90 Second Narratives
Season 7: “Community”
Episode 3: “An Islamic Community in Nineteenth-Century West Africa”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives. I’m your host, Sky Michael Johnston, and today’s storyteller is Dr. Mauro Nobili, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here is his story, “An Islamic Community in Nineteenth-Century West Africa.”
Mauro Nobili:
Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith explores the intertwined histories of a West African Arabic chronicle, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and its role in advancing a political project, the legitimation of the nineteenth-century Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi, located in what is now the Republic of Mali.
The Tārīkh al-fattāsh has been widely understood by scholars to be a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century work that was subjected to later textual manipulation. My book demonstrates that the Tārīkh al-fattāsh is in fact a fully-fledged nineteenth-century work written by substantially rewriting an earlier local chronicle.
I prove that the Tārīkh al-fattāsh was written to enhance the legitimacy of the founding ruler of the caliphate of Hamdallahi, Aḥmad Lobbo, who raised to the power without belonging to any elite of the time, after what can be defined a coup d’etat.
Aḥmad Lobbo is portrayed in the chronicle as sultan, the authoritative ruler of West Africa and the last of a long line of legitimate rulers that dates back to the first millennium; as the twelfth of the caliphs under whom the Islamic community would thrive, according to a ḥadīth ascribed to the Prophet; and as the “renewer” of Islam, who, according to another Prophetic tradition, is cyclically sent by God to prevent the Muslim community going astray.
In doing so Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith clarifies the history of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh that has caused scholars to spill much ink for more than a century, and provide the first study of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi in English language.
Sky Michael Johnston:
To learn much more about Dr. Nobili’s pathbreaking research, see his book, Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa. It was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press.
Thank you for listening today. Season 7 continues next week with the theme “Community,” please join me then for another “little story with BIG historical significance.”