A Legal Opinion on Who May Be Enslaved

Asked in 1615 for a ruling on the enslavement of black Africans, Ahmad Baba answered within the Maliki framework he had spent his life in, and the answer cut against the practice of the trade around him. The lawful ground for enslavement, he held, was unbelief and not descent or colour, so a free Muslim could not be enslaved whatever their origin, and a buyer who acquired someone from a Muslim people was buying a person wrongly taken. He listed peoples he understood to be Muslim, including the Fulani, the Songhay, the people of Kano and Katsina and Bornu, and set them outside the permitted category.

The text is usually called the Mi'raj al-Su'ud. Two things should be said about it plainly. It is not an abolitionist document: it accepts that enslavement of non-Muslims taken in lawful war is permitted, and it works entirely inside a legal system that assumes the institution. But it refuses the racial justification that the Saharan and later Atlantic trades increasingly relied on, and it does so from inside West Africa, by a man whose own city had just been sacked. Historians of slavery cite it constantly for that reason, and it is one of the sharper illustrations of what the Timbuktu legal tradition was actually doing.