Sunni Ali Ber: The Warrior, the Heretic, the Founder

He built an empire that would last a century and a half, and he did it in a way that the scholars of Timbuktu would never forgive.

The Man Who Carries Two Stories

There are figures in history who cannot be captured in a single narrative. Sunni Ali Ber is one of them. If you read the Tarikh al-Sudan, written in 1655 by the Timbuktu scholar Abderrahman as-Sa’di ﵀, you receive the portrait of a tyrant. A bloody persecutor of the Ulema. A man who trampled the city of knowledge under his hoof. As-Sa’di ﵀ writes about him with unconcealed horror: Ali was, according to him, “an oppressor, a great tyrant, a cruel persecutor of the scholars, a man who had them killed and exiled”.

But if you dive into the Songhay tradition itself, into the oral epic that has been passed down from generation to generation, you receive a very different man. A hero. The Ber, the Great. The liberator who drove Mali from its last claims and built a kingdom that was the pride of every Sorko village along the Niger.

Which of the two is true?

Both. And that is exactly what makes this man so fascinating. We will not sanitize him. We will lay the two stories side by side and let the listeners judge.

A Reign of Twenty-Eight Years

Sunni Ali ascended the throne in 1464 and would reign until his death in 1492. Twenty-eight years. In the West African Middle Ages that is an exceptionally long reign, especially for a sovereign who was almost constantly in the field. The Tarikh al-Fattash gives a list of his campaigns that is dizzying: more than thirty documented military expeditions. He was hardly ever in his palace. He was, in the words of one modern historian, “a king on horseback”.

His military genius had two pillars: speed and combined arms. The Songhay cavalry, heavily armed, could thrust faster than any opponent. The Songhay fleet, under the Sorko boatmen, could move troops along the Niger in a way that land armies could not match. Ali learned to combine these two: a land army that flanked via the river, a fleet that landed troops behind enemy lines. It was a tactical pattern that no West African contemporary equaled.

His first great goal: to finish what the previous generation had begun. To definitively liquidate the Malinese claims on the Middle Niger. He conquered Djenné in 1473, after a legendary long siege that according to some sources lasted seven years and seven months, although that number is probably symbolic. Djenné, the old trading city, the pearl of the Malinese south, fell into Songhay hands and would remain so until 1591.

Timbuktu, 1468

But the episode that would seal Ali’s reputation among Islamic scholars for centuries is what happened in Timbuktu in 1468.

You must imagine: Timbuktu at that moment is already nearly two centuries a spiritual and intellectual capital. The Sankore mosque attracts students from Fez, Cairo, even Baghdad. The scholarly families, the Aqit, the Baghayogho, the An-da-Ag-Muhammad, form an aristocracy of books. Copies of the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas ﵀, of the Sahih of Bukhari ﵀, of the works of al-Ghazali ﵀, circulate in handwritten manuscripts. The city is from 1433 controlled by the Tuareg tribe Maghsharan under Akil Aghmubula Ibn Masib.

Sunni Ali’s army took Timbuktu in 1468. The Tuareg fled. The qadi Abu Bakr Umar Muhammad Aqit, ancestor of the Aqit family from which Ahmed Baba ﵀ would later emerge, had to flee with his family to Walata. Many scholars who remained were according to the Tarikh al-Sudan killed, imprisoned or stripped of their riches. As-Sa’di ﵀ is specific: he names names, families, numbers. It is no vague accusation.

The question is: why?

The simple answer: Ali saw the Timbuktu scholars as allies of the Tuareg whom he had just driven out, and thus as a potential fifth column. But that answer is too political to explain everything. There is something deeper underneath, something the chroniclers sensed and which has lastingly damaged Ali’s memory: a religious gulf.

Syncretism on the Throne

Sunni Ali ruled a country that in the urban centers had been predominantly Muslim for two centuries. Timbuktu, Djenné, Gao itself, all had great mosques, a Muslim aristocracy, an Islamic administration of justice. But the countryside, the river villages, the Sorko fishermen and the Songhay farmers, lived largely according to pre-Islamic traditions. Ritual fire, spirit veneration, magical practices around the Niger itself as a deity.

Ali related to Islam in a way that the Ulema considered radically heretical. He prayed, yes. He sometimes had the shahada pronounced. But he held simultaneously to bori and magical practices, to incantations, to ancestor veneration. According to the Tarikh al-Sudan he asked his sorcerers what to do before performing his religious duties. He is said to have combined the five daily prayers into one. He is said not to have fasted Ramadan. He is said not to have given what was due to Allah ﷻ.

Whether all this is literally accurate is hard to say. As-Sa’di had every interest in portraying Ali as the opposite of what a good Islamic monarch should be, because as-Sa’di’s world was that of Askia Muhammad, the man who would bring down Ali’s son. But the pattern fits with everything we know about Songhay religion in this period: a syncretistic royal religion in which Islamic forms were mixed with a pre-Islamic core.

For the scholars of Timbuktu, who in precisely these decades were occupied with purifying the school of law and the textual transmission, this was a scandal on the throne. Ali was formally Muslim, but in their eyes he was worse than a heathen, for a heathen at least knows no better. Ali knew better, and chose the opposite.

The Aqit Family and the Long Memory

Let us pause briefly on the family that suffered most under Ali. The Aqit, originally of Sanhaja-Berber descent but fully anchored in the Islamic scholarly class of Timbuktu, were the intellectual aristocracy of the city. When in 1468 they had to flee to Walata, they carried their libraries with them, or hid them, or saw them lost. It was a trauma that would resonate for generations.

Seventy-two years later, in 1556, from this family was born Ahmed Baba al-Timbukti ﵀. The greatest West African scholar of his century, author of more than fifty works, a man whose name to this day circulates in Timbuktu archives. Ahmed Baba ﵀ would himself, by an irony of history, in 1593 be carried off into Moroccan exile, but his family carried the memory of Sunni Ali as a family wound. When in the next article we discuss the takeover by Askia Muhammad, you must understand that Askia’s support from the Ulema was not coincidental. The Aqit and their allies had a score to settle.

The Other Reading: The Unifier

But now the other side. For we sanitize not, but neither do we rehabilitate.

For the Songhay themselves, Ali Ber was the man who solidified their identity. He united the tribes along the Niger Bend under one rule. He rolled back the Tuareg threat that Mali had been unable to subdue. He conquered Djenné, Timbuktu, a large part of what was formerly Mali. He founded an army and a fleet that would protect Songhay for a century and a half thereafter.

Without Ali no Songhay Empire. Without Songhay Empire no flowering of Ahmed Baba’s Timbuktu under Askia. It is in a sense ironic: the man who persecuted Timbuktu made the later flowering of Timbuktu possible. He demolished the system he did not trust, but he left behind a state that his successor would use to build something new.

The Songhay tradition calls him Ber, the Great, not ironically. They see him as a founder-king in the line of other founder-kings: Sundiata of Mali, Sonni of the first generation. Such men are always bloody. Founding is never a gentle art.

What the Tarikh Cannot Erase

Here it becomes fascinating. Even as-Sa’di ﵀, who hated Ali with the hatred of a scholar for a persecutor, cannot deny that the empire Ali bequeathed stood firm. He notes the size. He notes the military organization. He notes the borders. He makes implicitly clear that Askia Muhammad, his hero, did not build from nothing, but inherited what Ali had imposed.

The Tarikh al-Fattash, somewhat friendlier to Ali because that chronicle had more affinity with the pre-Askia dynasty, gives anecdotes about his fairness toward his own soldiers, his personal courage in battle, his ability to inspire loyalty. A man who rules for twenty-eight years an empire in which he is constantly fighting is never only a tyrant. He must have had something for which men were willing to die.

The Tactic and the Terror

We must also make one thing concrete about Ali’s manner of waging war, because it was so different from what the region was accustomed to. Ali was no feudal king who led his knights in a battle and then went back to the palace. He was a campaign king. He stayed in the field, season after season, with his own bodyguard, his own attention to detail, his own willingness to ride at the front himself.

His tactic combined three elements. First speed. His cavalry units could march distances that opponents could not keep up with. Second, combined arms, as already mentioned: the combination of river fleet and land cavalry. Third: terror as a deliberate instrument. When a city or village refused to submit, Ali set an example that more quickly persuaded the next city. The Tarikh al-Sudan describes how some communities after inappropriate resistance were entirely wiped out, their inhabitants killed, sold into slavery, or banished.

This is uncomfortable to relate. But it is what the sources say, and we do not sanitize. Do not forget either that Ali’s opponents used precisely the same methods where they could. This was, in the late fifteenth century, the norm of Sahel warfare, not Ali’s invention. His distinctive quality was the effectiveness with which he wielded these methods, not the methods themselves.

Construction and Bureaucracy

Amid all this warlike activity, Ali also gave shape to an administrative infrastructure. He divided his empire into provinces with governors (often family members or loyal generals). He built garrisons along the Niger. He organized a courier service between the cities, according to some sources with cannon-boats that could move messages and troops quickly (this last is probably anachronistic; true firearm provisioning would only reach Songhay later).

What his successor Askia Muhammad inherited was therefore not a war zone with a shocking emptiness, but a functioning empire with administrative habits, military discipline, a tax base. Askia’s work would be: to Islamize this structure, but the structure itself was there.

This nuances the Tarikh al-Sudan narrative which portrays Ali almost exclusively as a destructive force. The chronicle leaves the positive legacy implicit, but it is there.

How Did He Die?

In November 1492, returning from an expedition against the Fulbe in the southwest, Sunni Ali drowned in the river Koni (or the Niger itself, the sources disagree). Some chronicles say that he fell from his horse while crossing. Others darkly suggest that it was no accident. The Tarikh al-Sudan is explicit: as-Sa’di ﵀ finds this a fitting end for a man who had defied Allah ﷻ, an end in which the elements themselves passed their judgment.

We can no longer know with certainty. But one thing is certain: in that same year 1492, Granada fell to Isabella and Ferdinand, Portuguese and Genoese seafarers under Columbus set course across the Atlantic Ocean, and a new world history began. The fall of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, the beginning of European colonial expansion, and the death of Sunni Ali — three events in one year, three events that each in their own way would make the Islamic world look different than before.

The Chronicler Himself

To assess Sunni Ali well you must also know the man who wrote about him. Abderrahman as-Sa’di ﵀ was born around 1594 in Timbuktu, thus a small century after Ali’s death. He was educated at Sankore, worked as imam and secretary in various cities of the Middle Niger, and wrote his Tarikh al-Sudan (Chronicle of the Sudan) between 1643 and 1655. He was a direct descendant of the Islamic scholarly tradition that had suffered under Ali, blossomed again under Askia, and gone into crisis under the Moroccan occupation after 1591.

For as-Sa’di ﵀ the question “what kind of king was Sunni Ali?” was not academic. It was a family story, a tradition story, a question of who could and could not be a legitimate Muslim sovereign. His answer, that Ali was illegitimate and Askia legitimate, is no coincidence. It fits with the broader argument of his book: the legitimate line of West African Islamic kingship runs through Askia, not through Ali.

This does not mean that as-Sa’di ﵀ invented facts. His descriptions of Ali’s military campaigns largely correspond with what we can reconstruct from other sources. But his moral framing — Ali as tyrant, Askia as liberator — is a frame, not a neutral observation. A modern historian therefore reads as-Sa’di ﵀ not as a judicial verdict but as valuable testimony with a clear stake of its own.

The Tarikh al-Fattash, written parallel to as-Sa’di ﵀ (initially attributed to the Timbuktu scholar Mahmud Kati ﵀, although modern researchers see the authorship as more complicated) is somewhat milder toward Ali, and offers details that as-Sa’di ﵀ omits. Between the two chronicles a complementary picture emerges, in which Ali appears as a more ambivalent, more human figure than in as-Sa’di ﵀ alone.

A Son Without a Father

Sunni Ali left behind a son, Sunni Baro (or Sunni Baru, the spellings vary). Baro would try to keep the throne for the dynasty. He remained, like his father, reconciled with the pre-Islamic royal religion, or at least chose not to publicly distance himself from it.

That choice would cost him his throne within months. For in his father’s army served a general, a Soninke of Tuareg-related blood, who was himself a deeply believing Muslim and who had a very different vision of what a Songhay king should be. His name was Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, and he would write history as Askia Muhammad the Great.

But that is the next chapter. For now it is enough to say: Sunni Ali had built an empire. His son got a few months to hold onto it. The Ulema of Timbuktu waited for their moment. And behind Askia stood a coalition that would not forgive.

A Figure for the Listener

What should you, as listener tonight, take with you about this man? Not the simple version. Not “Ali the tyrant” and not “Ali the hero” either. But something more complicated.

Sunni Ali was a founder-king who built his empire with methods that the later Islamic tradition of his own land would condemn. He left behind a state strong enough to last a century. He created a gulf between the urban Islamic elite and the countryside tradition that Songhay was never able to fully close, and that would ultimately in 1591 contribute to the collapse.

He is a warning and a monument at once. A warning of what happens when power detaches from legitimacy, from the Ulema, from the community that teaches. And a monument to what military genius can do when a man dedicates his entire life to one goal: the building of a state.

In 1492 he died. And precisely at that moment began the story that according to most Islamic chronicles is the real story of Songhay.

The Shared Responsibility

There remains one question hanging that each of us must ask ourselves when we discuss Sunni Ali. If his methods laid the foundations for what Askia Muhammad later built, are we obliged to approve those methods? If Timbuktu reflowered under Askia thanks to a state that Ali had created, is Ali’s violence then retroactively justified?

The answer, I think, is no. We may not reason backward about right and wrong. What Ali did with the Aqit family, with the scholars who were killed under his rule, with the Tuareg whom he drove out, remains what it was. Regardless of what came after. A good outcome does not justify wrong means. That is an Islamic legal principle that al-Maghili ﵀ would have recognized, and that Ahmed Baba ﵀ would later make explicit in his writings.

But we must also acknowledge that Ali did not live for our judgment. He lived for his own time, with its own demands, under its own circumstances. The judgment of history is important, but it is not the only thing that counts. Allah ﷻ is the ultimate judge, and what Ali must answer to his Lord is between him and his Lord. We, now, can only describe his life, weigh his consequences, and draw our own lessons.

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