The Jurist from Tlemcen: Muhammad al-Maghili and the Law for Black Rulers
In the last years of the fifteenth century, a Maghrebi jurist leaves his birthplace Tlemcen. He travels through the Sahara, gives legal advice to the Askia in Gao, reorganizes the court of Sarki Rumfa in Kano, and leaves behind him a stack of writings that would shape Islamic jurisprudence in West Africa for two centuries. His name: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Maghili ﵀. His reputation: great, influential, and uncomfortable.
A Man Who Was Not Comfortable
You have to understand: al-Maghili ﵀ is not the friendly scholar you add to a poetry circle. He is the voice that stands at the edge of the crowd and says what no one wants to hear. He is the man who decides that the richest merchants of his city have strayed too far and that something must be done about it. He is the sharp pen, the fierce fatwa, the strict application of the law — and with the controversies that arise from it, he already carries a controversial name in his own time.
That is the starting point from which we must speak about him. Not as a sterile name from a footnote. As a personality with sharp edges, whose influence on West African Islam was real and great, but whose legacy cannot be discussed without contradictions.
Begin with his birthplace. Tlemcen, on the border between present-day Algeria and Morocco, at 34.88° north latitude and 1.32° west longitude. A city that in the fifteenth century, under the Zayyanid dynasty, was a considerable center of Maliki scholarship, rich in madaris, rich in libraries, at the same time firmly anchored in the trans-Saharan trade. Al-Maghili ﵀ was born there around 1440. His full name — Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim ibn Muhammad al-Maghili — refers, with the nisba “al-Maghili”, to an Amazigh origin, most probably from the Maghila tribe of the central Maghreb.
He studied in Tlemcen itself, under famous figures such as Abd al-Rahman al-Tha’alibi ﵀ and Yahya ibn Abd al-Jalil al-Maghrawi ﵀, and acquired a reputation for sharpness, for literal Maliki strictness, and for a kind of moral restlessness that made him uncomfortable in his own court. By 1490 that restlessness would become explosive, and not in a way of which we can be proud today.
The Touat Episode: What Must Be Honestly Said
Let us at once address the uncomfortable part. For the name al-Maghili ﵀ is inseparably bound up with the events in Touat, the oasis region in the south of present-day Algeria, around 1490–1492.
Touat in the fifteenth century was a flourishing trading hub on the trans-Saharan route between Tlemcen and Timbuktu. It was at the same time a region where a Jewish community had lived for generations, integrated into the local economy, with its own trading networks to Tlemcen, Sijilmasa, and North Africa more broadly. They built synagogues, they conducted trade in gold and salt, they paid taxes to the local Muslim authorities. Under the dhimmi status in Islamic law they had a claim to protection of life, property, and religious practice, provided they paid the jizya and adhered to certain social arrangements.
Al-Maghili ﵀ had concluded that the Jewish community of Touat had violated a number of those social arrangements — in particular the rules about the height of buildings relative to mosques, about public religious expression, about certain forms of social contact. Whether the violations had really taken place, in the extent he claimed, is historically contested; modern historians such as John Hunwick have concluded on the basis of the sources that al-Maghili’s complaints rested partly on reality, partly on exaggeration.
In any case, al-Maghili ﵀ issued a fatwa ordering the demolition of the synagogue of Touat. And it did not stop at the fatwa. He, according to several sources, incited the local Muslim population to violence. A pogrom against the Jewish community followed. The synagogue was demolished. Jews were killed. Survivors fled to Tlemcen, to Fez, to more northern oases where they were safer.
This is no event we can excuse by pointing to complexity. We can place it in context. In the late-fifteenth-century Maghreb the tensions between ulama and Jewish minorities had become more frequent and more intense, partly under the influence of the Andalusian refugees who came from Granada after 1492 with their own bitterness, partly through competition on trade routes. But al-Maghili ﵀'s role in Touat is direct and documented. He gave the justification, he mobilized the crowd, he reaped the consequences.
Other Muslim scholars of the time contradicted him for that reason. The prominent jurist Abdallah al-Asnuni and others wrote refutations in which they branded al-Maghili ﵀'s application of the law as overreaching, as an unjustified violation of the dhimma protection that Muslims were obliged to offer. This means that al-Maghili ﵀ was not free to act unhindered in his own time. There was a debate, and he was not the undisputed winner of that debate.
Why do we spend time on this here? Because honesty about our traditions is obligatory. The same man who legally built up West African Islam acted bloodily in Touat. Both are true. Both must be said. Whoever presents al-Maghili ﵀ only as the great reformer of Songhai and Kano misses an essential part of who he was. Whoever sees him only as the instigator of Touat misses his broader significance. A mature engagement with our history requires both.
The Journey South
Shortly after the Touat events al-Maghili ﵀ left the Maghreb. The reasons were probably multiple — political pressure from opponents, personal ambition, a desire to apply his legal vision in new contexts. Whatever the precise motive, the route is clear: from Tlemcen southward, via Sijilmasa, across the Sahara, to Taghaza and then to the Niger.
Imagine that journey for a moment. Tlemcen lies at about 34.88° north latitude. Gao lies at 16.27° north latitude, 0° east longitude. Kano lies at 12.00° north latitude, 8.59° east longitude. The direct distance from Tlemcen to Gao is well over 2,500 kilometers as the crow flies, across the Sahara, across Tuareg territory, past salt mines where the caravan had to stop for resupply. From there to Kano another 1,600 kilometers or so.
Al-Maghili ﵀ did not make this journey as a tourist. He made it as a traveling scholar, with a retinue of students and merchants who shared his caravan. Overnight stays in the great oases: Tabelbala, perhaps Taghaza, certainly Taoudenni, Arawan, Timbuktu. In each of these places he probably gave majalis, study circles, in which he explained to local ulama what his juridical vision was. This was how Islamic scholarship spread: not through grand programs, but through physical presence, through conversation upon conversation, from oasis to oasis.
By 1493 or 1494 he arrived in Gao, at the court of Askia Muhammad, who there shortly before — in 1493 — had taken the throne of Songhai in a coup against the sons of Sunni Ali.
The Replies to Askia: Legal Counsel for a New Ruler
Askia Muhammad faced a problem. He had seized the throne against the son of Sunni Ali. His legitimacy was not dynastic; it had to be juridically-Islamically underpinned. He needed a jurist who could tell him which decisions of his predecessor were legally to be overturned, which institutions he should reform, which Islamic principles he should implement in daily governance.
Al-Maghili ﵀ offered exactly what the Askia sought. And he offered it in a manner that has proved especially valuable for historians: in written form. Askia Muhammad put to al-Maghili ﵀ a series of questions — seven core questions according to the tradition, each with several subquestions. Al-Maghili ﵀ answered in a written document, what would later become known as the Ajwibat al-Maghili 'an as’ilat Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, “The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad”.
This document — in scholarly literature usually shortened to Replies to Askia — has been preserved in several manuscripts and was translated and annotated by John Hunwick in 1985. It is one of the most valuable juridical sources for the history of West African Islam.
What does the Askia ask, and what does al-Maghili ﵀ answer?
A core question concerned the legitimacy of Sunni Ali. Ali had, in al-Maghili ﵀'s eyes and in those of the Timbuktu ulama, committed large-scale injustices: persecuted scholars, treated Muslims as kuffar, burned Qur’an manuscripts, enslaved Muslim women. Al-Maghili ﵀ answered that Sunni Ali had in fact never been a real Muslim — that he had only preserved an outward show of Islam while his deeds placed him outside the community of faith. With that he declared Ali’s legacy invalid: all contracts concluded under Ali, all judgments, all marriages, were juridically null unless reaffirmed. Every Muslim taken captive under Ali had to be released. All goods unlawfully confiscated had to be returned.
This was a juridical atom bomb. It justified the Askia’s seizure of power as a jihadic correction of an unjustified regime. It gave him a free hand to dismantle almost the entire administrative layer of Sunni Ali. And it bound Askia Muhammad to a strict Maliki Islamization of Songhai that went further than what had been envisaged under Mansa Musa or even under earlier Askias.
Another core question concerned the status of the borderlands. Could the Askia conduct campaigns against communities who called themselves Muslims but retained traditional practices? Al-Maghili ﵀ said: yes, if their practices could be unambiguously identified as un-Islamic, they could be treated as murtaddun, as apostates. This gave the Askia a legal basis for campaigns against the Mossi, against Hombori regions, and against parts of the Bambara world.
A third core question concerned coinage, taxation, and dealings with non-Muslim minorities within the realm. Al-Maghili ﵀'s answers to these questions are fascinatingly nuanced — he pleads for strictness in principle, but for pragmatic application that does not endanger trade and stability.
The total effect of the Replies was that Askia Muhammad received a legal framework within which he could consolidate his realm and project an identity as a strict Muslim ruler. Whether Askia Muhammad in practice followed all of al-Maghili ﵀'s advice is another question — he was also a practical statesman who knew when strictness became counterproductive. But the Replies have continued to circulate. They were copied, commented upon, used by later West African jurists, and they form one of the foundational texts of the West African fiqh tradition.
To Kano: The Counselor of Rumfa
After his time in Gao al-Maghili ﵀ traveled eastward to Kano, probably in 1493 or 1494. There he found another ruler, Muhammad Rumfa, for whom he would be useful in a different way.
Rumfa was no usurper like Askia Muhammad. His legitimacy was dynastic and uncontested. What he needed from al-Maghili ﵀ was not legal justification for his throne, but a framework for what he wanted the sarauta, the kingship, to become. Rumfa wanted to be a fully Islamic ruler, an al-malik al-adil in the Maliki tradition, not a half-Islamic post-iskoki courtier.
For him al-Maghili ﵀ wrote another document, shorter but more influential. It is called Tāj al-dīn fīmā yajib ʿalā al-mulūk, “The Crown of Religion in What Is Owed by Kings”. It is a “mirror for princes” in the classical Islamic sense — a genre that runs from Kalila wa Dimna to al-Ghazali ﵀'s Nasihat al-Muluk, and in which a scholar sets out for a ruler what his duties are in governance, war, justice, and personal piety.
What does the Tāj al-dīn contain? Chapters on:
The duty of the ruler to have ilm — to truly know, not to pretend — and to gather scholars around him who provide him with real knowledge. The duty not to delegate court cases without supervision, to appoint Qadis who dare to judge independently, to establish the maẓālim court, the court for grievances against authority itself. The duty to perform the salah publicly, to observe Ramadan strictly, to dress and behave as an example for his subjects. The duty to act against injustice, against extortion of merchants, against arbitrary tolls, against favoritism at court.
And, no less important, chapters on how a Muslim ruler should treat non-Muslim subjects. Here al-Maghili ﵀ tempers — interestingly, given his Touat reputation — his own strictness into something more pragmatic. In the Tāj al-dīn it is said that non-Muslims within the realm have a right to protection, to economic participation, to honorable treatment, provided they pay the jizya and observe public order. The sharp edges of Touat are absent here.
Under Rumfa’s regime the Tāj al-dīn became the blueprint for court reform. Rumfa appointed a galadima — prime minister — as al-Maghili ﵀ had advised. He built and improved Friday mosques. He regulated the market. He appointed a network of Qadis for various parts of the realm. He had a palace built that met the descriptions of an Islamic royal residence — the gidan rumfa, which is still inhabited today by the emir of Kano.
The Misbaḥ al-Arwah: On the Duties of the Ruler Toward Allah
A third of al-Maghili ﵀'s major works deserves mention. Alongside the Replies to Askia and the Tāj al-dīn he wrote the Misbaḥ al-Arwah fī usul al-falah, a more theological and less juridical work that focuses on the inner dimension of the royal office. Here al-Maghili ﵀ writes about the necessity for the ruler himself to be a practitioner of taqwa, to be aware that he gives account to Allah ﷻ, to see his office not as personal power but as borrowed responsibility.
These three works — the Replies to Askia, the Tāj al-dīn, and the Misbaḥ al-Arwah — together form an integrated corpus on Islamic governance that was read and cited in West Africa into the nineteenth century. Usman dan Fodio ﵀ cites al-Maghili ﵀ extensively in his own Kitab al-Farq and Bayan wujub al-hijra. The Sokoto jurist Abdullah dan Fodio ﵀ based parts of his Diya’ al-hukkam on al-Maghili ﵀'s models. Whoever wishes to understand the intellectual history of the Sokoto Caliphate must begin with al-Maghili ﵀.
The Line on the Map
Let us pause briefly at the physical journey we must visualize, for in our cinematographic support tonight it traces itself as a long animated line across Africa.
Tlemcen at 34.88° north latitude, in western North Africa, close to the Mediterranean. From there southeast, across the Atlas, through Sijilmasa — in the fourteenth century a commercial hub, in al-Maghili ﵀'s time already in decline but still inhabited. Then into the Sahara, the great empty space, about 1,500 kilometers of sand, rock, salt mine. Gao at 16.27° north latitude, 0° east longitude — the capital of Songhai on the great bend of the Niger.
From Gao, after the time at the Askia’s court, eastward. Through Agadez, the gate of the Air. Across the high Saharan plateau with its Tuareg caravans. Then Kano at 12.00° north latitude, 8.59° east longitude. Here the journey stops. Al-Maghili ﵀ would spend his last years largely in or near Kano.
One man, two courts, three principal works, a trail of influence that is twenty-five hundred kilometers wide and five centuries deep. This is what a single mobile scholar in the pre-modern Islamic world could accomplish.
His Death and His Legacy
Al-Maghili ﵀ died around 1505, probably in Kano or on the way back north. The exact circumstances are disputed; some sources place his death in Tlemcen, others in the southern Sahara on the return journey. What is certain is that he — whether in 1503, 1504, or 1506 — died as a rich and contested man, with an intellectual oeuvre that was already read and debated among his contemporaries.
His legacy is double. On the one hand he has, more than any other individual figure, given West African Islam of the fifteenth century a juridical backbone. Without al-Maghili ﵀ the Islamization of Songhai under Askia Muhammad would have gone less deep, the court reform of Rumfa in Kano would have been less systematic, the Sokoto reformers of the nineteenth century would have had to articulate their own program in different terms. The intellectual infrastructure on which the Fulbe jihad of 1804 would build was largely laid by al-Maghili ﵀.
On the other hand, he is responsible for Touat. And for the harshness in his juridical vision that, when applied to vulnerable communities, led to violence and exclusion. His example has not only inspired the good reformers. It has also given cover to the hardliners, the people who in every century pronounced takfir against fellow Muslims of whom they expected religious purity.
For us, as Dutch Afro-Caribbean Muslims sitting at the Islemunda lecture tonight, this duality is important. We like to have simple heroes. Scholars whom we can revere. But the real Islamic tradition is richer and more honest than that simplicity allows. It has figures like al-Maghili ﵀ — brilliant, influential, indispensable for a particular historical project — and at the same time damaged by decisions that we in our time cannot justify.
To reject him entirely would mean stripping West African Islam of its foundation. To glorify him without reservation would mean closing our eyes to the people he harmed. The mature attitude lies in between: recognition, learning, and applying a higher standard where he himself did not.
The Paradox of Influence
There is something striking about the long-term influence of al-Maghili ﵀, and it is that this influence consolidated itself above all in West Africa, less in his own Maghreb. In Tlemcen and Fez he became after his death a respected but not centrally canonical figure; the great names of the Maliki school there remained al-Qadi Iyyad ﵀, Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀, Ibn 'Arafa ﵀. Al-Maghili ﵀ was one of many.
But in Songhai, in Hausaland, in Bornu, and later in the Fulbe-Sokoto Caliphate, he became a kind of founder. Why? Because he had been there physically, had taught directly, had given direct legal advice, and his writings were copied and studied on the spot. For the West African ulama he was not a name in a book but a teacher in whose lineage their own scholars stood.
This is a pattern we see more often in Islamic historiography. A figure who in his own center is one of many becomes a founder in an adjacent region. Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi in al-Andalus. Al-Ghazali ﵀ in some parts of Central Asia. The Sheikh al-Akbar Ibn Arabi ﵀ in Anatolia and Persia more than in his Andalusian birthplace. Influence does not always move along geographical lines from where the most books stand. It moves along lines from where the greatest hunger is for what a figure can specifically give.
West Africa in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century was hungry for legal consolidation. Al-Maghili ﵀ came walking up with precisely that. He was nourished.
Conclusion of Part Two of This Scene
We now have three scenes behind us in this second part of the lecture: the four Hausa cities in their bloom, the Kano Chronicle as our historical source, and Muhammad al-Maghili ﵀ as the jurist whose advice shaped the courts of Gao and Kano.
With that the fifteenth century has largely been brought into view. What comes after? For West Africa follows a period of continuation and of growing tension. The cities continue to flourish, trade continues to flow, the caravans ride. But beneath the surface new dynamics grow. The first Portuguese ships have already lain at Elmina in 1471. The Atlantic slave trade begins to organize itself. Within Songhai itself the rivalry brews between the Askia line and its competitors. And in the north Ahmad al-Mansur is preparing in Marrakesh for an expedition of which al-Maghili ﵀ would never hear but that would in one blow decimate everything he had worked for.
But that is still a hundred years away. For now we rest awhile, in that short, flourishing fourteenth–fifteenth-century period in which a Maghrebi jurist could travel through the Sahara to advise rulers, in which a Kano sarki could build up an ulama library, in which four Hausa cities could together form a civilization.
This was no primitive past. This was an Islamic world in full operation, connected from Tlemcen to Kano, from Cairo to Gao, with scholars who traveled to each other’s courts and wrote texts that commented on one another. West Africa was no backwater. It was a fully fledged province of the ummah, with its own contributions and with its own character.
And those contributions, which we have tried to retrace tonight, live on. In the Hausa cities that still exist today. In the libraries of Timbuktu. In the legal tradition that has rolled via Sokoto into modern northern Nigeria. And, via the Atlantic detour, in ourselves — Afro-Caribbean Muslims who, although we do not always know it, are heirs of this world.