Askia Muhammad the Great: The Full Islamic State Model

Where Mansa Musa laid the foundations, Askia Muhammad completed the building. For thirty-five years, until his own sons would blind him and exile him.

The Man on the Throne

You must imagine Gao in 1493. The city lies on the eastern bend of the Niger, on the edge where the green of the river gives way to the yellow of the Sahara. From the palace, which stands a little north of the Great Mosque, you can see the caravan routes departing: northward to Tafilalt, eastward to Agadez and the Hausa states, southward along the river to Djenné and beyond. In that palace now sits a new king. Fifty years old, perhaps older. Stern of face. A practicing Muslim who knows the shariah. A warrior who has endured sixteen campaigns. And a politician who knows that his reign must from day one rest on legitimacy, not only on the sword.

For thirty-five years Askia Muhammad would reign. From 1493 to 1528. In that period he would build something West Africa had never seen before: a fully integrated Islamic state system, with legislation, jurisprudence, administration, taxation, army and foreign policy, all organized according to Islamic principles and at the same time adapted to the reality of a multi-ethnic Sahel empire.

This was not Timbuktu as an intellectual enclave within a syncretistic state, as under Ali. This was a state of which Islam was the administrative foundation.

The Hajj of 1496: The Great Journey

Three years after his takeover, in the year 1496, Askia did what Mansa Musa had done a century and a half earlier: he went on Hajj. But where Musa’s journey had been a demonstration of wealth, with hundreds of camels of gold and a caravan that threw Cairo into turmoil, Askia’s journey was of a different nature. It was a political and religious act, carefully calculated.

The Tarikh al-Sudan gives us the figures: Askia traveled with about 1,500 men, of whom 500 horsemen and 1,000 footmen. He carried 300,000 mithqal of gold, a mithqal being approximately four and a half grams, thus in modern terms about 1,350 kilograms of pure gold. This was an enormous sum, but deliberately less than Musa’s legendary caravan. Askia was not after effect. He was after recognition.

The route went via Tuat (an oasis in present-day southern Algeria), where Askia met the great scholar Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀, an encounter to which we shall return because it would change everything. Then via Ghadames, Tripoli, Cairo and then through Sinai to Mecca and Medina. The journey took with everything included nearly two years.

In Cairo Askia met Sultan Qaitbay of the Mamluks. But more importantly, he met the Abbasid shadow caliph al-Mutawakkil II. Since the fall of Baghdad in 1258 the Abbasid caliphs in Cairo had no real power, but they continued to function as a symbolic shelter for Islamic legitimacy; the Mamluk sultans kept them alive in order to present themselves as “protectors of the caliph”. The game was largely ceremonial, but for a Muslim sovereign in search of recognition, the institution was of inestimable value.

The Investiture as Caliph of Takrur

What happened in Cairo would determine the entire later legitimation of Askia’s reign. Al-Mutawakkil II formally granted Askia the title Khalifat fi bilad al-Takrur, “Caliph in the lands of Takrur” — Takrur being the Arabic designation for West Africa as a whole. Askia received a taqlid, an official mandate, that authorized him to exercise Islamic rule in the name of the caliph over his empire. He was allowed to appoint judges. He was allowed to declare jihad. He was allowed to levy taxes according to Islamic law. He was allowed to mint coins with his own name and the caliph’s name side by side.

This was, in Islamic-juridical terms, exactly the legitimation that Mansa Musa had never formally received. Musa had been received by Cairo as a wealthy pilgrim-king. Askia was received by Cairo as a brother-sovereign and a delegated bearer of caliphal authority.

From that moment on Askia could in his khutba, the Friday sermon in the great mosque, have his name mentioned alongside that of the caliph. For an Islamic community, the khutba is the heart of political legitimacy. He whose name is mentioned there is the sovereign who according to the people rules. Askia now had his name placed there with the authority of Cairo behind him.

In Mecca and Medina he performed the Hajj rituals himself. He visited the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, he prayed in the Masjid al-Haram, he contributed to the poor of the holy cities. In 1498 he returned to Gao, a different man than he had left. Not richer. But infinitely more legitimated.

Al-Maghili’s Answers

The encounter with Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀ in Tuat, on the way to Cairo, deserves its own paragraph because it led to one of the most important documents of Islamic statecraft in West Africa.

Al-Maghili was a Tlemcen scholar, a hardliner within the Maliki tradition, infamous for his rigorous views on purifying Islamic societies of syncretistic practices and of what he saw as Jewish influences in the Sahara. He was controversial, even in his own time. But he was also one of the sharpest juridical thinkers of his generation, and Askia recognized that.

Askia brought a list of practical governance questions: How do I treat people who call themselves Muslims but practice magic? How do I divide spoils from a jihad campaign? Which taxes are Islamically legal? How do I relate to subjugated non-Muslim tribes? What are my duties as ruler when I have an empire that is only partly Islamic?

Al-Maghili answered these questions in a document that became known as the Ajwibat al-Maghili (the Answers of al-Maghili). This was in fact an administrative handbook for Askia’s reign, and it would remain a reference text for the next century, not only in Songhay but also in the later Sokoto Caliphate of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ in the nineteenth century. The Ajwibat is one of the most important juridical documents from the West African Islamic tradition.

An example. Askia asked: if a tribe has formally declared itself Muslim but still continues heathen practices, may I wage war against them? Al-Maghili answered: yes, you may, because those practices are ridda (apostasy), and a ruler has the duty to combat apostasy. This fatwa, which we mention here without endorsement, would in the following decades form the juridical basis for Askia’s campaigns against the Mossi, the Dogon and other tribes that he brought under his authority by jihad.

Whether this was a sincere jihad or a rationalized expansionist war is a question that has divided historians for generations. The answer is probably: both. There is no Muslim ruler in history, from Umar ﵁ to Suleiman the Magnificent, in whom faith and politics can be entirely separated.

The Administration: Qadis and Regions

After his return Askia turned to internal reform. He divided the empire into provinces, each under a governor with the title farma or fari. Above the farmas stood a hierarchy of central ministers: the balama for military affairs, the kanfari for the western provinces, the dyina-koi for the court, and so on. About a dozen central titles, each with a sharply defined sphere of duty.

In every important city he appointed a qadi, an Islamic judge. This qadi was not subordinate to the local farma but to the supreme qadi of Timbuktu, which made an independent judiciary possible, an unbelievably modern state-building step for that time. A governor could not directly sentence his own subjects; for that he or she had to go to the qadi, who judged according to Maliki jurisprudence.

Askia standardized the zakat, the Islamic poor tax, across the entire empire. He determined the rates for agricultural products, for livestock, for trading profit. He introduced the kharaj tax on non-Muslim land and the jizya on non-Muslim subjects, according to the classical Maliki formulas. This created a system that was both predictable and Islamically legally justifiable.

He reformed the army. Under Ali the army was essentially a tribal levy, with each province supplying troops by custom. Askia created a standing professional army: sofa’s, permanent soldiers, rewarded with land and cattle, directly bound to the crown. This reduced dependence on tribal chiefs and increased the central enforcement power.

Timbuktu as Knowledge Institute

The Aqit family and other scholarly families had returned. Askia gave them space, subsidy and stature. Under his rule Timbuktu blossomed to its ultimate peak.

The Sankore mosque became what you might call a university, although the structure was more a loose federation of study circles under individual scholars. Pupils from the entire Muslim world, from Fez to Cairo to even Hadramawt, came to Timbuktu to study. The book trade in the city became one of the most lively of the Islamic world; Leo Africanus (Hassan al-Wazzan ﵀) would arrive in Timbuktu around 1510-1513 and note in his Descrittione dell’Africa (1526) that in Timbuktu more profit was made from the sale of books than from any other article of trade. That remark has often been quoted and deserves it: in a city that also traded gold and salt, books became the most profitable product.

The Aqit family would in this generation culminate in the birth, in 1556, of Ahmed Baba al-Timbukti ﵀. Ahmed Baba ﵀ would become author of more than fifty works, including the famous Nayl al-ibtihaj, a biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars known as far as Morocco and Egypt. This Timbuktu of Ahmed Baba ﵀ stands directly in the line of Askia’s patronage.

The Women of Askia

Allow me a side path. In the Tarikh al-Sudan and in the Tarikh al-Fattash the wives of Askia Muhammad also appear, not as extras but as actors. His first wife, Sangu Toree, played a role in the internal court life. His sister, Fatima, was remembered by the chronicles as a woman with influence at the court. Askia’s daughters married strategically with both Songhay aristocracy and with guests from the Maghreb. Islamic jurisprudence under Askia recognized, according to the Maliki school of law, women as legal persons in marital, inheritance and commercial matters. This is relevant to mention because a contemporary listener, and certainly a young Muslim listener, often has the image that Islamic societies before modernity were monolithic structures in which women remained invisible. That image does not match the West African sources. Songhay women acted, witnessed, inherited, spoke.

You should take this as context with you as you go into the later decades, in which the Caribbean diaspora also began to form. Our ancestors came from a world in which both men and women had a name.

The Campaigns

Askia was no sedentary monarch. Between 1498 and 1515 he conducted a series of major campaigns that expanded the empire to its maximum:

• Against the Mossi in the south (1498-1499), a jihad campaign that brought some parts of Mossi under Songhay authority, while leaving other parts unbroken.
• Against the Mali remnants in the southwest, which he definitively reduced to vassal status.
• Against the Tuareg tribes in the north (Air and Azawad), in which the city of Agadez temporarily came under Songhay authority.
• Against the Hausa states in the east (Katsina, Zaria, Kano), in which he took some cities and forced others into tribute.
• Against the Diara and Fuuta Toro in the west.

At its height Songhay extended from the Atlantic coastal regions of present-day Senegal to Agadez in the east, and from the salt mines of Taghaza in the Sahara to the Middle Volta. This was, briefly stated, the largest empire that West Africa would ever have.

The Old Age of a King

By 1515 Askia was old. His vision began to fail. He could still rule, but no longer personally lead campaigns. His sons, many in number (the sources mention twelve or thirteen), took over military duties. Each of them received a province. Each of them learned to rule. And each of them built, inevitably, his own power base within the empire.

In 1519 Askia lost almost all his sight. He remained king, but became dependent on his sons for daily execution. And in an aging father with many ambitious sons, the same risk always lurks: the sons do not like to wait long.

In 1528, at almost ninety years of age, Askia Muhammad was deposed by his son Askia Musa in a palace coup. He was blinded (some sources say that he was already blind and that “blinding” here symbolically meant the formal severing of power), imprisoned on the island of Kangaba in the Niger, and there he spent his last nine years. He died in 1538, an old man under the protection of family who no longer feared him.

But that is the subject of the next article.

The Correspondence with Cairo and the Maghreb

Under the great reign of Askia Muhammad, Gao for the first time in history became a place where official correspondence from Cairo, Fez, Marrakesh and Tlemcen regularly arrived and was answered. This is a point that is rarely brought up in the usual tellings, but it is essential for understanding Songhay as an Islamic empire rather than as an isolated African kingdom.

Askia’s court regularly received letters from the Abbasid shadow-caliphs in Cairo, from the Mamluk sultans, from the great qadis of Fez. His own answers, partly preserved in Moroccan archives and partly in Timbuktu manuscripts, show a literate diplomatic style that does not differ from that of a Moroccan or Egyptian sovereign. He negotiated about caravan protection, about extradition of fugitive merchants, about religious reforms, about juridical advice.

Leo Africanus (Hassan al-Wazzan ﵀) describes in his Descrittione dell’Africa how he saw in Timbuktu letters drawn up by Askia’s chancery in perfect classical Arabic, sealed with a royal seal, ready for transmission over the caravan routes. This was no exotic kingdom that leaned on Arab scholars for basic communication; this was a state that had built up its own bilingual bureaucracy (Arabic for external and juridical matters, Songhay for internal ordinary administration).

For the broader Islamic ummah of his time this meant that Songhay was a full member. Not a periphery. A partner, with its own theological contributions, its own juridical questions, its own scholars whose works were read in Cairo and Fez.

The Tax System in Detail

Another aspect that may surprise the modern listener is the sophistication of Askia’s tax system. On the basis of al-Maghili’s answers and the adjustments that Askia’s qadis added to them, a system arose that came down to roughly the following.

For Muslim agriculturalists: zakat al-zuru on grain and cotton, generally around ten percent of the harvest (al-'ushr), collected in kind and stored in state granaries. For Muslim livestock farmers: zakat al-an’am on livestock, generally one animal per forty (sheep and goats) or one per thirty (cattle). For Muslim merchants: zakat al-tijara on trading profit, usually 2.5 percent, collected in cash (gold or copper coins).

For non-Muslim agricultural communities under Songhay rule: kharaj on land, with rates that varied according to fertility, and jizya per adult male head, essentially a per-capita tax that also included protection by the army.

For subjugated tribes that had no settled agriculture (especially nomadic groups): an annual tribute in cattle, salt, gold or slaves, negotiated per group.

This was a system that accommodated all the classical Maliki categories, but that took into account the concrete Sahel reality. It worked, at its best moments, with a predictability that reached further than Mali had. A merchant in Djenné could know which toll he had to pay at which caravan station. A farmer in Soninke land could know which part of his harvest the state demanded. A qadi in Timbuktu could know which juridical procedure would be followed. This is no small thing. This is the birth of an early rule of law in West Africa.

The Thirty-Five Years Summarized

When you try to summarize this reign, you arrive at the following key points. Thirty-five years. Major military expansion to the largest empire that West Africa would ever see. One of the three greatest Hajj pilgrimages that a West African sovereign ever undertook (after Mansa Musa’s of 1324 and alongside that of Askia Ishaq I later). Formal caliphal investiture. Standardization of Maliki jurisprudence with independent qadis. Reform of the tax system to an Islamic model. Professionalization of the army. Patronage of Timbuktu as intellectual center. Correspondence with the greatest scholars of the time, Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀ foremost. Maintenance of diplomatic relations with the entire Maghreb and the Mashriq.

Such lists never do a reign justice, but they show the scale. Askia Muhammad was not one among many Sahel sovereigns. He was a statesman of world caliber, recognized as such in his own time by his contemporaries.

His Legacy

Before we go on, we must pause for a moment on what Askia left behind.

At the moment of his deposition in 1528, Songhay was the most complete Islamic state system that West Africa had ever known. Jurisprudence was standardized. Taxation was Islamic-juridically regulated. The army was professional. Timbuktu was the intellectual capital of the Muslim Sahel. The correspondence between Songhay and the Maghreb, between Songhay and Cairo, was alive. The empire was diplomatically and religiously recognized by the entire Muslim ummah.

This was no primitive setup. This was a deliberate civilization, Islamic in its structure, African in its context. The synthesis that Mansa Musa had dreamed about, but never fully implemented.

And yet. And yet.

The system that Askia built rested on one fragile element: succession. A king who reigns thirty-five years builds a state, but also builds a court of far too many aspirants. Twelve sons with twelve provinces is a recipe for a post-mortem civil war. Askia, with his political wisdom, must have known this. Why then did he not intervene?

Perhaps he trusted that his eldest, his most capable son, would carry out the transition smoothly. Perhaps he underestimated how quickly his own strength would decline. Perhaps he chose, like many old men, peace over confrontation. We do not know.

What we do know is that his state-building work, splendid as it was, would not find such a craftsman again after him. The next six decades Songhay would slowly fall apart, not in one blow but in a series of civil wars, court eruptions and dynastic disputes.

For now, at this point in our story, in the year 1528, it is enough to say: Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, Askia the Great, lies on the island of Kangaba, blind and dethroned. His son Askia Musa sits on the throne. And the most complete Islamic state system of West Africa begins, at the moment of its greatest success, its dismantling.

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