İslamic History

The new movie Black Panther depicts a fictional African king, T'Challa, as one of the wealthiest people in the world. But you don't have to go into the realm of fiction to find wealthy African rulers.

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The Malian sultan, Mansa Musa, was one of the wealthiest people in history. On his way to Hajj in 1324, he and his entourage gave out so much gold that they inadvertently devastated many local economies, with the price of gold devalued for the next decade due to inflation.

When he returned to Mali, he used his new contacts throughout the Muslim world to encourage the growth of institutes of learning. In Timbuktu he funded the Sankore Madrasa, which soon became one of the largest institutes in the Muslim world.

The level of education in West Africa became so high that in the 1400s, when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Tamīmī, a scholar from the Arabian Peninsula, came to Timbuktu to teach, he was not even qualified to study in Timbuktu and has to take prerequisite courses in Morocco first.

Despite devastating French imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, much of Timbuktu's intellectual heritage has been preserved through its manuscripts. Many digitized manuscripts can be found here