ABSTRACT
This essay examines the life of Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (15561627) and his efforts to end racial slavery and to persuade Maghribi scholars to accept the Islamic status of self-professed Muslims in West Africa. Towards this end, Ahmad Baba wrote a legal treatise that criticised the association of 'Black' Africans with slaves, especially through the racialised version of the curse of Ham. This treatise, entitled Mi'raj al-Su'ud, drew upon a century of jurisprudence produced in Timbuktu and set Islamic standards for enslavement that defined as illicit a substantial portion of the transSaharan slave trade as it then existed. However, the treatise also defined much of West Africa as non-Muslim or lightly Islamised, and thereby sanctioned the targeting of these peoples for enslavement. In a similar effort, Ahmad Baba also publicised the scholarly achievements of West African Muslims by compiling a huge biographical dictionary of scholars from West and Northwest Africa. This book, entitled Nayl al-Ibtihaj, could have substantiated the fact that many self-identified Black West Africans had been producing serious Muslim scholarship for at least a century, but it did not. On the contrary, Ahmad Baba included only one Black scholar in his biographical dictionary and instead featured nine scholars from his own 'Berber' patriline, including himself. The ironic characteristics of the Mi'raj al-Su'ud and Nayl al-Ibtihaj may best be explained by Ahmad Baba's own ambiguous status in Timbuktu and the broader society of Islamic West Africa – as a 'White' Berber living in the 'land of the Blacks'. The fact that his scholarship was ground-breaking, but not radical, facilitated its reception in the Maghrib while perhaps mitigating its practical effect on the slave trade and enslavement in that region as well as in West African trading towns such as Timbuktu.
