Mali Empire

The empire's founding is preserved not in a chronicle but in an epic, recited by griots of the Mande world and written down in the twentieth century from the performance of Mamadou Kouyate. In it Sunjata Keita, a boy who cannot walk until he pulls himself upright on an iron rod, returns from exile to defeat the sorcerer king Sumanguru Kante at Kirina, and the decisive weapon is not an army but knowledge: an arrow tipped with a white cockerel's spur, obtained by finding out the secret on which his enemy's invulnerability depends.

That is a religious world, and it is not the world of the mosque. It runs on nyama, the force in things and words that hunters, blacksmiths and griots handle professionally; on the sanctity of hunters' associations; on the oath that binds clans; and on the ancestors of the founding lineages. The Mande charter recited alongside the epic sets out obligations between clans and toward the land.

Islam and this older order did not replace one another. The kings were Muslim, took Muslim titles, built mosques and made pilgrimage, and continued to be surrounded by the ceremonial of Mande kingship, including practices Arab visitors found scandalous. The empire's religious life is best described as two systems held together in the same court, and the fact that both left durable records, one in Arabic manuscript and one in performance, is unusual for medieval West Africa.

In 1324 Mansa Musa crossed the Sahara on pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage and a quantity of gold that Egyptian writers were still discussing decades later; al-Umari, collecting accounts in Cairo, reports that the king's spending depressed the value of gold in the city for years. The journey put Mali on European maps, most famously the Catalan Atlas of 1375, which shows its ruler enthroned with a gold nugget in his hand.

Its religious consequences were institutional. Musa returned with scholars and an architect, and mosque building followed at Gao and at Timbuktu, where the Djinguereber mosque dates from this period. Timbuktu and Djenne became centres of Maliki law, Quranic commentary and Sufi teaching, and the manuscript libraries built there over the following centuries, many still in private family hands, are the largest surviving written record of West African intellectual life.

Ibn Battuta, who travelled through the empire in 1352 and 1353, gives the closest thing to an eyewitness portrait. He praises the security of the roads, the regularity of prayer, the crowding of the mosques on Fridays and the care with which children were made to memorise the Quran, and he records with disapproval the free social manner of Muslim women there and the court custom of subjects sprinkling dust on their heads before the ruler. His complaints are the clearest evidence of how the two religious orders coexisted.