Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the conceptualization of the Lands of the Sudan and the sub-Saharan diaspora in Ottoman Tunisia in the 1808 missive penned by the West African scholar Aḥmad b. al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the conceptualization of the Lands of the Sudan and the sub-Saharan diaspora in Ottoman Tunisia in the 1808 missive penned by the West African scholar Aḥmad b. al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī. The missive, entitled Hatk al-sitr 'ammā 'alayhi sūdānu Tūnis min al-kufr, addressed the ruler Hammuda Pacha and the 'ulamā' of the Regency, whom al-Timbuktāwī aimed at persuading of the need to ban the religious practices of "the blacks of Tunis" led by women, which he considered un-Islamic. The detraction from practices deemed un-Islamic has a long history in Islamicate writing, and women's participation in them has often been used to link them to immorality and apocalyptic consequences. This paper presents al-Timbuktāwī's admonition within this genealogy as well as indicative of the political situation at the turn of the century in both the Sudan and Tunisia. Not in the slightest degree, the missive was a reaction against the Tunisian tolerance to sub-Saharans' possession cults which jīhād leaders in West and Central Africa were endeavoring to ban in the aftermath of the Fulani war and the establishment of the Sokoto caliphate (1804-8). In Hausaland, a region where many of the sub-Saharan slaves brought into Tunisia originated from, jīhād leaders considered bori rituals polytheistic and used heavily gendered discourses to condemn them, just like al-Timbuktāwī. The paper reads the gender normative tone of the missive against the grain in order to investigate not only al-Timbuktāwī's view on the black diasporic community(mainly slaves), but that of the Husaynid rulers and Tunisian society.