Gold routes formed the economic infrastructure linking the western Sudan to the Sahara and North Africa. Ghana’s ruler sought to attract Muslim traders to the capital because the prosperity of the kingdom depended on trans-Saharan gold trade. These routes therefore carried not only commodities but also merchants, religious specialists, literacy, and institutional forms of Muslim communal life.

The route described through Ghana led toward the gold-producing town of Ghiyārū, said to be eighteen days from the king’s town. Along the way stood Gharantal, described as a large territory and important kingdom whose people respected Muslim travellers even though Muslims did not live there. Ghiyārū lay twelve miles from the Nile and contained many Muslims; west of it, the Nile town of Yaresnā was inhabited by Muslims surrounded by non-Muslims, while the Banū Naghmārtah traded gold from the area.

By the middle of the eleventh century, trading centres on the Upper Senegal opposite the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure were southern outposts of Islam. As routes extended southward, Muslims established new centres that reached the fringes of the forest by the end of the fifteenth century. This dispersal of Muslim traders created a gradual religious geography shaped by commerce rather than by a single conquest.