Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh Al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgements -- Notes on orthography and other conventions -- Introduction -- part 1. A nineteenth-century chronicle in support of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi : Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir's Tārīkh al-fattāsh. -- A century of scholarship -- The Tārīkh al-fattāsh : a nineteenth-century chronicle. -- part 2. A contested space of competing claims : the Middle Niger, 1810s-1840s. -- The emergence of clerical rule in the Middle Niger -- Aḥmad Lobbo, Timbuktu, and the Kunta -- Fluctuating diplomacy : Ḥamdallāhi and Sokoto. -- part 3. The circulation and reception of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 1840s-2010s. -- The Tārīkh al-fattāsh at work -- Conclusion.

"This book is a study of the West African chronicle known as the Tārīkh al-fattāsh (The Chronicle of the Inquisitive Researcher) and its role in advancing a political project, the legitimation of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (1818-1862), located in what is now the Republic of Mali. In reconstructing this story, I have brought together two bodies of literature that have often crossed paths, but whose relationship until now has not been fully exploited. The first is the critical scholarship produced over the past hundred years or more on the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The second is the scholarly literature on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa Islamic revolutions and the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi"-- Provided by publisher.