Calibrating the Scholarship of Timbuktu

Chapter 10 Calibrating the Scholarship of Timbuktu

Charles C. Stewart

One of the central arguments in Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias’ Medieval Inscriptions is that the ‘Timbuktu Ta’rikh genre’ of the 17th century was, indeed, original, i.e., not the end- product and summary of many centuries of historical writing that are yet to be uncovered.1 This is a conclusion that is interrogat- ed, confirmed and expanded in this volume by Mauro Nobili’s analysis of the Taʾrikh al-fattāš.2 Nobili describes the ‘Timbuktu taʾrīḫ genre’ as a ‘pragmatic political tool’ that would be resuscitated well into the 20th century in local writing in an effort to legitimate political status. Moraes Farias’ observation and Nobili’s elaboration invite us to look beyond the taʾrīḫ genre to the literary production, generally, in the Timbuktu area in comparison to the surrounding regions. This is a theme in Bruce Hall’s contribution to this volume which ques- tions the significance of Timbuktu scholarship, especially in the aftermath of the 17th-century collapse of that city as a center of learning. His plea is that Arabic manuscript3 libraries there should be assessed in the ‘intellectual and cultural context in which they were produced.’ Implicitly, this involves a comparison of the Timbuktu writings to other literary output in the region, a task, until recently, not easily done. This is now possible thanks to a recent compilation of writing that encompasses the whole of the Ḥassānīya-speaking world

* This chapter also appears in French translation as “Évaluer le Niveau de la Culture Savante à Tombouctou” in « Évaluer le niveau de la culture savante à Tombouctou », Islam et sociétés au sud du Sahara, nouvelle série, vol. 5, 2018 : 57–77. 1 Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-Tuareg History. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), lxxi. 2 Mauro Nobili, in Chapter 9 in this volume “New Reinventions of the Sahel: Reflections on the Tārikh Genre in the Timbuktu Historiographical Production, Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries” agrees that the ‘ta’rikh genre’ was not deeply rooted, but points to examples where it was revived in subsequent years and remained alive and well in local writing into contem- porary times. 3 The word ‘manuscript’ will be used here to refer to works in and about the Islamic scienc- es but not, generally, ‘documents’ consisting of letters, instructions, and polemics that are sometimes included in the statistics of the numbers of handwritten materials in libraries.

Calibrating the Scholarship of Timbuktu 221 in which Timbuktu occupied the southeast corner.4 What is revealed by such a comparison is that other scholarship we have long associated with Timbuktu, like the taʾrīḫ genre, also appears to have been rather less than has been as- sumed in the past; and that while the city was important in the period up to 1591, after that the dispersal of Timbuktu scholarship to other regions was in- strumental in spreading Islamic knowledge in the Sahel, much more so than was Timbuktu. This recalibration of the fabled scholarship of Timbuktu is also addressed in Bruce Hall’s contribution. In this essay two particular elements of the Tim- buktu legend will be taken up: (1) we will address its manuscript libraries by looking at the contents of libraries across the region, on the premise that their contents provide indices to the most widely-used texts and (by inference) most frequently-taught subjects, and (2) we will examine the literary production of the Timbuktu scholars in the two subject-areas which most preoccupied scholars in this region: Arabic grammar and derivative writing in matters of jurispru- dence (fiqh). These two subjects – grammar, as a simple measure of scholarly capacity to spread and reproduce knowledge, and writing in fiqh that focuses on a localization or indigenization of classical works – will be argued to be measures of the profundity and growth of an Islamic culture in a region on the fringe of the Islamic world. They are measures derived from a careful examina- tion of the evolution of the wider manuscript culture described in ala v. By these measures, we will see that both the libraries and the literary output in the Timbuktu region do not compare to what is found in the nomadic societ- ies north and west of the Niger Bend. My argument here is that, like the ‘Tim- buktu taʾrīḫ genre,’ the highly-vaunted reputation of Timbuktu as a center of Islamic learning may be misplaced. Timbuktu scholarship at its height in the 16th century appears to have been a controlled, elitist preserve of mainly two lineages that seem to have catered to external commercial interests more so than the expansion of a local Islamic culture. From the mid-17th century the record of Timbuktu scholarship falls silent until the 20th century when it re- appears, more focused then on antiquarian collections of manuscripts rather than Islamic learning. The true locus of the scholarship long identified with Timbuktu (and similar Saharan entrepots like Walata, Tishitt, Wadan, Arawan,

4 The Hassani dialect of Arabic is common in a triangle of territory, roughly demarcated by the Moroccan Sus in the northwest, the Niger Bend in the southeast, and the Atlantic coast at St. Louis. This is the region encompassed in the recently-published Charles C. Stewart with Sidi Ahmed Wuld Ahmed Salim, et al., Arabic Literature of Mauritania and the Western Sahara, the fifth volume in the Arabic Literature of Africa series, (Leiden: Brill, 2015) (hereafter ala v), a compilation of literary output across 350 years by 1875 authors of roughly 10,000 works.