Ahmad Baba al-Massufi

Abu al-Abbas Ahmad Baba was born on the twenty-sixth of October 1556 at Araouane — some sources say Timbuktu itself — and raised in Timbuktu, a son of the Aqit family, Sanhaja Berber scholars of the Massufa who had served the city's learning for generations. He studied under his father and under the jurist Mohammed Baghayogho: Maliki law, the traditions, and grammar.

When Morocco's army broke Songhai at Tondibi in 1591 under Judar Pasha, and Pasha Mahmud ibn Zarqun came ruling after, the scholars of Timbuktu fell under suspicion. Ahmad Baba was arrested late in 1593, his books — some sixteen hundred volumes — seized; he would remark that his was the smallest library in his family. Marched across the Sahara to Marrakesh, he was imprisoned two years and then held in the city — where the learned of the Maghreb crowded his lessons and carried his rulings.

In Marrakesh he completed Nayl al-Ibtihaj, his great biographical dictionary of the Maliki jurists (1596). Freed in the years after Sultan al-Mansur's death, he reached Timbuktu again on the twenty-second of April 1608 and taught there the rest of his days. In 1615 he answered the slavery questions put to him with the Mi'raj al-Su'ud — a landmark ruling that rejected race as any ground for enslavement. More than forty works bear his name; roughly half survive in copies.

He died at Timbuktu on the twenty-second of April 1627, at seventy, remembered as the most celebrated scholar of the city's golden age; the manuscript institute founded in 1973 carries his name and keeps his city's written memory. Honored be Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu, whose books were taken and whose word could not be.