Takrur

In the geography and history books of the Mamluk age, Takrur is a people of the western Sudan on the "Sudanese Nile" — what is today called the Niger — alongside Sila and Ghana; Ibn Khaldun has it "in this era within the kingdom of the king of Mali", a destination for the merchants of the far Maghreb ¹. Al-Umari places it on the westward course of that river, which runs "to the lands of Mali and Takrur until it empties into the encircling ocean north of the town of Qalatu" ².

Ibn Khaldun, discussing the outlying climes, says that the people of Mali, Kuku and Takrur — neighbours of the land of the Maghreb — profess Islam in his era, "said to have entered it in the seventh century" ³. In Ibn Sa'id's list of the Sudan nations, quoted by Ibn Khaldun, Takrur comes in the west after Kuku: "and after them Naghala and Takrur and Lama and Tamnam and Jali and Kuri and Afkrar"; and the shaykh Uthman, jurist of Ghana's people, told Ibn Khaldun they call the Takrur "Zaghay" ⁴. The people of Ghana and Takrur raid the "Lamlam" peoples south of the river and enslave them ¹. Al-Umari also records the tomb of "Sa'd al-Takruri", a pious faqir, in a Syrian village — a small witness to the scholarly reach of its people ⁵.

• Text from the harvest copies: Ibn Khaldun's Ibar (Heliopolis 1957) pp. 33, 46, 1655, and al-Umari's Masalik al-Absar (1924) pp. 89, 106-107, 254. In the old sources "Takrur" names a people/region, not necessarily a bounded state; the political detail (ruling dynasties, the shift to "Tanda", the link of the name "Takruri" to West African soldiers in the Maghreb) awaits a specialist West African history source.