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The Scholars of the Sahel

From Timbuktu in the sixteenth century to Sokoto in the nineteenth, West African scholars wrote in Arabic, within the Islamic sciences, and later in Hausa and Fulfulde in Arabic script (ajami). Their manuscripts, as Souleymane Bachir Diagne puts it, are a written tradition that the twentieth-century debate over African philosophy was conducted “in total ignorance” of.

In Timbuktu, falsafa in the narrow sense “had almost disappeared from the curriculum”, in Diagne’s account, but philosophy as “an all-encompassing way of thinking which goes far beyond the disciplinary boundaries” lived on in theology, law, Sufism and logic. Logic stayed because it was “considered an instrument (organon) for all the other sciences”, and it was taught in verse, in al-Maghīlī’s and al-Akhḍarī’s poems, to be memorised. In Diagne’s account, Ahmad Baba (1556–1627), deported to Morocco after the Moroccan conquest of Songhay in 1591 and fourteen years a teacher in Marrakech, made the pursuit of wisdom the theme of his Tuhfat al-fuḍalāʾ, arguing for its superiority over all other ends, and put at its heart the saying that “the ink of the scholars is more precious than the blood of the martyrs”. For him, “knowledge is authentic and complete only when it is a way of life”, when the accomplished jurist is also the realised sage.

The Sokoto Caliphate was founded by ʿUthmān dan Fodio (c. 1754–1817). His brother ʿAbdullāh (c. 1766–1828) recorded how it was done: the shaykhs he studied with, and what he read with ʿUthmān, theology, syntax, “the knowledge of mysticism which belongs to the forming of good character in oneself and that which belongs to perfecting oneself in science”, law, exegesis and hadith. “Many a scholar and many a seeker after knowledge came to us from the East … from the West … Here I collect them for you in verse in order to make the memorizing of them easy” (tr. Hiskett). ʿUthmān held that knowledge has its time: “Every learned man judges according to the knowledge of his age. Conditions change with the times, and the cure changes with the disease” (tr. Palmer).

He turned the duty to teach towards those the scholars left out. “Most of our educated men leave their wives, their daughters, and their captives morally abandoned, like beasts, without teaching them what God prescribes … How can they thus shut up their wives, their daughters, and their captives, in the darkness of ignorance, while daily they impart knowledge to their students? … to instruct one’s wives, daughters, and captives is a positive duty, while to impart knowledge to students is only a work of supererogation” (Nūr al-albāb, in an English version made from French). His daughter Nana Asma’u (1793–1864), a poet, put it in Hausa verse: “Obtaining food and seeking after education are valid reasons for leaving your homes. The faith requires that you seek knowledge. Thus, when a woman leaves her home to seek knowledge, she violates no prohibition” (Waʿazi, 1856–57, tr. Boston University Ajami project).