Abstract
The Tārīkh al-Sūdān, the so-called Tarīkh al-fattāsh, and the Notice historique, Timbuktu’s
three famous seventeenth-century tārīkhs (chronicles) piqued the interest of Western
scholars, travellers and colonial officials since the mid nineteenth-century. The first Western
written works began to be produced at the end of the nineteenth century and burgeoned over
the twentieth century with several large projects continuing into the present century, as recent
as 2015. These works were primarily, though not exclusively, concerned with the authorship,
sources, political properties of the tārīkhs, and Timbuktu’s social history. This article is
interested in Muslim theology as a resource of the Tārīkh al-Sūdān, one the three tārīkhs. It
focuses in particular on the precepts of Ashʿarī kalām (theology) of Sunni Islam as the key
resource the author of the Tarīkh al-Sūdān.