University of Rochester Press Ransoming Prisoners in Precolonial Muslim Western Africa: 97 (Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora)

Covering a broad temporal and geographic area from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, including present-day Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Morocco, this study explores questions such as who was and wasn't a Muslim? How could and should Islamic law be implemented? What rights and protections were recognized for freeborn Muslims? What role did governments play in ensuring those rights, especially during a time when slavery was legal? Based on research conducted mostly in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and France and on Arabic-, French-, and English-language archival sources, treatises, personal correspondence, oral sources and testimony, biographical data, travel reports, and early colonial documents.