A New Source For the Biography of Aḥmad Bābā Al-Tinbuktī (1556–1627)

Abstract

The name of Aḥmad Bābā first became known to European scholarship through the articles of the French scholar M. A. Cherbonneau in the years 1854 and 1855. In 1857, when Heinrich Barth published his Travels and discoveries, Aḥmad Bābā achieved a spurious fame which lasted for over 40 years as the supposed author of the Ta'rīkh al-Sūdān. It was not until 1897 that the learned German's attribution was scornfully refuted by the French journalist Felix Dubois, in his Tombouctou la mystérieuse, and the work was correctly assigned to al-Sa'dī the Timbuctoo scholar who died in 1656. During the twentieth century the name of Aḥmad Bābā has frequently been mentioned by writers about the medieval Western Sudan, usually as the symbol of all that was finest in sub-Saharan Islamic learning in the Middle Ages.