Around 1300 CE, so the legend goes, the king of the Malian empire in West Africa hatched a plan. He believed that the earth was round and wanted to prove it, so he equipped 200 boats full of men and another 200 full of gold, water and victuals, and sent them west. After a long time only one boat returned, reporting that ‘we have navigated for a long time, until we saw in the midst of the ocean as if a big river was flowing violently’.1 Not happy with the answer of the only boat to escape the danger, the king doubled down, and equipped 2,000 boats for a second voyage. This time he travelled with them. Just before he left he put his deputy in charge. The king and his fleet never returned. In 1312 this deputy became the tenth ruler of the Mali empire. His name was Mansa Musa.

The first chapter uses the lens of intersectionality to explore three different case studies involving masjid space on the continent. The first case study focuses on the development of spaces such as the Open Mosque (South Africa), which actively provides a space where men and women can engage equitably in performative spirituality. The second case study continues this discussion with the Al-Fitre Foundation, which is currently the continent’s first openly LGBT+ congregation and moves beyond gender-equitable sites to promote spaces for Muslims whose sexual identity does not conform to that traditionally interpreted by Islamic doctrine. The third case study addresses the destruction of Timbuktu’s masjid landscape by extremist group Ansar Dine in 2012 towards demonstrating that just as masjid spaces can empower identity, they can also disrupt, intervene, and even destroy it, given its function as a spatial text that articulates the specific sociopolitical character of its context.

This chapter describes shifting coalitions in northern Mali, especially in the critical phase of 2012–2013, when al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) deepened a remarkable set of alliances with local politicians. These “circumstantial jihadists” had a temporary but real effect on the character of the jihadist movement in northern Mali in 2012, positioning the jihadist coalition as a kind of “jihadism lite” that was open to negotiations with regional governments. Even after they left the jihadist camp in 2013 amid France’s military intervention, these elites may have continued to play a role in the trajectory of jihadism in the region, as rumors circulate that they remain in contact with jihadists operating in the shadows. The chapter argues that jihadists built a wide coalition in northern Mali in 2012 by offering political resources to local politicians, but that this coalition was doomed to fracture precisely because it was so diverse.

This chapter explores the expansion of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi in the Niger Bend in the 1820s. Aḥmad Lobbo exercised his control over these areas by a combination of coercion, the appointment of local representatives, and the installation of functionaries sent from the capital; but also by seeking, with varying degrees of success, the cooperation of the powerful Kunta scholarly clan of the Niger Bend and Azawād. However, while the Kunta had accepted the rule of Ḥamdallāhi, their support for Aḥmad Lobbo was only partial and limited to political domain. The Kunta never gave up their role as the ultimate religious authority of the region, and tension flared at times between them and Ḥamdallāhi, as in the case of the never-resolved tobacco dispute and that of the Kunta’s mediation with the leaders of rebellions against the caliphate.

This chapter addresses crucial historiographical, philological, and historical questions concerning the nature of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, a widely circulated yet misinterpreted primary source for West African history. By reviewing a hundred years of scholarship on the topic and exploring West African manuscript libraries, the chapter demonstrates that the current understanding and uses of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh are radically impaired by scholars’ dependence on a defective colonial confection that passes as a critical edition produced by Houdas and Delafosse in 1913. This flawed edition and translation in fact conflates two different works: the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of the son of al-Mukhtār” and the nineteenth-century Tārīkh al-fattāsh written by the Fulani scholar Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir from the entourage of Aḥmad Lobbo, the funding leader of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.