Recording link
Kenncode: w?PqUZ01

Zoom Webinar Link

Abstract

Al-Suyūṭī is widely seen as one of the most important Muslim scholarly authorities in West Africa. Manuscript copies of al-Suyūṭī’s works are plentiful in the region in a wide range of subjects (for example, there are 187 extant copies of al-Suyūṭī works in the main public archive in Timbuktu, Mali). The paper will present the most widely attested titles in the region as part of an effort to evaluate al-Suyūṭī’s particular contribution to the ‘core curriculum’ of what became the Muslim intellectual tradition in West Africa. In addition, the paper will examine the connections between al-Suyūṭī and Muslim West African scholars in a well-known exchange of letters and accounts written by al-Suyūṭī himself of receiving West African visitors. It will also discuss more fanciful insertions of al-Suyūṭī into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West African pseudo-historical writings as a key Middle Eastern Arab figure conferring authority on particular West African lineages and political claimants.

Bio

Bruce S. Hall is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, having previously taught at Duke University, University at Buffalo (SUNY), and Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2005). His first book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) was the co-winner of the American Historical Association’s Martin Klein Prize for best book in African History in 2012. He has published articles in the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, the Journal of North African Studies, African Economic History, Afriques, L’Ouest Saharien, Antropologia, and Black Camera. Much of his research has been based in Timbuktu, Mali and he is currently continuing research focused on circum-Saharan commercial networks connecting Ghadames and Timbuktu in the nineteenth century. His research focuses on the social, economic and intellectual history of the West African Sahel and Sahara. He is the general editor of a bibliographic database of Arabic manuscript materials from across West Africa called the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (WAAMD), which can be accessed at https://waamd.lib.berkeley.edu/home.

Download Program