The history of Arabic literature from the rise of Islam up until the 19th century is characterized chiefly by its cosmopolitanism; it was not only a language of cultural production in the regions occupied by native-Arabic speakers, but throughout a large range of geographies, ranging from southeastern Europe and Central Asia to North India to the African Sahel. By the 20th century, in contrast, Arabic literature had become compartmentalized into a grouping of national literatures, less ‘Arabic’ than Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Moroccan etc. The Post-WWII organization of academic departments in Western universities has only served to further solidify this tendency. Though we continue to speak about Arabic literature in a broad sense, the Eastern part of the Arab world (meaning, in practice, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq) has been the domain of area studies departments while the countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) have been handled by French departments, generally excluding Arabic literary production altogether in favor of the Francophone. Other centers of Arabic literary production have been neglected entirely. In addition to the fragmentation of Arabic literature and culture into canons bound to individual nation-states, our critical tendency has been to divorce modern Arabic literature from its larger heritage. The post-classical and early modern periods have, since the colonial era, been dismissed as decadent, with the form adopted by the modern literary text considered the result of the importation of European models. These gaps are in a sense analogous to the tendency in Africanist scholarship to privilege colonial rather than African languages, despite the impressive variety of literary practices in indigenous languages. Yet if we are to read post-colonially, it is necessary to think outside of the epistemological frameworks that were instituted as part of the colonial enterprise.
For scholars of Arabic literature, the Sahara represents a dividing line that separates the Arabic literary cultures of North Africa from the non-Arabic speaking South. The extensive Arabic sources from West Africa dating from the 16th century onward do not yet figure into our understanding of Arabic literature. While this division is perpetuated by the current structure of academic departments, the tensions between the communities who wrote in Arabic to the north and south of the Sahara have origins predating both the dominance of Western academic models and colonialism. This paper will look at a specific encounter between Morocco and Timbuktu, the 1591 Moroccan invasion of the city. This moment will be read not only as that which would lead to the downfall of Timbuktu’s prosperity, but as the event through which the city’s scholars textually asserted their belonging to the larger Arabic literary community. The focus will be Mahmud Kati’s Tarikh al Fattash, the seventeenth century Arabic chronicle describing the Moroccan invasion, a text that exemplifies some of the complicated overlapping identity categories negotiated by the Arabic literary production of the area. The rhetoric he employs throughout relies on a series of analogical equivalences to the great centers of Arab empire. It is grounded in narrative acts meant to legitimatize his native city of Timbuktu through the classical Arabic literary canon, yet it is not an equivalence without its own claim to difference.