Sunni Ali Ber

By 1438, Ancient Mali had lost control of Timbuktu. The town came to be ruled by local Tuareg pastoralists until it was conquered in 1468 by Sunni Ali Ber on behalf of the newly ascendant Songhay state.

The reason that the Songhay Empire rose to such prominence was for two main reasons: it was able to control, to some extent, one of the principal trans-Saharan trade routes; and it occupied an ecological area that was especially good for raising horses. Much of Sub-Saharan Africa is very unhealthy for horses because of the prevalence of tsetse flies which cause equine trypanosomosis, which is often deadly for horses. Because of their ability to raise horses, the Songhay were able to develop a powerful cavalry, which the chronicles tell us they used to impose their power over weaker groups of people across the West African savannah. We should understand that they were also able to control a very valuable trade item in horses, which were in high demand as a mark of elite status across the subregion. The Ta’rikh al-Sudan informs us that Sunni Ali Ber, who came to power in 1464, extended the territory controlled by the Songhay state westward from its core territory centered at Gao and Kukiya in the eastern Niger Bend by a series of military conquests. When he captured Timbuktu in 1468, many of the merchants and Muslim scholars of the town fled and took refuge in Walata, 430 kilometers to the west. Some of those who remained were killed and, as a consequence, Sunni Ali Ber is represented in the texts written in Timbuktu as a “great oppressor and notorious evil-doer.”^[1682] We are told that he mocked Islam and that his true loyalty was to non-Muslim traditional religious rites. “He tyrannized the scholars and holymen, killing them, insulting them, and humiliating them.”^[1683]

Sunni Ali Ber (which means Sunni Ali “the Great”) ruled for 28 years and extended the territory controlled by the Songhay state to the west.

His conquest of Timbuktu was facilitated by the use of hundreds of boats on the Niger River. Both the Replies of al-Maghili and the Ta’rikh al-Sudan, which was written in Timbuktu 150 years after his conquest of the town, insist that he was not a good Muslim. This dim view of Sunni Ali is undoubtedly the product, at least in part, of the fact that he captured the city of Timbuktu and then set his troops free to loot it. Sunni Ali did not respect the Muslim scholars in Timbuktu or their property, and he did not heed their advice or council, we are told.

The truth about Sunni Ali is probably more complicated than this. Sunni Ali was probably, like the rulers of Ancient Mali before him, both a Muslim and a practitioner of traditional non-Muslim religious rites. We should understand Sunni Ali as legitimizing his power on the basis of both Islam (which was the language of merchant capital) and the traditional religious system based on offerings to particular shrines associated with his ancestors (which was the language of land tenure among agricultural people in the Niger Bend). This is the traditional system of a mixed Islam at the royal court—acknowledgment of Islam for outsiders and commercial interests; but a continued respect for the value of traditional religion for the bulk of the local population that continued to believe in the power of these practices. Successful politics was a balance between these different bases of political power. In Songhay, the population was likely more Muslim, or more Islamized, than the population of ancient Ghana or Mali. But traditional belief systems were nonetheless still important.

The Muslim scholars and merchants of Timbuktu called Sunni Ali Ber a magician- king. Shortly after his death in 1492, which may have been an assassination—he drowned, or was drowned, in the Niger River—his son became king. Within a matter of months, one of Sunni Ali's generals carried out a coup d' etat that killed the new king and established a new ruling line that historians refer to as the Askia dynasty.

We know this man as Askia Muhammad Ture, founder of the Askia dynasty. Askia Muhammad was able to mobilize support from the scholars in Timbuktu for his new regime. He did this in large part by granting the scholars and merchants in Timbuktu greater autonomy and respect—much more so than Sunni Ali Ber had done. Once Askia Muhammad took power, he sought to redress the mistreatment of the Muslim scholars whom he made into his supporters and advisors. As the Ta’rikh al-Sudan puts it, “the most felicitous and well-guided one became the ruler on that day, and was amir al-muminin [commander of the believers] and khalifa [the legitimate successor as ruler] of the Muslims... Through him, God Most High alleviated the Muslims' distress, and eased their tribulation.”^[1684] But because he was a usurper to the throne, and also because he was not fully Songhay in terms of his parentage (his origins were Soninke, the same people at the core of Ancient Ghana), he used Islam in a much more explicit way as the basis for the legitimacy of his rule. He claimed to be an Islamic reformer of the corrupt, non-Islamic practices of Sunni Ali Ber and the Sunni dynasty. After establishing himself in power, he quickly set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1496-1497, to further burnish his Islamic credentials.

In both the Arabic chronicles of Songhay history written in Timbuktu, and in much of the modern historiography of the Songhay Empire, Askia Muhammad is represented as a novel political figure because of the extent to which he sought to legitimize his rule on explicitly Islamic credentials.^[1685] In the older scholarship on medieval statecraft in Sahelian West Africa, the “magician king” Sunni Ali Ber and the “Muslim pilgrim” Askia al-hajj Muhammad represented ideal types in the long struggle imagined between Islam and non-Muslim “traditional” religious and political traditions. The advent of Askia Muhammad's rule was seen as marking a shift in the role of Islam in the political history of the region's major states, from a religion of commerce that coexisted with more local religious practices at the court of important states, to an explicit Islamic idiom of statecraft.^[1686] Nehemia Levtzion described the contrast and conflict between the “syncretic” Islam of Sunni Ali Ber and the more “pious” Askia Muhammad, which became a theme in the subsequent history of Sahelian Africa as Muslim reformers, especially those of the jihadist movements launched in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Fulbe scholars across West Africa, claimed that Sahelian Muslim rulers were in fact, by their failure to respect Islamic norms, non-Muslims.^[1687]

A better approach to the role of Islam in the Songhay Empire would be, in my view, to focus on the claims made by Askia Muhammad to be a just Muslim ruler who should be recognized by other Muslims residing far outside the geographic core of the Songhay state.

What Askia Muhammad asserted was a kind of symbolic authority that far outstripped his coercive power. In doing so, he invoked a complex of Islamic political concepts about the threat of disorder and the necessity of submission or allegiance (Ar. bay'a) required of all Muslims to a lawful ruler.^[1688] In Maliki jurisprudence, the dominant school of Islamic law followed in West Africa, allegiance can theoretically be withheld from a ruler only when he acts so improperly that he must be defined as a non-believer. So Askia Muhammad and his supporters among the chronicle writers had to argue that Sunni Ali Ber had been a non-believer in order to justify his ascension to power as legitimate. The audience for these claims was surely not just the Muslim scholars in Timbuktu and elsewhere who had opposed Sunni Ali Ber, what John Hunwick has called the “religious estate,”^[1689] but also a far wider group of people who identified as Muslims and had offered allegiance to Sunni Ali Ber on what were probably very similar terms (and before him, to the Ancient Mali ruler Mansa Musa). If we understand the dichotomy between Askia Muhammad and Sunni Ali Ber in this way, we are forced to rethink the nature of power and authority of the Songhay state, and to accord a greater importance to the symbolic authority of Islam in the projection of its power, under the “Sunni” dynasty as much as that of the Askias who followed.^[1690]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Sunni Ali Ber

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