Timbuktu’s scholarly society developed through the meeting of several regional traditions. Sudanese scholars had long been present under Mali, while the city later attracted Arab and Berber merchants and scholars from the northern Sahara and the Maghrib. Sanhaja scholars connected with Walata formed a new community around the Sankore mosque, alongside the older scholarly quarter of Jingerber.

Education was organised through numerous Quranic schools and circles of advanced study. Students gathered in the principal mosques and in the homes of leading scholars to study exegesis, prophetic traditions, jurisprudence, logic, syntax, rhetoric, and related Islamic sciences. A student who completed a text received an ijaza authorising him to teach it, creating chains of transmission that preserved distinct traditions of scholarship.

The Aqit and And-ag-Muhammad families became the nucleus of a new Timbuktu aristocracy. Their members occupied the office of qadi across the sixteenth century under the askiyas of Songhay. The scholars’ authority extended beyond teaching: they influenced imperial policy, defended legal principles, and participated in the political leadership of the city.

The community also included practitioners of asceticism and Sufi-oriented piety. Scholars could be wealthy, receiving land, slaves, money, clothing, and gifts from rulers and merchants. Sufi influences arrived from the Maghrib and were later enriched through contacts with Mecca and Cairo, although the excerpt stresses that there is no evidence for the formal introduction of Sufi brotherhoods into Timbuktu before the middle of the seventeenth century.