Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith Book contents
- Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith
- African Studies Series
- Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Orthography and Other Conventions
- Introduction
- Part I A Nineteenth-Century Chronicle in Support of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi: Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir’s Tārīkh al-fattāsh
- 1 A Century of Scholarship
- 2 The Tārīkh al-fattāsh: A Nineteenth-Century Chronicle
- Part II A Contested Space of Competing Claims
- Part III The Circulation and Reception of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 1840s–2010s
- Index
- African Studies Series
1 - A Century of Scholarship
from Part I - A Nineteenth-Century Chronicle in Support of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi: Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir’s Tārīkh al-fattāsh
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2020
- Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith
- African Studies Series
- Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Orthography and Other Conventions
- Introduction
- Part I A Nineteenth-Century Chronicle in Support of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi: Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir’s Tārīkh al-fattāsh
- 1 A Century of Scholarship
- 2 The Tārīkh al-fattāsh: A Nineteenth-Century Chronicle
- Part II A Contested Space of Competing Claims
- Part III The Circulation and Reception of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 1840s–2010s
- Index
- African Studies Series
Summary
This chapter addresses crucial historiographical, philological, and historical questions concerning the nature of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, a widely circulated yet misinterpreted primary source for West African history. By reviewing a hundred years of scholarship on the topic and exploring West African manuscript libraries, the chapter demonstrates that the current understanding and uses of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh are radically impaired by scholars’ dependence on a defective colonial confection that passes as a critical edition produced by Houdas and Delafosse in 1913. This flawed edition and translation in fact conflates two different works: the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of the son of al-Mukhtār” and the nineteenth-century Tārīkh al-fattāsh written by the Fulani scholar Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir from the entourage of Aḥmad Lobbo, the funding leader of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.
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- Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the FaithAhmad Lobbo, the <I>Tārīkh al-fattāsh</I> and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa, pp. 43 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020