Politics
c. 1443 to 1538, Songhai Empire (Gao, in present-day Mali)
The scholar-king who forged a Muslim administrative empire on the Niger - statecraft, learning, and the manufacture of legitimacy in Songhai.
Start learning Askia →How Askia Muhammad turned a conqueror’s war-machine into a governed state - dividing Songhai into provinces under appointed governors, raising a professional standing army and river fleet, standardizing weights, m…
How Askia made Islam the legitimating framework of the Songhai state - the 1496 pilgrimage to Mecca, his investiture in Cairo as the Caliph’s deputy over the land of the Blacks, and the building of a polity of jud…
The intellectual flowering under Askia - his patronage of the scholars of Timbuktu and Djenné, the teaching circles of Sankore, and a trans-Saharan trade in which manuscripts sold for more than almost any other g…
The Replies of the jurist al-Maghili to the questions Askia put to him - on who is a true Muslim, when war against a nominally Muslim ruler is lawful, and what a just sovereign owes his people - the closest surviving wi…
How the chronicles built Askia into the model of the just, pious reformer - and the honest gap between that image and the politics: a general who seized the throne by force in 1493, was idealized by the scholars he patr…
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