Assalaamu alaikum,
Alhamdulillah, the following was culled from www.cnn.com mellinium series. Check out the
website. Very interesting.
In Praise of Mansa
Musa
Malian
cities like Timbuktu and Jenni were
famed throughout the Muslim world. Their
mosques,
libraries and schools were gathering places for
intellectuals.
Their texts were adorned with Mali's
source of wealth -- gold.
Gold
also paid for royal magnificence -- the
court poetry and music in praise of
the ruler.
Legend of Mansa Musa's
wealth became so well
known in Europe that when the king was depicted
in
the most famous map of the age, the Catalan Atlas,
he was holding a
gold nugget.
But
the legends were shown to be true. During
Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca,
his
extravagance inflated the economies of the towns he
visited. The
passage of his caravan of gold was
remembered for years.
In Mali today,
people still celebrate the great
14th century king Mansa Musa. Everything
about
him, they say, exuded majesty: his stately gait, his
wives, his
concubines, the way he talked to the
people only through a spokesman.
In European maps from the
1320s onward, the
ruler of Mali was portrayed like a black
Latin
monarch. Complete with orb and scepter, he
was
seen as a sophisticate, not a savage.
By the mid-14th century,
Mali warriors had
established the Mansas' rule from Gambia
and
lower Senegal in the west to the Niger
valley
below Gao in the east, and from the upper
Niger
in the south to the Sahara in the north.
From Transworld Publishers, Ltd.
Allahumma salli wasallim
alaa Nabiyyina Muhammad. Wasalaam.
Modou Mbye