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The Timbuktu Fatwa That Proved West African Slavery Was Illegal
In 1615, a slave named Adda Bari was brought to Timbuktu from Katsina, sparking a legal crisis. The city's top jurist, Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, wrote a landmark fatwa arguing that no free Muslim could be enslaved — and that most of the enslaved people in the region were fraudulently taken. This episode dives into the world of Timbuktu's scholarly legal system, where judges like al-Timbukti used Islamic law to challenge the trans-Saharan slave trade. We explore how his legal treatise, the Mi'raj al-Su'ud, drew on the Maliki school of jurisprudence and defined…
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