During the medieval period, the Arabic language and the Islamic faith spread together along trade routes across the Sahara and then gradually across Africa’s Western Sudan region. Few West African manuscripts from the medieval period survive today, and the earliest known date from the sixteenth century. However, the legacy of the movement of Arabic into West Africa is found in books like this Life of the Prophet text, which reflects the linked movement of language, faith, and trade. The scholar Al-qadi wrote a biography of the Prophet Mohammad with devotional instructions in the twelfth century. This manuscript is likely a later copy produced in North Africa and imported across the Sahara at an unknown time. It is one of about forty thousand manuscripts in the collection of Mali’s Institut des hautes études et de recherches islamiques Ahmed Baba, most acquired from private family libraries in centers of Islamic learning across Mali.
