Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (1556-1627 CE / 963-1036 AH) was the best-remembered scholar of Timbuktu, then a center of learning in the Songhay realm of the Western Sudan (the Sahel). He came from the Aqit family of the Sanhaja Berbers; sources place his birth at Araouane, north of Timbuktu, after which he was raised and educated in Timbuktu itself. He studied with his father and, above all, with the Juula scholar Mohammed Baghayogho al-Wangari, whom he honored as his "renewer" (mujaddid). A jurist of the Maliki school (one of Sunni Islam's four legal traditions), he wrote more than forty works, including Nayl al-Ibtihaj, a biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars still used by historians.

In 1591 a Moroccan (Saadi) army conquered Timbuktu. Accused of sedition, Ahmad Baba was arrested and deported to Morocco around 1593-1594. Most accounts place his confinement at Marrakesh (some say Fez); after roughly two years his conditions eased and he was permitted to teach and issue legal opinions. Among these was a celebrated fatwa, Mi'raj al-Su'ud, arguing that enslavement should rest on religion, not skin color, and rejecting the idea that Black Africans were marked for slavery. After Sultan al-Mansur died in 1603, he was allowed to return home, reaching Timbuktu in 1608, where he taught and wrote until his death in 1627.