The Marginalia of El Escorial Arabe 1673: A Dialogue between al-Andalus and Sixteenth-Century Timbuktu

The library at El Escorial holds an incomplete manuscript of al-Iḥāṭa fī akhbār Gharnāṭa, Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s (d. 1374/766) magisterial fourteenth-century history of Nasrid Granada – that has been misattributed. Supposedly copied in Granada in 1490, by the mid-sixteenth century it was the property of Aḥmad b. Aḥmad b. ʿUmar b. Muḥammad Aqīt (d. 991/1583), a prominent member of the scholarly community of Songhay Timbuktu. Al-Iḥāṭa’s influence, perhaps in this very manuscript, on the Aqīt family – Nayl al-ibtihāj, the biographical dictionary written by Aḥmad b. Aḥmad’s grandson Aḥmad Bābā, leans heavily on it as a source. Despite its prestigious colophon, it was almost certainly in Timbuktu that it was copied, and, more importantly, prodigiously annotated. This paper considers El Escorial Arabe 1673 as a physical embodiment of how Andalusī thought was understood and negotiated south of the Sahara. The manuscript’s biography traces the connections between the regions of the Western Islamic world, but its some 200 annotations provides unique insight into the scholarly world of Timbuktu. The many annotators provided cross-references; pointed to rhetorical flourishes they enjoyed; highlighted for themselves and their students the most important scholars. In doing they engaged in a complex, time-displaced conversation across time and space with their Mediterranean forebears, negotiating Mālikism and legacy of al-Andalus as they considered their own role within the Songhay Empire.