This article examines the biographies of West African fuqahāʾ in Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbuktī’s (d. 1036/1627) ṭabaqāt works. Out of the more than seven hundred entries about the life and works of Mālikī ʿulamāʾ featured in Nayl al-ibtihāj and Kifāyat al-muḥtāj, it is peculiar that the fourteen tarājim of scholars of West African origin relate almost exclusively to those from the author’s hometown, Timbuktu, in the same self-referencing parochial manner as the Timbuktu Chronicles, and refer to intellectual activities chiefly of members of the powerful Aqīt household to which the author belonged. This study contextualizes these biographies within the tenth-/sixteenth-century West African tradition of Islamic learning and Islamic jurisprudence as well as within the general historical and sociopolitical context, situating them within Timbuktu’s eleventh-/seventeenth-century self-conscious historiographical tradition and the ideological beginnings of bīḍān hegemon
