Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

Timbuktu in the sixteenth century was a commercial city whose principal import and export was books. Manuscripts came across the Sahara from Cairo and Fez, were copied locally, and were held in private family libraries rather than in any public institution, which is why so many survived into the twentieth century in domestic custody. Teaching happened around the mosques of Sankore, Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya, with students attaching themselves to individual scholars rather than enrolling anywhere.

Ahmad Baba belonged to the Aqit family, one of the scholarly lineages at the centre of this, and the remark for which he is most often quoted is a complaint: that the Moroccans took 1,600 volumes from him, and that his was the smallest library of his relatives. Whatever the exact number, the claim gives a sense of scale that archaeology cannot.

The tradition did not end with the Saadian conquest. Families in Timbuktu and the surrounding region went on copying, collecting and inheriting manuscripts, and the state institute that carries his name was built in the twentieth century to gather and conserve what remained. When armed groups occupied the city in 2012 and 2013, the greater part of the collection was moved out by custodians and families, which is a continuation of exactly the private stewardship that preserved it in the first place.

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.