{
 "id": "source/wikipedia-sonni-ali-en",
 "class": "source",
 "slug": "wikipedia-sonni-ali-en",
 "label": {
  "en": "Sonni Ali — English Wikipedia"
 },
 "summary": {
  "ar": "مقالة ويكيبيديا الإنجليزية عن سوني علي بير ⁦(حكم نحو 1464–1492)⁩، خامس عشر حكام أسرة سوني ومؤسس إمبراطورية سونغاي؛ فتح تمبكتو وجني ودلتا النيجر الداخلية، وتصف المقالة ديانته التوفيقية المتنازع عليها بين إسلام معلن وممارسات تقليدية، وخلاف المؤرخين المسلمين معه، ووفاته سنة 1492.",
  "en": "English Wikipedia article on Sonni Ali Ber (r. c. 1464–1492), fifteenth ruler of the Sonni dynasty and founder of the Songhai Empire; he conquered Timbuktu, Djenne and the Inner Niger Delta, and the article sets out his contested religious profile — a professed Islam alongside traditional practice, and the hostility of the Muslim chroniclers — and his death in 1492."
 },
 "stub": false,
 "wings": [],
 "regions": [],
 "periods": [],
 "tags": [],
 "aliases": [],
 "themes": [],
 "data": {
  "kind": "reference_data",
  "title": "Sonni Ali",
  "author": [
   {
    "family": "Wikipedia contributors",
    "given": ""
   }
  ],
  "issued": {
   "date-parts": [
    [
     2026,
     10,
     21
    ]
   ]
  },
  "publisher": "Wikipedia (English), revision 1381311036 of 21 October 2026",
  "URL": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonni_Ali",
  "language": "en",
  "reliability_note": "Read in full on 1 November 2026. The article rests on the Tarikh al-Sudan and Tarikh al-Fattash kinglists and narratives (in Levtzion's Cambridge History of Africa chapter), sources written under or for the Askia dynasty that overthrew his house, and it says so itself: funeral stelae from Kukiya cast doubt on the chroniclers' picture. It gives no birth year — his accession falls about 1464 — and dates his death to 6 November 1492 on the Tarikh al-Sudan's account of a drowning while crossing the Niger, marked in the article as conjecture, against an oral tradition that his sister's son Askia Muhammad killed him. On religion it reports both that he observed the prayers, fasted and gave alms and that he venerated trees and stones and would not accept the sharia in Songhai, citing al-Maghili's condemnation and Toby Green's qualification; no source read names a school or order for him.",
  "type": "web",
  "open_access": true,
  "status": {
   "review": "published",
   "generated_by": "Muse (Muse Spark 1.3)"
  }
 },
 "prose": {},
 "degree": 0,
 "contemporaries": [],
 "updated": "2026-11-06",
 "connections": [],
 "related": [],
 "license": {
  "prose": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
  "data": "CC0 1.0"
 }
}