Product Description: The extraordinary manuscripts of Timbuktu: invaluable historical documents, objects of tremendous beauty, and a testament to a great center of learning and civilization.For centuries, trading caravans made epic journeys across the Saharan sands to reach the markets of the legendary city of Timbuktu, where they traded salt, gold, slaves, textiles―and books...read more

Product Description: West Africa is defined as the area south of the Sahara between the Atlantic and Lake Chad, encompassing the Sahel zone, tropical forests, and pasturelands. West Africans speak languages belonging to three major families: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic, as well as the official languages, French and English, introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...read more

Product Description: The principal text translated in this volume is the Ta r kh Al-s d n of the seventeenth-century Timbuktu scholar Abd al-Rah m n al-Sa d . Thirty chapters are included, dealing with the history of Timbuktu and Jenne, their scholars, and the political history of the Songhay empire from the reign of Sunni Al (1464-1492) through Moroccan conquest of Songhay in 1591 and down to the year 1613 when the Pashalik of Timbuktu became an autonomous ruling institution in the Middle Niger region...read more

Presents a collection of primary materials on the enslavement of Africans in Islamic countries of the Mediterranean, covering such topics as Muslim views on slavery, the capture and sale of slaves, and the types of labor they performed. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Eventually to be completed in six volumes, "Arabic Literature of Africa" will provide a survey of Muslim authors writing in Arabic in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa and a bibliography of their works. Falling within the tradition of the great works of Brockelmann and Sezgin, it will form a basic reference tool for the study of Arabic writing in areas of the African Islamic world that fall outside the parameters of these works...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The second volume of Arabic Literature of Africa (of which six volumes are planned) deals with the literature of Central Sudanic Africa, i.e. the area lying between the present Republic of the Sudan and Mali. The bulk of the work concerns Nigeria, which has produced a voluminous and varied Arabic-Islamic literature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)