Askia Muhammad I

Askia Muhammad I, also called Askia the Great, ruled the Songhai Empire of West Africa from 1493 to 1528. A general who seized the throne from the son of the conqueror Sunni Ali, he founded the Askia dynasty, extended Songhai to its greatest size along the Niger River and into the Sahara, and reorganised its government. A devout Muslim, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, gave Islamic scholars a central place in the state and presided over the golden age of Timbuktu as a centre of learning.

Much of what is known about Askia Muhammad comes from two chronicles written in Timbuktu in the seventeenth century, the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, from the account of the traveller Leo Africanus, who visited the region early in the sixteenth century, and from Songhai oral tradition. These sources sometimes disagree, and the details of his early life are uncertain. His birth date is not known; the commonly given year of 1443 rests on his reported great age at death.

His full name in the chronicles was Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, with the additional names al-Turi or al-Sillanki. Many historians read these as the West African clan names Ture and Sila, suggesting Soninke or Tukulor ancestry on his father's side, while Songhai traditions, and his modern descendants, insist that he was fully Songhai. Tradition holds that his mother, Kassey, was a sister of Sunni Ali, and in modern Songhai he is remembered as Mamar Kassey, "Muhammad son of Kassey".

In the second half of the fifteenth century Sunni Ali turned the small kingdom of Gao on the middle Niger into an empire, taking Timbuktu in 1468 and Djenné a few years later, as the power of the Mali Empire declined. Muhammad served him as one of his leading commanders. Sunni Ali observed Islam only loosely, kept the old Songhai religious practices that underpinned royal power, and treated the scholars of Timbuktu harshly, whom he suspected of disloyalty.

When Sunni Ali died in late 1492, his son Sunni Baru succeeded him. Muhammad rose against the new king, reportedly after Baru refused to declare himself a Muslim, and drew support from Muslim scholars and the Muslim chief of Bara. In April 1493 he defeated Baru at Anfao near Gao and took power, adopting the title askia, an old Songhai military rank whose origin is unclear. The chroniclers offered a folk explanation linking it to a cry of Sunni Ali's daughters, "a si kiya", "he shall not be it", but this is not taken literally by historians.

As a usurper, Askia Muhammad needed legitimacy, and he sought it in Islam. In about 1496 or 1497 he set out on the hajj to Mecca with a large escort and a great quantity of gold, recalling the famous pilgrimage of Mansa Musa of Mali more than 170 years earlier. He gave generously to charities in the holy cities and endowed a hostel in Medina for West African pilgrims. According to the chronicles, while in Cairo he was invested by the Abbasid caliph, then a figurehead under the Mamluk sultans, as his deputy or caliph for the lands of West Africa. He returned in 1497 or 1498 as al-Hajj Muhammad, with a religious authority no Songhai ruler had held before.

He also sought advice on ruling as a Muslim. The North African scholar Muhammad al-Maghili, a strict reformer, answered his questions in writings that justified holy war against rulers who mixed Islam with traditional religion. Those replies were later cited by Islamic reformers in West Africa, including the founders of the Sokoto Caliphate in the nineteenth century.

After his return Askia Muhammad led or sent a series of campaigns that made Songhai the largest state West Africa had seen. In 1498 he attacked the Mossi kingdoms to the south, calling the war a jihad. In the west he took over much of the former Malian heartland and Diara, and in the north he controlled the trade routes and the salt mines of Taghaza in the Sahara, relying on alliances with the Tuareg. In the east his forces campaigned against the sultanate of Agadez in Aïr, and according to Leo Africanus they attacked the Hausa city-states of Katsina, Zaria and Gobir and forced Kano to pay tribute, although some historians question how far Songhai power in Hausaland really reached. An invasion of Borgu in 1505 ended in costly failure, and after a campaign against Agadez in 1515 the ruler of Kebbi, angered over his share of the spoils, broke away and blocked further Songhai expansion eastward.

Askia Muhammad's lasting achievement was administrative. He divided the empire into provinces under governors he appointed, many of them his relatives, with a viceroy, the kurmina-fari, in the west. A council of officials took charge of finance, justice, agriculture, the river fleet and relations with the desert peoples. He made the army a standing force of professional soldiers, many of them royal slaves, rather than a levy raised for each campaign, and he standardised weights and measures and policed the markets. Gao remained the capital and a great trading city, which Leo Africanus described as rich and populous.

He appointed qadis, Islamic judges, in Timbuktu, Djenné and other towns and consulted scholars closely, and under his protection Timbuktu's mosques and teaching circles flourished. Islam became the religion of the court, the towns and the trading classes, but most rural people continued to follow their traditional religions, and the askias kept some older royal rituals alongside Islamic practice. His family's patronage of learning laid the groundwork for later Timbuktu scholars such as Ahmad Baba, who was born after Askia Muhammad's death.

In old age Askia Muhammad went blind, a fact his advisers tried to hide, and his many sons fought over the succession. In 1528 his eldest son, Musa, forced him to abdicate. Musa was killed by his brothers in 1531, and his successor, Muhammad Benkan, a nephew of the old ruler, exiled Askia Muhammad to an island in the Niger. In 1537 another son, Ismail, took the throne and brought his father back to Gao, where he died in 1538, said to be well over ninety.

He was buried in Gao in the tomb that still bears his name, a seventeen-metre pyramid of mud brick built at the end of the fifteenth century, by tradition after he had seen the pyramids of Egypt on his pilgrimage, though it also follows older Saharan burial mounds. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mali.

Askia Muhammad is remembered as one of the greatest rulers of medieval West Africa. The system he built held Songhai together through the quarrels of his successors for more than sixty years, until a Moroccan army armed with muskets defeated the askias at Tondibi in 1591 and the empire broke apart (see History of Morocco). Many families in present-day Mali and Niger still trace their descent from him, and his story lives on in the Songhai oral epic of Askia Mohammed recited by griots.