The Sankore Curriculum: Inside Timbuktu's Medieval University

Long before the University of al-Qarawiyyin or the Sorbonne, Timbuktu's Sankore mosque was the intellectual epicenter of West Africa. But what did students actually study there? In this episode, Lucas and Luna pull back the shroud on Sankore's curriculum: the Maliki fiqh texts that anchored legal training, the ijazas or certificates that linked Timbuktu to Cairo and Fez, the mathematics and astronomy borrowed from al-Battani and al-Zarqali, and the surprising focus on medicine, grammar, and logic. They explore how Sankore’s system of knowledge transmission was both deeply Islamic and distinctly African—where scholars like Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti taught from the Mi'raj al-Su'ud, a legal treatise on slavery, while others copied Tarikh al-Sudan in the margins. And they ask: why did this system collapse when the Moroccan invasion of 1591 destroyed not just the city but the intellectual network that sustained it? This is the story of a curriculum that once rivaled the great universities of the world. #Sankore #Timbuktu #MaliEmpire #AhmadBaba #MalikiFiqh #Ijaza #MedievalEducation #TarikhAlSudan #WestAfrica #Songhai #AlBattani #AlZarqali #MoroccanInvasion #13thCentury #16thCentury #History #FexingoHistory #AfricanHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo