Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mali gathers three cities of the Inland Niger Delta and its neighboring desert edge that together made West Africa's Sahel a center of Islamic scholarship to rival any in the medieval world.

Gao on the Niger became capital of the Songhai Empire, West Africa's largest Sudanic state, after the ruler Kossoi converted to Islam around 1010 and made the hajj to Mecca, receiving symbols of authority from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad himself. Under the Songhai Askia dynasty from the late fifteenth century, Gao grew alongside Timbuktu and Djenne into one of the region's three great centers of Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence.

Timbuktu built its reputation on the Sankore, Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya mosques, which functioned as teaching institutions while scholarly families accumulated manuscript libraries on law, theology, astronomy and medicine. Its mud brick mosques, like Djenne's Great Mosque nearby, are replastered by the whole community each year in a labor intensive act of maintenance the town treats as religious as much as practical. Timbuktu's manuscripts and the tombs of its Sufi saints were attacked in 2012, by which time much of the collection had already been moved south for safekeeping.

Djenne's Great Mosque, first raised around the thirteenth century and rebuilt in its present form in 1907, is the largest mudbrick building in the world, and the annual replastering festival built around it, the Crepissage, is a civic occasion as much as a religious one. Alongside Timbuktu, Djenne was a major center of Quranic scholarship in the Mali and later Songhai empires, its old town inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.

Three cities, one shared technique of mud construction and one shared identity as scholarly capitals of Islamic West Africa.