Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa

The subject of this book is broader—and more interdisciplinary—than its title suggests. For the precolonial era, Kane is largely concerned with intellectual history in the narrow sense of the written ideas of West African Muslim scholars in Timbuktu and elsewhere (especially the Western Sahara and Senegal), since such texts are the main evidence available for this period. However, even in this section, he provides considerable information about the economic base and market for such learning, its institutional form as well as, from the late seventeenth century onward, the involvement of some clerics in jihadist politics—that is, efforts to take over local states and make them conform to Islamic legal norms. Kane’s treatment of such topics as slavery and warfare is largely focused upon their discussion by Muslim scholars rather than what happened on the ground, but he is, after all, only claiming to write an intellectual history. This half of...