Kenneth's Ch 18 Outline Pt 1

Kenneth Li Euro Hist. 2-29-08 Period 6th Ch. 18 pg 493-515 I. Africa A. The Spread of Islam South of the Sahara 1) Sahelian Empires of the Western and Central Sudan B. The Eastern Sudan 1) The Forestlands-Coastal West and Central Africa 2) East Africa 3) Southern Africa C. North Africa and Egypt 1) Egypt and other North African societies played a central role in Islamic and Mediterranean history after 1000 c.e. From Tunisia to Egypt, Sunni religious and political leaders and their Shi’ite, especially Isma’ili, counterparts struggled for the minds of the masses. 2) In politics, this period witnessed the influential dynasties of the Fatimids, the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans across most of Mediterranean Africa. i) Morocco, ruled by a succession of Sharifs, was the only North African sultanate to remain fully independent after 1700. D. The Spread of Islam South of the Sahara 1) In East Africa, Muslim traders moving down the coastline with the ancient monsoon trade routes had begun the “Islamization” of port towns and coastal regions even before 800 c.e. i) Yet as in East Africa, wherever Islamization occurred, its agents were traders, chiefly Berbers who plied the desert routes to trading towns such as Awdaghast on the edge of the Sahel, as early as the eight century. E. Mali 1) In the mid-thirteenth century the Keita ruling clan of a Ghanaian successor kingdom, Mali, forged a new and lasting empire. i) The Keita kings dominated enough of the Sahel to control the flow of West African gold from the Senegal regions and the forestlands south of the Niger to the trans-Saharan trade routes, and the influx of copper and especially salt in exchange. ii) The Malinke, a southern Mande-speaking people of the upper Niger region, formed the core population of the new state. 2) The Keita dynasty had converted early to Islam and even claimed descent from Muhammad’s famous muezzin Bilal, a former black slave from Abyssinia whose son was said to have settled in the Mandespeaking region. Mali’s imperial power was built largely by one leader, the Keita King Suniata. Sundiata and his successors, aided by significant population growth in

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western Savannah, exploited their agricultural resources and Malinke commercial skills to build an empire even more powerful than Ghanaian predecessor. i) Many individual chieftaincies retained much of their independence but recognized the sovereignty of the supreme, sacred mansa, or “emperor,” of the Malian realms. ii) The greatest Keita king proved to be Mansa Musa, whose pilgrimage through Mamluk Cairo to Mecca in 1324 became famous in Egypt and elsewhere abroad. 3) Under his rule, Timbuktu became known far and wide for his madrasas and libraries, and for its poets, scientists, and architects, making the city the leading intellectual center of sub-Saharan Islam as well as a major trading city of the Sahel-roles it retained long after Mali’s imperial dominance ended. Mali’s dominance waned after Musa’s times, most sharply in the fifteenth century, evidently as the result of destructive rivalries for succession to the mansa’s throne. F. Songhai 1) For the next century the kingdom flourished, but not until the reign of the greatest Sunni ruler, Sunni Ali, did it become an imperial power. Sonni Ali made the Songhai empire so powerful in the entire upper Niger region and beyond that it dominated the political history of the Western Sudan for more than a century and was arguably the most powerful state in Africa. i) Taking advantage of their control of access to the gold and other desirable commodities of West Africa, they emulated their Ghanaian predecessors in cultivating and expanding the ancient caravan trade across the Sahara to the North African coast of Libya and Tunisia. This provided their major source of wealth.