Probing the Theological Resources of a Seventeenth-Century tarikh: the Tarikh al-Sudan and Ashari kalam

Modern Western scholars, journalists, travellers, and colonial officials have shown an interest in Timbuktu's famous seventeenth-century chronicles ever since they heard of them in the mid nineteenth-century. The three tarikhs (chronicles) are the Tarikh al-Sudan, the so-called Tarikh al-fattash, and the Notice historique. The first Western written works began to be produced at the end of the nineteenth century and burgeoned over the twentieth century with several large projects continuing into the present century, as recent as 2015. These works were primarily, though not exclusively, concerned with the authorship, sources, and political properties of the tarikhs. This article is interested in Muslim theology as a resource of the Tarikh al-Sudan, one the three tarikhs. It focuses in particular on the precepts of Ash. ari kalam (theology) of Sunni Islam as the key resource the author of the Tarikh al-Sudan.