Ahmad Baba al-Massufi

Ahmad Baba was the most celebrated scholar of Timbuktu, was deported to Morocco by the army that conquered his city, and wrote the treatise that argued against the enslavement of Muslims regardless of colour. He belonged to a Sanhaja Berber family of jurists and taught at the Sankore mosque, the centre of a scholarly economy in which books were among the most valuable goods on the caravan routes. When Judar Pasha's Moroccan force destroyed the Songhai empire in 1591, the new authorities treated the scholars as a threat: Ahmad Baba was arrested in 1593, his library confiscated, and he was taken in chains to Marrakesh. He said he had owned 1,600 volumes and that his was the smallest library in his family. He was held for two years and then permitted to teach, and Moroccan scholars queued for his lectures on Maliki law. His Mi'raj al-Su'ud answers a correspondent's questions about who may lawfully be enslaved, and its position is that the ground is unbelief and never ancestry or complexion, so that Muslims of any origin are protected and the trade in them is invalid - an argument made from within the system rather than against it, and considerably in advance of the practice around him. He was allowed home in 1607, refused to visit the sultan again, and died in Timbuktu. The modern research institute holding the city's manuscripts carries his name. The figure of 1,600 books is the most-quoted sentence in the history of West African scholarship, because it is the single clearest measure of what Timbuktu had before 1591 and what the conquest cost it. His argument on slavery was cited for centuries afterwards, in Africa and beyond it, by people on both sides of the trade, which is a fate that awaits any careful text about a profitable practice.

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