تاريخ الفتاش (Timbuktu Chronicles 1493-1599)

fish was not killed but continues to preside over its underwater kingdom. Malio depicts this fish as the father of Askiya Muhammad (or "Mamar Kassaye") in Hale's transcribed version of the epic; the fish gives his weapons and ring of power to his son, the Askiya Muhammad, which enables him to kill his tyrannical uncle Si ("Shi Ali" in the Ta'rikh al-fattāsh or Sonni Ali Ber).

We know from Kati's account that Sonni Ali Ber was not actually the uncle of the Askiya Muhammad, and that his father was an ordinary Songhay man, although both versions show the resilience of pre-Islamic belief systems that long pre-date the coming of Arab traders to the region. Some possibly reveal the influence of the ancient Egyptians upon Songhay peoples. Besides the obvious affinities of the Osiris monomyth and the Songhay legend of the great djinn, al-Sadi writes in the Ta'rikh al-Sudan that an ancient Pharaoh of Egypt once summoned two of Kukiya's most powerful sorcerers to do battle with the Prophet Moses. The staff of Moses, once it was transformed into a serpent, swallowed up the staffs of the sorcerers from Kukiya. The Pharaoh sent for Songhay sorcerers, it is said, because they were reputed to be far more powerful than all the magicians of ancient Egypt. It is interesting to note that the Ta'rikh al-fattāsh, with its obvious bias for Islam, also asserts that the underwater djinn feared only one mere human: the legendary sorcerer Sulayman, the son of Dāwūd (or King Solomon, the son of David), who is noted in both the Bible and Qur'an for his extensive knowledge of Egyptian magic.

In modern-day Timbuktu, the Muslim population continues to venerate the Askiya Muhammad for his piety and his respect for Islam, whereas the citizens of Gao tend to view him as a great sorcerer who lost his occult power and was then banished to the Island of Quema, where he met a pitiful death. The later version of the life of the Askiya Muhammad resonates with the views of the French ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch, who argued that the true founder of the Songhay Dynasty was not the Askiya Muhammad, but Sonni Ali Ber (or the Shi Ali).

In the Fall of 2005, I traveled to Timbuktu where I met with al-hājj Salem Ould, an elderly man and local historian of the

Askiyas. We met at the adobe house of Ould, where I was led to the second floor of a spacious mud dwelling, into a cool and shaded room with straw mats on the floor. We reclined on the mats, and I was offered "African whiskey"—gunpowder tea that is powerfully sweetened and sticky. From an ancient trunk, al-hājj Ould produced a pile of his scholarly papers on the history of Timbuktu, some of which he sold to me for about five dollars apiece. I found al-hājj Ould to be a lively, even gregarious man who was proud of his ancestry. I had spent most of the last year translating the Ta'rikh al-fattāsh and researching the history of the Askiyas and wanted to know more about its eventual decline. "What happened to the Songhay Dynasty?" I asked him. "Why did it fall apart?"

"After the fall of the Songhay Empire," he told me, "Timbuktu went to the Muslims. In fact, this entire section of the river went to the Muslims, whereas Gao and Kukiya fell to the animists. The sorcerers and griots have different beliefs from the Muslims." As for which version of the fall of the Askiyas was more accurate—that of the scribes or the griots—he insisted that the version of the scribes was certainly more accurate than that of the griots. "The scribes were there," he told me. "They actually knew the Askiya very well. They lived with him. They took the hajj to Mecca with him. But, as Muslims, they saw the fall of the Askiyas in moral terms. The sons of the Askiya Muhammad did not keep their promises to their father. They practiced sexual immorality. The judgment of God fell upon them. This is how religious people tend to see things. But there are, of course, other reasons for the decline of the Askiyas that the scribes fail to mention."

"The Askiya Muhammad and his son the Askiya Dāwūd were fathers of more than one hundred sons. There was a terrible fight for political power between the sons of the Askiyas. The authors of the Ta'rikhs address this problem. But there were other factors. The Songhay Empire was enormous. It was very hard for the Askiyas to manage such a vast expanse of lands, a kingdom with so many different tribes, peoples, and customs. And the Spanish Moroccans who finally conquered Gao and Timbuktu brought..."