Ibadi Muslims of North Africa

Abstract

When the eleventh-century Ibadi Muslim scholar Abu al-Rabiʿ Sulayman b. Yakhlaf al-Mazati was asked by his student whether he should consult a book of legal opinions attributed to older generations of scholars, he responded: "Of course! How have we associated with so many of those pious scholars who came before us if not through books?" 1 Both the question and its answer reveal the growing power of manuscript books in Northern Africa by the beginning of the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth centuries) to bring together scholars of different times and places, incorporating them into the same community. For a religious minority like Ibadi Muslims in the late medieval Maghrib, books complemented the webs of personal relationships connecting students and teachers. Ibadis, a Muslim minority community following neither the Sunni nor the Shiʿi traditions of Islam, lived throughout the earlier medieval centuries (the eighth-tenth centuries) in towns and villages across the southern Maghrib stretching from Sijilmasa in what is today southern Morocco to the mountains of the Jebel Nafusa in what is today northwestern Libya. In the early medieval period their communities had flourished, especially through their participation in Saharan trade. But by the eleventh century Ibadis had begun their steady numerical decline in the region. Their numbers dwindled as Arabic-speaking Sunni communities spread into regions where Berber-speaking Ibadis had previously made up the majority. Ibadi scholars responded to this existential threat through literal and literary mobilization. Itinerant students and scholars traveled widely and met together in small study circles, drawing personal and intellectual connections among different centers of learning in Northern Africa. A longstanding tradition of Saharan trade facilitated travel, and its routes provided the terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.