The social advancement of the Aqīts, the most powerful scholarly household
of 10th/16th century Timbuktu, has traditionally been considered as meteoric,
and although their prior socioeconomic condition has not received sufficient
attention, it is a good example of how specialized scholarship aided power–
ful households to reach and consolidate social and political leadership. Just a
few decades after their arrival in the city, and without previous dedication to
scholarship, the Aqīt household reached the top of its learned elites in what
has been known as Timbuktu’s golden age. Their story, which was told by
the last of the members of the prestigious lineage, Aḥmad Bābā al–Tinbuktī
(963/1556–1036/1627), as well as by other contemporary sources, exemplifies
the careers of the elite of the ʿulamāʾ in premodern West Africa. In fact, the
history of the Aqīts is one of the very rare accounts of learned households
which can be drawn from West African sources before the 11th/17th century,
an account for which the information available is relatively sufficient enough
in order to be considered as representative of the intellectual life of the pre–
modern bilād al-sūdān before the Moroccan invasion of the Songhay Empire
in the year 999/1591, in spite of the evident tendentiousness of the sources.

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