabic Literature of Africa mentions the time of the Kitāb al-turjumān's writing (that is, after 1933), its genealogical tables, and the number of its chapters, noting that chapter 14 discusses the benefits of French rule.Footnote 8 In 2009, al-Hādī al-Mabrūk al-Dālī produced a print version of the Kitāb al-turjumān; however, claiming editorial privilege, his text included changes, omissions, and a value judgment of the author. He noted:
I am reluctant to include in this [printed] edition some content [found in the manuscript] such as the internecine tribal wars, individual squabbles over the leadership of the region because they enflame tribal conflicts. The aim of editing is to present a clear and useful product. I have also made changes to the title of the Kitāb [al-turjumān] not found in the manuscript and added to the text. . . . I besiege God to forgive this Shaykh for praising the [French] enemy of the [Muslim] nation and [Islamic] religion.Footnote 9
Bruce Hall is the first modern scholar to identify the Kitāb al-turjumān with political objectives.Footnote 10 Hall meticulously shows how, as one of the most important representatives of the bidan (‘whites’) who claimed ‘that the Niger Bend belonged to them’, bin al-Ŝayḫ wrote the Kitāb al-turjumān to demonstrate the claim.Footnote 11
Ould al-Shaykh gave the standard account of the founding of Timbuktu, following the tradition laid down in numerous texts and current in the oral traditions. . . . In describing the way in which Timbuktu came to be populated, and the origins of the different people who moved to the town during its early history, Ould al-Shaykh wrote that the inhabitants were Arab and Tuareg. He then discussed how people came from different places . . . (Egypt, Morocco, Tuwat, Ghadames, etc.), and how different mosques and neighborhoods came to be built. . . . There is no mention of early black immigrants to Timbuktu from Wagadoo mentioned in the written histories that Ould Cheikh [sic] clearly relied on in other places. Nor is there any discussion of the black inhabitants in the town's history. This omission served Ould al-Shaykh's purposes in that it rendered Timbuktu white. As race entered into the politics of decolonization, we begin to see the geographical space of the Niger Bend itself turned into the object of racialized contestation.Footnote 12
In addition to introducing a new synthesis of older materials, a new arrangement of well-known information from older works of local history, and a selective incorporation of other older local texts, the Kitāb al-turjumān ascribes to the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān what it does not say, as this article will show later. All four acts clearly identify the chronicle with political objectives, although they do not unambiguously associate the Kitāb al-turjumān with the claim that the Niger Bend belonged to the bidan population of the region.Footnote 13 However, via the two leitmotifs of the chronicle — foreign invading powers and Aḥmad bin Ādd — this article will examine what motivated bin al-Ŝayḫ to write a history of the Sahel.
Muḥammad Maḥmūd bin al-Ŝayḫ was born in the town of Arawān in 1910 and died in 1973 in Timbuktu. He studied the Islamic religious-intellectual tradition at the hands of many scholars and in turn taught many scholars. He was famous for his wit and his learning.Footnote 14 His numerous fatwās and legal, theological, Sūfi, and polemical treatises and poems bear testimony to his status as a highly rated intellectual and prolific writer. He was recognized as such by fellow ‘ulamā’, colonial officials, and the local literati. He spoke, read, and wrote French and had extensive knowledge of French politics, history, and culture; his library contained works on French penal and criminal law, the Petit Larousse Illustré, and other French texts.Footnote 15 He travelled widely for religious duties and his political agenda.Footnote 16 In 1932, the colonial authority appointed him qāḍī for the Arawān community residing in Timbuktu, and he held this position off and on until 1949.Footnote 17
In the 1950s, bin al-Ŝayḫ wrote the Kitāb al-turjumān, which he introduced as follows:
Since the science of history is among the most important [sciences] that people of reason engage in and among the most sublime that commands the attention of scholars . . . I wanted to collate what our predecessors have [preserved] of the history of the Azawād and of Arawān, its origins, of those who settled in it and its surrounding [neighbourhood] from days of yonder to this day; the lineage origins of every tribe and its current branches, the wars between them; an account of scholars, friends [of God], the pious, and descendants of the Prophet who arrived here [to settle]; the [Kel] Anṣār, the Barābīŝ, the ʿAjam of the Tuāreg and others such as the [people of] the Sūdān and accounts of all [the peoples]. My dependence for this [task] was what I found transmitted from ancient works and earlier accounts. Whatever information's spuriousness/inauthenticity was clear to me, I did not transmit. I only included what was transmitted from the writings of our sages and scholars and the like, except that I have abridged some of that [transmission].Footnote 18
The importance of history and what prompted bin al-Ŝayḫ to write a history of Timbuktu and the region immediately follow the passages praising God and offering salutations to the Prophet, as all Timbuktu's chronicles and biographical dictionaries do.Footnote 19 However, in contrast to the latter, the introduction alludes to the sources it apparently drew on in writing the Kitāb al-turjumān, particularly in relation to the Saʿdian invasion and conquest of Songhay in 1591.
Saʿdian invasion and conquest
Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī sent to him [Askiya Isḥāq II] before Jawdar's [mission] an envoy with a letter [from him] pertaining to the salt mines at Taĝāz between Marrakesh and the Sūdān. In summary, [Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī demanded] that all who trade in salt to the different parts of the Sūdān should pay [to the Saʿdian State] for every consignment of salt an ounce of gold as a land tax to fund the Muslim soldiers [of the Saʿdian state] in their jihad against the [Portuguese] infidels and to protect the shore of [the Sūdān]. Sulṭān Māwlāy al-Ḏahabī wrote to him only after consulting the scholars of his dominion. The jurisconsults issued legal opinions (fatwās), drawn from the written texts of the jurists, that accorded him, as the imām of Muslims, complete jurisdiction over the [salt] mines and permitted commercial activity only with the explicit permission of the sulṭān [Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī] or his representative. Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī sent the legal opinions (fatāwā) to Askiya Isḥāq together with the letter. Askiya Isḥāq did not respond positively to his demand nor carry out his instructions; rather he purposely tarried in his response. To the extent that the messenger delayed [waiting on Askiya Isḥāq's response] Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī comprehended as such Askiya Isḥāq's thoughts [and] there and then resolved to despatch an army to the Sūdān. When the messenger returned from Askiya Isḥāq to Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī, he briefed him on what he [the Askiya] said; that he rejected [Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī's demand] saying that Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī is the ruler of a kingdom and he [Isḥāq] the ruler of a kingdom. [He showed al-Ḏahabī] the pair of iron sandals and a spear [Isḥāq II sent along] with his letter. This indicated that he was prepared] for war. At this point Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī consulted with his advisors and consultants. Indeed, their gathering was a momentous day; they discussed the matter mutually until they unanimously agreed on dispatching [an army] to the Sūdān. However, even at this stage Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī was still hesitant until the beginning of the year 997 hijrī/1591 CE. He then strengthened his resolve and [commissioned] work on the preparation of the war apparatus and the necessities the army required in terms of mobilization and fighting capacity/war readiness.Footnote 20
Central to bin al-Ŝayḫ's long account of the Saʿdian invasion and conquest of Songhay is that Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī consulted the jurists of his kingdom to seek legal opinions (fatwās) regarding authority over the salt mines in Songhay territory. Bin al-Ŝayḫ makes the point that al-Ḏahabī obtained the approval of the jurists before proceeding with the invasion to confer it religious sanction. Therefore, Isḥāq II's refusal to surrender authority over the salt mines to the Moroccan ruler rendered him a rebel liable to be disciplined, hence the invasion. Interestingly, however, bin al-Ŝayḫ begins his account of the invasion not with Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī's envoy to Askiya Isḥāq II, but with appraisals of Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī and Askiya Isḥāq II and the conduct of Jawdar, the commander of the Moroccan army. For the appraisal of the three, he draws apparently on the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān; for the overall account of the Moroccan invasion, he draws on the Kitāb al-istiqṣā li aḫbār al-maĝrib al-aqṣā, a late nineteenth-century Moroccan chronicle:Footnote 21
What al-Saʿdī's mentions in the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān about [Jawdar Pasha] fleeing from [the encounter with] Askiya Isḥāq bin Dāwūd, labelling Sulṭān al-Manṣūr Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī's rule unjust and him unrighteous and Askiya Isḥāq II pious has no basis and is contrary [to the truth]. Rather the truth is as we found passed down [generation after generation] about the just rule of Sulṭān al-Manṣūr Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī. As for the state of Songhay on the day [of the Battle of Tondibi] the addendum of the [Tārīḫ] al-fattāŝ [and] what we read from the Kitāb al-Istiqṣā spare us from [having to demonstrate] the precarious state [of Songhay], drowned in the commission of proscribed abominable acts. Askiya Isḥāq did not stay on the path of his predecessors in pursuing just rule.Footnote 22
The passage ascribes to the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān the observations that Sulṭān Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī was unjust, that Askiya Isḥāq II was a just and a virtuous man, and that Jawdar Pasha fled from battle. However, with this ascription, bin al-Ŝayḫ distorts the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān. The Tārīḫ al-Sūdān does not present al-Ḏahabī's rule as oppressive, al-Ḏahabī himself as an unjust ruler, Isḥāq II as a just ruler, or Jawdar as abandoning the battlefield. Rather, it supplicates God's mercy for al-Ḏahabī, mentions explicitly that Jawdar defeated Isḥāq II in ‘the twinkling of an eye’, and calls out Isḥāq II for the unjust execution of his pious brother Yimba.Footnote 23 It is inconceivable that bin al-Ŝayḫ did not know the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān's account of the two rulers and the Battle of Tondibi. As Hall shows, the Kitāb al-turjumān is scholarly in its extensive and critical use of historical references.Footnote 24 Bin al Ŝayḫ would have read Timbuktu's older local histories as he relied on them. Why was it necessary for him to distort the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān on the three points? His account of the invasion could have sufficed; why did he bring the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān into his account? The answer lays in the status of the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān. It has significance for the motive of the Kitāb al-turjumān in relation to the Moroccan invasion.
By the time bin al-Ŝayḫ was writing in the 1950s, Western scholars had been working on Timbuktu's seventeenth-century chronicles for over a half a century. Furthermore, they had come to regard the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān as the doyen of local sources on the Songhay Empire, its rulers and internal workings, and the Moroccan invasion.Footnote 25 Bin al-Ŝayḫ was aware of this. He could not simply ignore the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān because its account of the invasion and its protagonists stands in contrast to that of the Kitāb al-turjumān. To put it differently, the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān's account of the Moroccan invasion was problematic for bin al-Ŝayḫ's motive in writing the Kitāb al-turjumān. How so, especially since the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān — or the Tārīḫ ibn al-Muḫtār — does not condemn the invasion? In fact, as mentioned above, the author evokes God's mercy for al-Ḏahabī.
It was the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān's lack of explicitness that troubled bin al-Ŝayḫ and posed a challenge to his motive. Evoking God's mercy for al-Ḏahabī was not explicit in the text's designation of him as a just ruler. Reference to Isḥāq II's execution of his pious brother was not an unequivocal designation of him as corrupt — elsewhere it described Isḥāq II as generous in nature and copiously charitable. In other words, the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān did not legitimate the invasion; it did not confer it with religious sanction.Footnote 26 For bin al-Ŝayḫ, the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān's ‘failure’ to explicitly describe al-Ḏahabī as righteous and Isḥāq II as cantankerous was tantamount to dismissing al-Ḏahabī as a just ruler and disputing Isḥāq II as a belligerent rebel who had to be reined in. But more importantly it cast aspersions, albeit implicitly, on the Saʿdian invasion of Songhay, thereby delegitimizing the conquest.
This distortion of the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān aimed to expose it as an unreliable historical source for the Moroccan invasion. Interestingly, bin al-Ŝayḫ cites the Tārīḫ ibn al-Muḫtār's mention of abominable acts, sexual debauchery, and Isḥāq II's failure to continue the just rule of his predecessors to support his own criticism of the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān. Indeed the Tārīḫ ibn al-Muḫtār does give this account of Songhay during the reign of Isḥāq II.Footnote 27 But so does the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān.Footnote 28 However, the Tārīḫ ibn al-Muḫtār equally notes Isḥāq II's generosity, tolerance, kindness, love for and kind treatment of scholars, and indifference to wealth.Footnote 29 With this selective reading of the Tārīḫ ibn al-Muḫtār, bin al-Ŝayḫ too distorts it. After all, if the most authoritative of the Timbuktu chronicles, the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān, factually errs on major events, then all other local sources become questionable.
Both chronicles concur that Isḥāq II offered Morocco 100,000 miṯqāl of gold and 1,000 slaves in return for the withdrawal of the Moroccan army to Marrakesh and the return of the land to the askiya, and that al-Ḏahabī flew into a rage, dismissed Jawdar on the spot, and replaced him with Pasha Maḥmūd bin Zarqūn who had strict orders to drive Isḥāq II out of the Sūdān.Footnote 30 However, the Kitāb al-turjumān alone has al-Ḏahabī saying, ‘It is not wealth that I pursue, but I want God's word to be supreme and to kill [whomever] spreads corruption in the land and acts arrogantly in it’.Footnote 31
The discrepancy is one of a mundane language versus a religious one. The Tārīḫ al-Sūdān's mundane account of al-Ḏahabī's response shows military logic at work. Jawdar's acceptance of Isḥāq II's peace offer enabled the Songhay army to regroup; he declined to push for the total defeat of the Songhay army. This is in keeping with the objective of taking control of the salt mines to fund the Saʿdian state's numerous military campaigns. In stark contrast stands the Kitāb al-turjumān's religious language, by which the invasion was a jihad for God, intended to purify the land of corruption and injustice. Al-Ḏahabī demanded that the salt mines under Songhay jurisdiction come under his control in order for him to protect Muslim Songhay against Christian infidels.Footnote 32 Al-Ḏahabī's ostensible deep concern for God's word is bin al-Ŝayḫ's invention of a pietism inflected with authoritarianism. If, to borrow from Michel Foucault, ‘we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power’, then the religious grammar of the Kitāb al-turjumān was not intended ‘so much to record the past . . . as . . . to speak of power's right’.Footnote 33 The religious language was intended to do the work of conferring religious sanction and legitimacy upon al-Ḏahabī's decision to invade Songhay.
The Kitāb al-turjumān's citing of Timbuktu's earlier local histories should be understood in this light, as should its actual drawing on the Moroccan chronicle the Kitāb al-istiqṣā. The extent to which it draws, albeit selectively, on a chronicle written in the belly of the power that invaded Songhay three centuries after the event is instructive. This Moroccan chronicle's version of the invasion, conquest, and subsequent rule of Songhay fits what Moraes Farias calls ‘the barren accounts of Moroccan historians’.Footnote 34 Bin al-Ŝayḫ does, however, mention another local chronicle, the Ṣanjah al-wazzān fī waqāʾiʿ Arawān written by bin al-Ŝayḫ's paternal uncle Ṭālibna Sanbēr bin al-Wāfī Ṭālibna al-Arawānī (d. 1767).Footnote 35 He would have depended on it but for the fact that it got lost some time in the eighteenth century.
May God's mercy be on our paternal [great] uncle, al-Qāḍī Sanbēr son of al-Qāḍī Sīdī al-Wāfī. He compiled a work on the history of Arawān, its wars and events which he named Ṣanjah al-Wazzān fī waqāʾiʿ Arawān as [recorded] in many narrations and in the Fatḥ al-ŝukūr fī ḏikr ʿulamāʾ al-Takrūr. However, this work got lost among the books of the jurist Sīdī ʿ Umar the son of our paternal Uncle, Sīdī Bēr when his camel strayed from him. If only I found it, it would have sufficed me from having to collate these scattered unbound pages.Footnote 36
His redundant reference to the lost chronicle, however, was aimed at linking bin al-Ŝayḫ and his family to history writing, demonstrating that they were qualified to write the region's history. Unfortunately, we will never know the account and appraisal of the Moroccan invasion contained in bin al-Ŝayḫ's paternal uncle's lost chronicle. We saw above that bin al-Ŝayḫ referred to pages and older transmitted histories he found in the handwriting of local scholars. That suggests he depended on local sources; however, the fact that he provides no titles or names of authors is instructive.
Fig. 1: A page of the Kitāb al-turjumān entitled ‘French rule of this region and an elucidation of its great benefit that only the intelligent can grasp’. IHERI-ABT MS 762, 71. Reproduced by permission from the Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Rehcerches Islamiques Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou.
France is first mentioned in chapter 13 of the Kitāb al-turjumān under the heading ‘An account of the entry of the French, the rule of the land, and the scholars’ disagreement about them’. However, the detailed account of French rule is offered in a section of chapter 14 under the subtitle ‘French rule of this region and an elucidation of its great benefit that only the intelligent can grasp’. If the title already indicates ibn al-Ŝayḫ's lauding of the French invasion and rule of Niger Bend/Azawād, the description does so much more explicitly.
Know that prior to the arrival of the French this Sudanic region, the Azawād and surroundings were [plunged in a state of] rampant killing, severe oppression, plunder, continuous bloodshed, violation of God's laws. . . . The destitute oppressed, the owner deprived [of his] right, the sincere advisor [regarded] ominous, the poor treated as a criminal, the fair judge undermined, the wrongdoer let off the hook, the vizier capricious and the ruler a tyrant. Between a defeated oppressor and suffocating oppression there was no one to help or show mercy. Until God brought this French state and gave it power over the Tuareg and Ḥasānī states. It [France] suppressed the tyrant and restored the rights [of the wronged], constructed the land, entrenched in it every commendable imperative. It extinguished the flames of war, shone the light of truth [that was] absent, oriented every faction to the best of its abilities and nourished [suckled] all the tribes with both its breasts. In summary: the arrival of the French to this land and their rule of it are the greatest favour and most beneficial gain compared to the situation the people found themselves in before. This reality the scholars know but the ignoramuses are oblivious of. The benefits of this state cannot be enumerated: the first being that it has the capacity to [administer] justice and [institute] reform of mundane and religious matters. . . . A testimony to the fairness is that they appoint Muslims as magistrates to adjudicate among themselves in accordance with their Islamic law and those who do not have law among the majūs [non-Muslims] of the Sūdān. Their capacity to reform mundane [matters] is not hidden to the uneducated let alone the intelligent. This [in light of the fact that] the Muslim state in the Azawād and the Sūdān had become weak, its power broken, and incapable of carrying out reform of both the mundane and religious. . . . [R]outes were unusable and unsafe. God redressed our weakness through the French state. They secured the routes . . . and ensured order and stability. They brought the far near through railways and the amazing wireless, provided water by digging wells. . . . All this, God be praised, the French state did. Through their reform of the religious and mundane spheres, the French achieved the fruits of dominion and the superiority of their opinion [among all nations]. God has promised the sincere reformers that they will inherit the earth saying, ‘We have stated in the Zabūr [a pre-Qur'anic revealed text] after the reminder that my pious servants will inherit the earth.’ Praise be to God for granting possession [of our lands to] this French state first in [dispensing] justice to the servants [of God]. . . . We [the traditional] qāḍīs, all of the family of al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd, and the entire population of Arawān under our jurisdiction . . . are recipients of her [France's] love known for her victories, strength, abundant good, and mighty state.Footnote 37
The complete account is much longer.Footnote 38 However, this excerpt effectively captures the motive behind the writing of the Kitāb al-turjumān: lauding French colonial rule. Prior to the arrival of France, an absence of order on an existential scale characterized the southern Sahara and Sahel.
To be sure, the Kitāb al-turjumān is not alone in this gloomy description of the region and milieu. The eighteenth-century chronicle the Ḏikr al-wafayāt speaks of internecine warfare, food shortages, disease, and plunder that prevailed at the time of its composition. Disorder was pervasive and ubiquitous, and included assassinations of political and military elites, often grotesquely and by treachery, and the frequent and arbitrary removal of pashas from power, in one case after only three days.Footnote 39 In addition to the chronicles, we find for example a scholar in a one-page pamphlet welcoming the arrival of the French and praising the economic and political changes they apparently brought.Footnote 40 However, among the chronicles, the Kitāb al-turjumān is unique in its total condemnation of the local while advancing an unbridled praise for the French invader — as it did for al-Ḏahabī. The seventeenth-century chronicles distribute ‘praise’ and ‘blame’ to both the Saʿdian state and the last Askiya rulers of Songhay, the former for the social and political upheavals their invasion brought and the latter as moral culprits and catalysts for the invasion. However, as Moraes Farias shows, the chronicles were centred upon the task of making historical sense of the invasion in line with their political project, which was ‘aimed at reconciliation between three elites, aimed at a closer, less unequal political integration of the . . . Arma, the Askiyā lineages, and the urban patriciate of Timbuktu and Jenne’.Footnote 41
Unlike the seventeenth-century chroniclers who rehabilitate the Saʿdian invasion for the sake of a new era of concord between the Sahelian communities and the invaders, bin al-Ŝayḫ embraces it to the complete exclusion of the Songhay elite and everything local.Footnote 42 He then turns on the Arma, laying the deplorable state of affairs in the Sahel at their hands when, from 1617 onwards, they appointed and removed the pashas ruling Songhay. Their practice of appointing the ruling pasha was an appropriation and usurpation of the exclusive power of the just and pious Saʿdian sulṭān. In so doing the Arma abandoned a just and God-fearing leadership that guaranteed durable stable political authority and rule. This marked the demise of the state, leading to insecurity, lawlessness, and moral degeneration. Therefore, only a state could restore order and stability and — in the process — respect, benevolence, the rule of law, mercy, dignity, compassion, security, safety, growth, tribal relations, and religion in the Sahel. France was that state. Hence it was both a religious obligation and a social imperative — as well as being logical — for the inhabitants of the region to accept and embrace the French invasion, conquest, and rule of the Sahel. If the Tārīḫ al-Sūdān aimed at a closer, less unequal political integration of each of three elites to effect reconciliation, the Kitāb al-turjumān aimed at complete subordination of locals (both elites and commoners) to French colonial power.
To demonstrate the status and role of France, the Kitāb al-turjumān resorts to Qurʾānic verse and metaphor. For example, the verse ‘and we (God) have declared in the Psalms after the reminder that the earth will be inherited by God's righteous servants’ depicts France as a righteous servant of God and a fulfilment of His promise. Breastfeeding as a metaphor presents France as the mother who nourishes her children and the local populations of the Sahel as suckling infants who cannot survive without their mother. In drawing on Qurʾānic verse and metaphor the Kitāb al-turjumān is unique; Timbuktu's earlier and contemporary historical sources do not do the same.Footnote 43 France is presented as more than a state; it is a saviour. The language of the French invasion is unmistakably more religious than that of the Saʿdian invasion.
Bin al-Ŝayḫ's embrace and lauding of French colonial rule extends to other literary genres. In 1938, he composed a poem in praise of the French which he translated into French and sent to Colonel Bertrand, the commandant de cercle of Timbuktu:
The price of the hearts of free men is the good deed. Authority on the basis of the good deed is a known thing. The recognition of a good deed is equally a good deed. Recognizing good deeds is a habit of the virtuous. Here among the French there is a government which performs good deeds publicly and secretly, in justice and in policy, by mercy and kindness, with benevolence and respect. Her compassion and her benevolence have satisfied all Muslims in every country. Before her coming, our countries were in a state of anarchy and misery. Peace was something unknown and unimaginable there. [Rather, we knew] fighting and pillage, war and the abduction of women and children into captivity [as well as] the stealing of goods, the rape of our women, and sale of free men. Our lands were unproductive, and famine reigned. Education was devalued and scholars were despised. . . . God brought the French for the good of the fearful peoples; they arrived to get rid of injustice and polygamy.Footnote 44
However, bin al-Ŝayḫ was not simply a praise singer for the French. As Hall puts it, ‘it would be a mistake . . . to see Ould al-Shaykh as just a French puppet’.Footnote 45 True, the political discourse he advanced was parochial insofar as it agitated for keeping the Niger Bend region, or the region known as the Azawād, under white (bidan) control and refused incorporation into a future Black-dominated state. However, he sincerely believed that he agitated for the genuine aspirations of the bidan populations of the Sahel that would otherwise be neglected under a Black-dominated country.Footnote 46 As Hall says, ‘his project reflected the deep misgivings of Arab and Tuāreg elites about the changes threatened by decolonization. Ould al-Shaykh played an important role in articulating the problems faced by these elites.’Footnote 47
The Kitāb al-turjumān's enumeration of the benefits of French colonial rule is hyperbole.Footnote 48 Tribal strife, wars, disease, plundering, and the many other ills did not summarily come to an end, nor did the French repair or secure all routes, or build or fix schools, at least to the degree bin al-Ŝayḫ claims. To be sure, as a superior military force the French established order; however, they did so in line with their needs and interests. Their appointing of Muslim scholars and notables as judges to adjudicate their own disputes in line with Islamic law, which bin al-Ŝayḫ sees as evidence of their fairness, was in reality part of policy to keep Islamic activity under their watchful eye and control.Footnote 49 In his critique of how the French dealt with slavery in the Niger Bend, what he terms ‘defending slavery, the moral order of inequality c. 1893–1940’, Hall writes that
although slavery was officially abolished in Soudan in 1908, colonial authorities did little to encourage the liberation of slaves in the northern, desert-edge parts of the territory where colonial authority was most precarious. In these areas, the colonial administration developed policies designed to ensure that slaves remained subject to their masters. Faced with a League of Nations enquiry into the question of slavery in colonial territories in the 1930s, the French regime presented the investigators with a fiction of benevolent colonial emancipation policies that concealed their reliance on slavery as the basis of both the economic and political stability of French rule in the Niger Bend and other Sahelian territories.Footnote 50
Moreover, bin al-Ŝayḫ was oblivious to or knowingly denied the order and relative stability the region experienced under the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (1818–62). For example, the letters of Ghadames slaves in the late nineteenth-century Niger Bend open a window on relatively autonomous and high-status slaves living in the circum-Saharan world.Footnote 51 According to Hall, ‘the extension of the authority of the jihadist state of Hamdullahi as far as Timbuktu in the 1820s resulted in a period of some prosperity for the western parts of the Niger Bend’.Footnote 52 Elias Saad argues that during the reign of the Ḥamdallāhi Caliphate
the commerce of Timbuktu became a major beneficiary. At a later time, it was even claimed that the city attracted many merchants and settlers that it was restored to its previous size under Songhay. This does not seem true, but a measure of growth is certainly evidenced by Barth's observations concerning the extensiveness of storage buildings at Kabara.Footnote 53
In fact, the starvation that afflicted Timbuktu in 1844 was the result of an economic blockade Ḥamdallāhi imposed on the city after failing to maintain control of it.Footnote 54 The above is not meant to refute bin al-Ŝayḫ's narrative, but to offer a nuanced picture as opposed to the black-and-white picture he presents in the Kitāb al-turjumān. Ironically, the gloomy picture the Kitāb al-turjumān sketches of the Sahel prior to and at the time of the arrival of the French contradicts and even negates bin al-Ŝayḫ's description of his family as paragons of virtue and custodians of knowledge and order in Arawān. On that ironic note, we come to the second leitmotif of the Kitāb al-turjumān, al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd, progenitor and patriarch of the Ādd clan.
The clan of Aḥmad bin Ādd
We hail from the lineage of al-Ḥasan bin ᶜAlī; our [Arab] ancestors came to West Africa with the Islamic conquests [of the region] during the second and third centuries [hijrī]. Our clan was called the Ahl al-Sūq. When the Tuāreg mulaṯṯimūn gained power in the region, political rule passed to them; however, religious authority in terms of the issuing of legal opinions, judicial decrees, and education remained in our hands to this day, not through inheritance as only those who are qualified [assume that duty]. Our ancestors regarded marriage of [our male] scholars and judges to the daughters of the Tuāreg royal house [as] an imperative to unify authority. Thus, our mothers hailed from the Tuāreg so much so that we ourselves became an integral part of the Tuāreg.Footnote 55
In this 1955 interview with Radio Tunisia, bin al-Ŝayḫ emphasized his family's Arab origins from the paternal side and descent from the lineage of Prophet Muḥammad, underscoring their status as ŝurafā. Marriage into the ruling Tuāreg house showed the family's ‘royal’ Tuāreg pedigree, hence its political status. In short, by highlighting his family's Arab-Tuāreg genealogy, bin al-Ŝayḫ communicated their elite genealogical-political-religious status. What bin al-Ŝayḫ said in the interview about his family permeates the Kitāb al-turjumān, echoing his motive for writing a history of the Sahel.Footnote 56 In fact, so pivotal is the family lineage to the historiographical aim of the Kitāb al-turjumān that it appears on the opening page of the chronicle, just after the title and even before the conventional praising of God and salutation of the Prophet. The lineage begins with Aḥmad bin Ādd (d. 1634 CE), the progenitor and patriarch of the family and the spiritual, intellectual, and political founder of the town of Arawān. Aḥmad bin Ādd was born in the Saharan town of Sūq sometime during the second half of the sixteenth century. He left Sūq on a spiritual sojourn to the Sūdān, becoming a holyman. The Kitāb al-turjumān states that his father and grandfather had likewise undertaken the spiritual sojourn to the Sūdān a few years earlier, while Aḥmad was still very young.Footnote 57 He finally settled in the town of Arawān, some 220 km north of Timbuktu. In Arawān, he married the daughter of the Maghsharan Tuāreg chief. The marriage solidified his status as the religious-intellectual authority of the town. Aḥmad bin Ādd's spiritual sojourn marks his otherworldliness, while his marriage to the daughter of the Tuāreg chief reflects temporal power. However, in line with what motivated bin al-Ŝayḫ to write the Kitāb al-turjumān, it was not sufficient for al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd to be merely a saint. He had to be the unrivalled saint of the Sūdān. The Kitāb al-turjumān seeks to establish this status.
Fig. 2: A page of the Kitāb al-turjumān entitled ‘The account of Jawdar's departure from Marrakech and his encounter with al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd, his experience with Askiya Isḥāq, and related matters’. IHERI-ABT MS 762, 9. Reproduced by permission from the Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Rehcerches Islamiques Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou.
Encounter with Jawdar
It has been related that he [Sulṭān Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī] entrusted Jawdar that when he meets the pious walī [saint], al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd on entering [Songhay], he consults with him [regarding the invasion] for he is the unrivalled walī of the region. It has been narrated that he [al-Ḏahabī] wrote a note to him in this vein, which we narrated on the authority of righteous scholars virtuous and pious. The reason [that] Sulṭān Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī wrote to al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd is that he heard much about al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd worshipping in the open deserts, as he heard of other scholars and saints, [and since] he intended to invade the land [of Songhay] wherein he [al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd] lived. He [Sulṭān Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī] took pieces of raw meat and wrote the name of a saint of the famous saints of the Sūdān he knew among them al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd. He then threw the pieces into the fire. The fire consumed all the pieces except the piece with the name of al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd on it. The fire did not consume [the piece of meat with al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd on it]. It remained in the fire in its [original] form. . . . So, the Sulṭān [al-Ḏahabī] said, ‘Indeed this [al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd] is the greatest [saint] in the Sūdān. He instructed Jawdar not to enter [Songhay] except with his [al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd's] permission and wrote [a note/letter to him [al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd].Footnote 58
The narrative of the fire not consuming the piece of meat with Aḥmad bin Ādd's name on it while consuming the pieces with the names of other saints of the Sūdān affirms him as the Sūdān's unrivalled saint. But more importantly it invests and confers Aḥmad bin Ādd with a type of power that political temporal power had to consider. He has the Moroccan sulṭān provide Jawdar with a letter to present to Aḥmad bin Ādd. The letter seeks Aḥmad bin Ādd's approval for the invasion; Jawdar had to consult the saint first, before proceeding. This linking of temporal power to spiritual power, the sultān to the walī, is a legitimation of the invasion to which Aḥmad bin Ādd, the unrivalled saint of the Sūdān, was pivotal. The Saʿdian invasion of Songhay hinged on his approval. However, bin al-Ŝayḫ lets this symbiosis between the spiritual-cum-religious and the temporal play out in most intriguing and dramatic fashion.
When Jawdar meets Aḥmad bin Ādd, he mistakes him and his two companions as spies for Isḥāq II and therefore imprisons them in heavy chains.Footnote 59 However, Aḥmad bin Ādd miraculously frees himself from the chains to do the ritual ablution (al-wuḍūʾ) at the time of prayers. With this act, it dawns upon Jawdar that the man in front of him is the saint whom al-Ḏahabī instructed him to consult. Jawdar falls in front of Aḥmad bin Ādd, kisses his head and hands, and begs for forgiveness for imprisoning the Ŝayḫ and his companion. He hands over the letter to Aḥmad bin Ādd, who immediately blesses the invasion but instructs Jawdar not to touch the town of Arawān. The miracle was performance, an embodiment of the saint's power.
Jawdar's forgetting of al-Ḏahabī's instruction about al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd further brings out the motive of the Kitāb al-turjumān. Had Jawdar recognized Aḥmad bin Ādd from the outset, he would not have imprisoned him, which in turn would have precluded the performance of the miracle. As supernatural performances, the meat incident and the freeing from the chains are active and passive displays of Aḥmad bin Ādd's spiritual status and power. In the case of the French, the written word — Qurʾānic verses and poetry — replaced the performance of miracles. Beyond legitimizing the Moroccan invasion, the Kitāb al-turjumān's construction of Aḥmad bin Ādd's spiritual station also invests his offspring with status and authority. Hence religious, intellectual, judicial, and political authority runs in the Ādd family and offspring from Aḥmad bin Ādd's arrival at the end of the sixteenth century to bin al-Ŝayḫ's day at the end of the 1950s.
The picture that the Kitāb al-turjumān presents of Aḥmad bin Ādd and his offspring including the encounter with Jawdar Pasha are not found in any of Timbuktu's large chronicles. The Nayl al-ibtihāj, the biographical dictionary of the famed sixteenth-century Timbuktu scholar Aḥmad Bābā al-Sūdānī, has no entry on Aḥmad bin Ādd, whether as a holyman and scholar or as an ordinary individual.Footnote 60 Yet the two men were contemporaries — Aḥmad Bābā died in 1627 while Aḥmad bin Ādd died in 1634. However, two twentieth-century Timbuktu biographical dictionaries, the Al-Saʿādah al-abadīyyah and the Izālah al-rayb, list him as a scholar and spiritual luminary.Footnote 61 Two relatively unknown twentieth-century histories — one written by a great grandson of al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd, the other related by a great grandson do offer an account of al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad and his sons — related the second.Footnote 62
Arawān and the creation and legacy of the Ādd clan
Al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd remained on his spiritual sojourn until the army of Māwlāy Aḥmad al-Ḏahabī liberated the Sūdān. . . . [H]e intended to decide on a space to live and worship. So, he returned to Arawān and settled there. At the time Arawān was surrounded by many people living in tents and straw homes in the deserts. He then built a mosque and a home for him and Ṣāliḥ bin Abī Muḥammad and married a woman from the Maghsharan. . . . [The place then] became famous as a place of worship, devotion, reform, knowledge, and spiritual-cum-political authority. Anyone from among the Maghsharan and others who had the ability built a house [in Arawān did so]. Aḥmad bin Ādd's settling in Arawān was at the beginning of the eleventh century [hijrī/end of the sixteenth century CE]. Everyone from among the Maghsharan and the like who heard that he settled there resolved to visit [Arawān] and settle there. After only four years, Arawān had a large palace and [was] completely built.Footnote 63 In a short period people flocked [to Arawān] for commerce until its fame spread far and wide. When Jawdar came to know of all this in the year 1007 hijrī/1598 CE, he sent the Commander ʿAbd al-Mālik to Arawān to collect [the tax of] a tenth from the traders accompanied by a number of Arma [soldiers].Footnote 64
The town of Arawān features prominently throughout the Kitāb al-turjumān. Chapter 1 provides an account of its founding by the Maghsharan Tuāreg in the eleventh century CE when they encamped there during the rainy season, erecting tents, and straw houses in the desert, thus not settling. However, chapter 6, ‘The end of Aḥmad bin Ādd's spiritual sojourn and his settling in Arawān’, ascribes Arawān's actual, albeit second founding to the arrival and settling of Aḥmad bin Ādd there at the end of the sixteenth century CE. The town owns its spiritual existence, political order, economic activity, and knowledge tradition to that man of barakah (God's grace) and clairvoyance. After bin Ādd's demise, the spiritual, political, and economic leadership of Arawān — and religious and intellectual authority over its residents — passed to his offspring. For the next 300 years, iftā and qaḍā in Arawān — that is, the issuing of juristic legal opinion and binding legal rulings — were in their hands. This religious and intellectual influence that extends after al-Ŝayḫ Aḥmad bin Ādd to his offspring speaks to family as a leitmotif of the Kitāb al-turjumān. If Timbuktu, as presented by the seventeenth-century tārīḫs, is the creation of numerous scholars, families, and traders who came from all over West and North Africa, Arawān in contrast is the creation and legacy of one man and his descendants. On this basis, bin al-Ŝayḫ can write that the departure of the Ādd family from Arawān in the twentieth century marks the town's economic and intellectual retrogression and therefore its social demise, as its population declined and the Azalaï salt caravans became its only visitors.
However, the abovementioned Tārīḫ Arawān wa Tawdannī disputes written by bin al-Ŝayḫ's contemporary, Abū al-Ḫayr bin ʿAbd-Allah disputes the gloomy picture the Kitāb al-turjumān offers of Arawān with the departure of the Ādd family.Footnote 65 It speaks of bustling activity, the proliferation of building, and traders from Ghadames, Tuwāt, and elsewhere who brought great varieties of cloth, clothing, and abundant fruit to Arawān, selling, buying, and profiting handsomely. In other words, Arawān was not beholden to the Ādd clan.Footnote 66 The Tārīḫ al-Sūdān mentions Arawān twice in passing, namely as the abode of the Maghsharan Tuāreg during the rainy season and in reference to the Moroccan army's march east of it.Footnote 67
Most learned scholar
As for knowledge, its people have withered away in this region especially in Timbuktu where scholars have become extinct, the last one being the erudite jurist al-Suyūṭī. . . . Since his death not one scholar worth mentioning remains in Timbuktu; yes, from what I saw resembling [scholars] there is among them one scholar, namely Al-Muṣṭafā Konate, the son of the great scholar Alfā Muḥammad Konate. However, he is afflicted with [mental] conditions. . . . Following him in status is al-Muṣṭafā bin Bābā Ŝarfī. . . . Among [the rest] are two intelligent, pious youths with proper comprehension and capacity for law, language, and syntax. Both are our students. [The first] Sīdī Yaḥyā bin al-Imām Bānī hails from a family of scholars [and] studied under my tutelage the jurisprudence of al-Imām Mālik . . . and other texts, but did not complete [his studies]. . . . The second youth [is] the intelligent and mature, erudite jurist San Moi, the son of Alfā Saʿīd, the amīr of Timbuktu at the time the French entered Timbuktu, . . . who when he heard of me after my coming to [settle in] Timbuktu studied under me and does not want to part from me, completing under my tutelage a comprehensive and meticulous reading of the Muḫtaṣar Ḫalīl. . . . [H]e is more deserving of the title faqīh (jurist) then [the so called] jurists I saw who do not know their wrist joint (kūʿ) from their ankle joint (būʿ). . . . He read to me al-Manhaj al-muntaḫab fī qawāʿid al-maḏhab but did not complete [the study of] these books. . . . [Thus, the demise of knowledge in] Timbuktu, which once had uncountable scholars and used to be of the largest precincts of knowledge, a locus of writing and comprehension. To God we belong and to him is our return.Footnote 68
The leitmotifs of Aḥmad bin Ādd and bin al-Ŝayḫ's lineage and the of town of Arawān find their completion in bin al-Ŝayḫ himself as a figure in the Kitāb al-turjumān. In this, the Kitāb al-turjumān is unique among Timbuktu's tārīḫs and biographical dictionaries. The authors of the latter do not figure in their own works. The role bin al-Ŝayḫ allots himself in his chronicle is that of the most learned scholar of Timbuktu and the region. From the citation above, his desire and quest (and later his claim) to be the most learned scholar is apparent. In this vein, he asserts that scholars became extinct in Timbuktu after 1945, following the death and mental affliction of the last two scholars.
But his description of his contemporaries among the jurists in Timbuktu is obvious in its will to insult. The Arabic proverb of one not knowing the wrist joint from the ankle joint denotes sheer stupidity. The remainder of the scholars of bin al-Ŝayḫ's day do not even come close to the value of the two students under his tutelage, he claims. However, with his coming to Timbuktu, knowledge and learning were given a lifeline, the potential of restoring Timbuktu to its former glory as a centre of knowledge. But nothing is certain even with these two students since they have not completed their reading of legal and other texts. Hence, he concludes with the Qurʾānic phrase ‘Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn’ to announce the death of scholarship. Thus, with bin al-Ŝayḫ's attribution of the most learned scholar status to himself, his historiographical motive is served. The Kitāb al-turjumān — and his other religious writings — becomes an authoritative source of the region's history.
However, the presence according to local sources of many acclaimed scholars belies bin al-Ŝayḫ's claim of the ‘death’ of scholarship in Timbuktu. There are too many scholars to mention, but one could take as an example Abū al-Ḫayr bin al-Ḥill of Arawān. The twentieth-century biographical dictionary the Al-Saʿādah al-abadīyyah describes him as the unrivalled scholar of Takrūr, its chief jurist, teacher, and mufti, unmatched by any covetous competitor.Footnote 69 A fatwā refers to him as the remaining representative of the pious predecessors of jurists and as the authority for the jurists and people of his day, an epithet given only to scholars of the highest calibre in knowledge as well as piety.Footnote 70 Bin al-Ŝayḫ was well aware of Abū al-Ḫayr's status. He therefore patronizingly describes him as a student whom God has tried with a penchant for adjudicating disputes in Arawān; the inhabitants of Arawān came to him, but only after bin al-Ŝayḫ and his family left the town.Footnote 71
A colonial administrator in Timbuktu judged bin al-Ŝayḫ to be a potentially dangerous man who ‘delights in intrigue, chicanery, and obstruction [procédure], very sure of his knowledge, which he deems far superior to that of the other cadis or notables . . . [He is] very ambitious, wishing to play the role of cadi general or mufti of Timbuktu.’Footnote 72 In official correspondence and interviews, he referred to himself as ‘Cadi of Timbuktu’, which was wrong as he was the qāḍī of only the Ahl Arawān in Timbuktu. Interestingly, in the Kitāb al-turjumān he never refers to himself as qāḍī, still less as ‘the Qāḍī of Timbuktu’. It will come thus as no surprise that bin al-Ŝayḫ had many enemies, indeed as another colonial record confirms.Footnote 73 Muhammad ʿAlī Ag Attaher, chief of the Kel Entsar, accused him of being in cahoots with French officials in the Niger Bend to ruin his name.Footnote 74 Many thought of him as controversial, quick tempered, and sometimes cantankerous. However, it is very plausible that bin al-Ŝayḫ's enemies exaggerated his misdemeanours and even invented some.Footnote 75
Conclusion
The departure of France from the Soudan Français, marking the transition from colonial rule to postcolonial realities, had important implications for the Sahel. The Kitāb al-turjumān was written at the cusp of this development. Put differently, the French departure is sufficient to explain why and how bin al-Ŝayḫ wrote a history of the Sahel. But the Kitāb al-turjumān also enables the rethinking of the place of the Timbuktu's tārīḫ tradition in the intellectual history of West Africa beyond the seventeenth-century tārīḫs. It offers insights into local Africans’ dialectical reception of and engagement with French colonialism, and of Western modernity more generally. It is an invaluable addition to what has become known as the Islamic library of Africa alongside bin al-Ŝayḫ's many other writings straddling the colonial library.Footnote 76
Moraes Farias sees the whole of the Timbuktu tārīḫ tradition as inseparable from the pursuits of political projects. Like the seventeenth-century tārīḫs, later texts had ephemeral success but ultimately failed to meet their political objectives. Moraes Farias had initially argued that Timbuktu's seventeenth-century tārīḫs had no literary posterity. Their sudden birth as a genre was followed by the equally sudden demise of the whole tārīḫ tradition.Footnote 77 However, Moraes Farias put forward a modified argument in 2018.Footnote 78 A careful reading of all Timbuktu post-seventeenth-century tārīḫs shows the absence of a unified tārīḫ genre covering the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The post-seventeenth-century tārīḫs do not share common political aims or generic properties with the seventeenth-century tārīḫs, which aimed at reconciling three social elites characteristic of a very particular historical period, and which pursued this aim by means of particular literary devices appropriate to that specific historical and cultural context. There are simply no tārīḫs written after the seventeenth century that can be said to belong to the same genre as those of the earlier period. The Kitāb al-turjumān is further distinguished as representative of a distinct genre by what Moraes Farias calls the ‘local inherited knowledge’ that features within it. In addition to its selective drawing on Timbuktu's seventeenth-century tārīḫs, the Kitāb al-turjumān does not draw on other local written sources (e.g. the Taḏkirah al-nisyān) or oral sources (Tuāreg folklore, Songhay oracy, etc.) as the seventeenth-century tārīḫs did. The result is that they do not share common political properties. If the seventeenth-century tārīḫs aimed at political reconciliation, the Kitāb al-turjumān aimed at political exclusivism. Yet in their different genres all Timbuktu tārīḫs engage in the pursuit of political projects. As Shamil Jeppie wrote, ‘What must be stressed is not the banal point that Africa had a history before colonialism, but that there were styles of historical writing and practices to ensure its continuity before colonial modernity introduced its modalities of knowledge, historical and otherwise.’Footnote 79
On the role of family in Muslim historiography, the Kitāb al-turjumān echoes Mamlūk-era chronicles. Yossef Rapoport shows that many Mamlūk-era chronicles ‘can be read like memoirs in which historians talk about their families’ and demonstrate an autobiographical bent devoted to the self-representation of the author.Footnote 80 If, to draw on Rosenthal, the Kitāb al-turjumān is a local Muslim history expressing a deeply felt desire for a place in the global ummah while simultaneously expressing a specifically local identity, it further centres the family within the local.Footnote 81 Aḥmad bin Ādd, the Ādd clan, and finally the place of bin al-Ŝayḫ in the Kitāb al-turjumān qualifies bin al-Ŝayḫ to fit the Indian historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar's (d. 1958) description of historians who ‘mainly produced histories that pandered to regional, religious, family, or caste pride [and who] . . . tried to prove the veracity of legends with the help of documents’.Footnote 82 The Kitāb al-turjumān was not so much a history of the southern Sahara and the Sahel as it was an attempt by bin al-Ŝayḫ to write history in line with the aspirations of the bidan of the Niger Bend.Footnote 83 The Kitāb al-turjumān shows that history, to draw on Marc Bloch, is ‘the science of men in time’, and bin al-Ŝayḫ exploited the climate of the time for his political motives.Footnote 84 Finally, we may begin to wonder whether the Kitāb al-turjumān belongs to what Partha Chatterjee calls ‘the Early Modern’ as a category of transition. Chatterjee identifies the Early Modern with elements of thought or practice, ‘as innovations that . . . represent novel ways of comprehending or coping with the unfamiliar . . . aris[ing] within different social strata — among elite groups or the literati’; Subaltern Studies calls it ‘nationalist mythmaking’.Footnote 85 The political and intellectual history the Kitāb al-turjumān offers of the Sahel and the Azawād reflects to an extent Van Ess's notion of Islamic ideologies.Footnote 86 However, Moraes Farias's reading of Timbuktu's seventeenth-century historiography shows that Van Ess's Islamic ideologies are not sufficient to appreciate the close relationship between Muslim historiography and politics. What we can say with certainty is that bin al-Ŝayḫ practiced what al-Masʿūdī (d. 945 CE) calls the historian's craft with finesse. Like the woodcutter by night, he mixed the weighty with the trivial in the service of his political objectives.Footnote 87
