Who Wrote the Replies to al-Īsī? Islamization in the Sahel and Trans-Saharan Slavery in Early Modern Mālikī Fatāwā

Abstract This article analyzes how the currently known West African fatāwā up to the 11th/17th-century, namely the rulings by Maḥmud b. ʿUmar b. Muḥammad Aqīt, Maḫlūf al-Balbālī and Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbutkī, portray the sale of free Muslims ( bīʿ al-aḥrār ) in the premodern Sahel. It argues that the strong contradictions between Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbuktī’s Miʿrāǧ al-ṣuʿūd and his previous legal replies to Yūsuf al-Īsī may justify to affirm that these Aǧwiba were not authored by the Timbuktu scholar, and suggests that the reasons for their elaboration and their attribution to him may be related to the interests of traders from the Maghreb, where the manuscripts of the Aǧwiba were found and the Replies supposedly emitted. This study brings forward the hypothesis that the aim of the text may have been to reduce the impact that the extraordinary measure of accepting the enslaved person’s qawl when declaring to have been illicitly captured at times and places where the sale of unenslaveable persons is attested, found in the Sahelian rulings but also in preceding Andalusi and Maghrebian rulings, could have probably caused in putting the indiscriminate sale of West African captives into question. This would also imply the existence of voices against their sale, probably because the adherence to Islam of the enslaved persons must have been clearly manifest.