تاريخ الفتاش (Timbuktu Chronicles 1493-1599)

reason for acting as he did? Had the Askiya Muhammad ever mistreated his son?"

“Oh no! The Askiya Muhammad treated all his sons in an upright fashion,” Muhammad assured me. “But even if he had mistreated them, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. The son must do exactly as the father says.”

“Even if the father is a bad father?”

“Even if the father is a bad father. Even if the father is totally evil. If my father tells me that the cup of water I drink is black, then it is black. If he tells me it is white, then it is white. Even if one’s father is a drunkard and a fool, the father is always right. You must submit to the wishes of your father. The Askiya Mūsā The eldest son of Askiya Muhammad, known for rebelling against his father. was a bad son, and the curse that he received was just. This was an edifying lesson for the pious.”

The tomb of the Askiya Muhammad was built in the shape of an Egyptian pyramid. The Askiya got the idea while traveling through Egypt on his hājj pilgrimage to Mecca. At Giza on the Nile, he made up his mind to build a lasting monument for his own burial, worthy of the pharaohs of old. The body of the Askiya Muhammad lies entombed in a mud grave without any doors. He is the only Askiya to be honored in this way. Even the Askiya Dāwūd lies in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of the mosque in Gao. I asked repeatedly for the site of the Askiya Dāwūd’s grave and got a lot of evasive suggestions, before the curator told me that no one knew where to find it. The various sons of the Askiya Muhammad are buried in the graveyard outside the mosque, but no one would tell me where. Many of the gravesites have probably been forgotten.

Gao was once the administrative center of the Songhay Empire, but Timbuktu had always been the intellectual capital. When civil war erupted between the two great cities, Gao easily conquered Timbuktu, but it quickly lost its bearings. If Gao was the heart of the Askiya Empire, Timbuktu was its brain. Gao was the place of sorcery, which lay directly across from the Rose Dunes. But, against

Rouch's thesis, I began to feel that the Askiya Muhammad's real accomplishment consisted in his ability to forge a pact between the two great capitals, Timbuktu and Gao. The Askiya Muhammad helped to unite two religions into one dynamic new faith by wedding the ancient religion of the sorcerers to the newer religion from Arabia. His tomb, which is both an Egyptian pyramid and an Islamic mosque, symbolizes that unity. For the religion of Kukiya-Gao is, in effect, the living heir of Egyptian religion. The Askiya Muhammad did not simply take notice of the pyramids en route to Mecca and fancy himself an Egyptian Pharaoh. Songhay animism is the true ancestor of the religion of the Pharaohs—a belief in the magical properties of the River. The two brothers from Mecca claimed that they slew the Fish God with the phallic ring in its belly. But the griots traditional West African historians, storytellers, and praise singers do not believe this. Both al-hājj Mahmūd Kati and the griots acknowledge that Kassaye is the mother of Askiya Muhammad, but the griots also insist that the true father of the Askiya Muhammad is the river djinn a supernatural spirit in Islamic mythology. The griots know that this great water god cannot be killed, for it is a powerful water spirit, literally an occult wind. So long as the griot emits this powerful wind from his lungs, the River God cannot die.

When the Dynasty of the Askiyas broke up, it split on predictable fault lines. As al-hājj Salem Ould had said, Gao went to the sorcerers and griots, whereas Timbuktu went to the Muslims and scribes. These separate heritages are clearly reflected today in both Songhay cities. Certainly, the “Shī ‘Ali” was a military genius and a brutal enemy to all those who opposed him. But the great Sunni Ali Ber had failed to appreciate Timbuktu and what it had to offer to the Songhay people. In contrast, the Askiya Muhammad had brought the Muslims over to his side, without fully renouncing Songhay magic. That was his true accomplishment. In Timbuktu, al-hājj Ould had emphasized to me his view that when the Askiya Muhammad destroyed the Mossi fetish during his great jihad, he had done so using a spoken passage from the Qu'rān. But al-hājj Ould had neglected to observe that, in doing so, the Askiya Muhammad had also performed an obvious act of Songhay sorcery. There is a passage in the Ta'rīkh al-fattāsh original: "Chronicle of the Researcher," a significant 16th-century historical text concerning the Western Sudan.,