Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti was a Sudanese Maliki jurist and biographer from the Aqit family of Timbuktu. After the Moroccan conquest of the Sudan he was exiled to Marrakesh, and he is known for his supplement to the biographical dictionary of the Maliki scholars.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), article signed E. Lévi-Provençal, describes Ahmad Baba as a Sudanese jurist and biographer of the Sinhaja family of the Aqit, born at Timbuktu on 21 Dhu'l-Hijja 963/26 October 1556. His ancestors in the male line had been imams or qadis at Timbuktu in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. ¹

When the Sa'di sultan Ahmad al-Mansur conquered the Sudan in 1000/1592, Ahmad Baba refused to recognise the court of Marrakesh. Two years later the governor Mahmud Zarkun arrested him on the sultan's orders, accusing him of fomenting revolt at Timbuktu. He was taken in chains to Morocco with other Sudanese, freed not long after, but required to live in Marrakesh from 1004/1596. There he taught fiqh and hadith and gave legal opinions, and his renown spread through the Maghrib. After al-Mansur's death in 1016/1607 his successor Mawlay Zaydan allowed him and the other exiles to return. He made the pilgrimage and went home to Timbuktu, where he died on 6 Sha'ban 1036. ¹

He wrote some fifty works on Maliki law, grammar and other subjects. His chief work is a supplement to Ibn Farhun's biographical dictionary of the Maliki jurists, al-Dibaj al-mudhahhab, which he completed at Marrakesh in 1005/1596 under the title Nayl al-ibtihaj bi-tatriz al-dibaj. He later made an abridgement, Kifayat al-muhtaj, covering the Maliki jurists not in Ibn Farhun. Nayl was lithographed at Fez in 1317 and printed at Cairo in 1329. His dictionary is one of the chief sources for a bio-bibliographical survey of the Maghrib up to the sixteenth century, and it also records the great Moroccan saints. His library in the Sudan is still not entirely dispersed. ²