ABSTRACT
Over four decades, Nehemia Levtzion had a great impact on the history of Islam, Africa in general, and West Africa in particular. He is probably best known for three works: his study of old Ghana and Mali (Levtzion 1973), a set of invaluable translations and annotations of Arabic documentation for the “medieval” period of West Africa (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981), and the ambitious History of Islam in Africa completed not long before his death (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000). But some of his finest work was done early in his career. In this article, I wish to look at two such publications, one set in the “Middle Belt” of contemporary Ghana, the other in the savannah of Mali: Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa: A Study of Islam in the Middle Volta Basin in the Pre-Colonial Period (1968), a revision of his dissertation; and “A Seventeenth-Century Chronicle by Ibn al-Mukhtar: A Critical Study of Ta’rikh al-Fattash” (1971c).
