Latest / Timbuktu: Africa's Forgotten Center of Knowledge — Fexingo History / The Timbuktu Fatwa That Shocked the Islamic World
Transcript
- Lucas: So last time we talked about Ahmed Baba and that powerful fatwa against enslaving free Muslims. But what I didn't get into was how deeply controversial it was, even among his own peers — and how it set off a legal firestorm across the Sahel. Luna: A fatwa against slavery in the 1600s? That sounds radical even for today. Lucas: Exactly. And to understand why, we need to look at Baba's full argument, which he laid out in his book Mi'raj al-Su'ud, or 'The Ladder of Ascension.' He wasn't just issuing a one-off ruling — he built a systematic legal case. He started with the fundamental question: what makes someone a legitimate slave in Islamic law? Luna: And what did he conclude? Lucas: He argued that the only lawful source of slavery was capture in a just war, and that the vast majority of enslaved people in West Africa were not taken in such wars. They were kidnapped, or sold by corrupt rulers, or born into families that had been illegally enslaved generations before. And crucially, he argued that if someone converted to Islam after being enslaved, they could not be held as a slave — because the Prophet himself had said that a Muslim cannot enslave another Muslim. Luna: That would have upended the entire economy of the Songhai Empire. Lucas: It would have. And Baba knew it. The slave trade was a major source of revenue for the Askia dynasty, and many scholars in Timbuktu were complicit — they issued fatwas that conveniently justified the status quo. Baba called them out by name in his writings. He named judges in Takedda and Ghadames who were profiting from the trade, and he challenged them to defend their positions. Luna: He named names? That's bold. Lucas: Incredibly bold. One of his main targets was a scholar in Walata who had issued a fatwa saying that anyone from the 'lands of the blacks' could be enslaved because they were supposedly pagan. Baba dismantled that argument, point by point. He cited the Maliki school's own authorities — Ibn Abd al-Barr, al-Qurtubi — to show that skin color and ethnicity had nothing to do with legal status. Luna: So he was using the same legal tradition that his opponents claimed to follow, and turning it against them. Lucas: Precisely. And he went further. He used a concept called 'asl al-'abd' — the origin of slavery. In Maliki law, if you can't prove that a person was lawfully enslaved, the presumption is freedom. Baba argued that the burden of proof was on the enslaver, not the enslaved. That was a radical inversion of how the trade actually worked. Luna: So he was saying, 'You claim this person is a slave? Prove it.' Lucas: Exactly. And in practice, that was nearly impossible. Most enslaved people had been kidnapped or taken in raids that left no paper trail. Baba's ruling meant that if a merchant couldn't produce a written record of lawful capture, the person had to be freed. That was devastating to the trade. Luna: Did anyone actually follow his ruling? Lucas: Some did. We have records of slaves being freed in Timbuktu and Gao after Baba's fatwa was read aloud in the market. But the powerful merchants pushed back hard. They accused Baba of being a troublemaker, and eventually the Askia ruler — Dawud — had him arrested and exiled to the salt mines of Taghaza. Luna: Taghaza — that's the place where conditions were brutal. Lucas: Brutal. But even in exile, Baba continued to write. He sent letters to scholars in Fez and Cairo, explaining his position and asking for their support. Some of those letters survive today. And his arguments slowly gained traction. A generation later, scholars in Katsina and Bornu began citing his fatwa in their own rulings. Luna: So his influence spread beyond the Songhai Empire, even after his death? Lucas: It did. And what's remarkable is that Baba's work was largely forgotten by European historians until the late 20th century. The manuscripts were hidden away by families in Timbuktu, and only rediscovered in the 1970s and 80s. Since then, scholars have been revisiting his arguments and realizing how sophisticated they were. Luna: Are there any modern parallels? Did his fatwa influence later abolition movements? Lucas: There's evidence that Baba's writings were used by 19th-century West African reformers like Usman dan Fodio, who led a jihad to reform Islamic practice in the region. Dan Fodio explicitly cited Baba's arguments against enslaving Muslims. And in the early 20th century, French colonial administrators encountered Baba's legacy when they tried to codify Islamic law — and found that local judges were using his rulings to resist French attempts to regulate the slave trade. Luna: So Baba's fatwa was like a legal time bomb that kept going off for centuries. Lucas: Exactly. And it's a reminder that Timbuktu wasn't just a center of astronomy and medicine — it was also a place where scholars wrestled with the hardest moral questions of their time. Baba risked everything to challenge an unjust system, and his courage still resonates. Luna: It makes you wonder how many other voices like his are still hidden in those manuscript collections. Lucas: That's the thing — there are thousands of manuscripts yet to be catalogued. Every year, scholars discover new texts that change our understanding of West African intellectual history. Baba's fatwa is just one example of the kind of legal reasoning that flourished in Timbuktu. And it challenges the stereotype that precolonial Africa was a place of simple oral traditions. Luna: So the next time someone says Africa had no written law, we can point to Ahmed Baba. Lucas: Exactly. And not just him — there were dozens of jurists in Timbuktu, Djenné, and Gao who produced complex legal commentaries. Baba's work is the tip of the iceberg.