Whether or not they believe in prophecies, most people agree that such divinations are created and shared before the events they foretell. Of course, because prophets die and time marches on, what was once the future eventually becomes a present within which the predictions of past prophecies can be usefully reinterpreted or reenacted to support anything from political agendas to eschatological forebodings. There certainly have been visions from the past whose significance was only rediscovered later. But, understanding well how prophecies work, historians — and, for that matter, proponents of prophecies — know that many prophecies that are elaborated in the present only pretend to be texts from the past. Claiming prescience, some forged prophecies announce a premonition about something true in the current moment, which the purported ‘prophet’ happens already to know. This is exactly what happened in West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century when a Muslim cleric in the service of Ahmad Lobbo — aka Seeku Ahmadu and Sékou Amadou in Fulfulde and French, respectively — forged a text that has since become famous: the Târîkh al-fattâsh (‘Chronicle of the researcher’). Because forgers of prophecies, like this Muslim cleric, can be very efficient in deceiving contemporaries and future historians alike, it has taken two centuries for a scholar — Mauro Nobili, the author of the book under review — to uncover the ruse. But this is not only a detective story. Indeed, by revealing the history of this false prophecy, Nobili's book represents a huge historiographic leap forward for the history of the societies of the Middle Niger between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

In 1913, French orientalist scholar Octave Houdas and his son-in-law, the scholar-cum-colonial administrator Maurice Delafosse, published an edition of a text they called Tarikh el-fettach ou chronique du chercheur. The editors attributed the Târîkh to a sixteenth century Timbuktu historian by the name of Mahmûd Kâ‘ti. Since then, the Târîkh al-fattâsh's Arabic text and its French translation have figured in many historical works, and have even been recopied into manuscripts as a reliable Timbuktu chronicle, akin to Abd-al-Rahman al-Sa‘di's famous Târîkh al-Sûdân. That was the original sin. For as Nobili demonstrates, Houdas and Delafosse conflated several incomplete manuscript texts that they wrongly considered to be different versions of the same ancient chronicle, thus establishing both the urtext of the supposed chronicle and its variants. But they were completely misguided, as the various elements they conflated in their critical edition were not versions of the same texts. They were different texts produced by different authors centuries apart. One was an authentic seventeenth century chronicle, ascribable to a man named Ibn al-Mukhtâr (a fact already understood by Nehemia Levtzion in 1971, as acknowledged by Nobili);Footnote ¹ the other was a nineteenth-century forgery by a man named Nûh b. al-Tâhir.

The indisputable air de famille between these two texts arises from the fact that the latter was a plagiarized version of the former. By plagiarizing al-Mukhtâr's text, Nûh b. al-Tâhir ‘created’ a prophecy foretelling the coming of his patron, Ahmad Lobbo, a Fulani scholar and political leader who claimed the status of a sultan, caliph, and renewer of the faith, and who established a theocratic state, the Diina of Masina, that dominated the region between Ténenkou and Timbuktu in today's Mali. The Diina lasted from the late 1810s to the early 1860s; its capital was Hamdallâhi, southwest of Mopti. Nûh b. al-Tâhir's first draft of his retrospective prophecy (the Târîkh al-fattâsh proper, a squarely nineteenth-century work) was in turn nested like a cuckoo in Ibn al-Mukhtar's genuine Târîkh, while the nest itself was artfully ascribed to a sixteenth century scholar, Mahmûd Kâ‘ti, about whom very little was known. Al-Tâhir thus created a very plausible prophecy embedded in a (forged) text embedded in a (real seventeenth century) text falsely attributed to the sixteenth century.

Nobili provides a deep, illuminating, study of this multidimensional history. His book deals successively with the history of scholarship around the Târîkh al-fattâsh as misleadingly reconstructed by Houdas and Delafosse (Chapter One); the deconstruction of this so-called chronicle into component parts alongside an explication of how Nûh b. al-Tâhir worked (Chapter Two); the importance of the early nineteenth century Middle Niger in which Nûh b. al-Tâhir's forgery took place, particularly its religious and political contexts (Chapter Three); the resistance(s) to Ahmad Lobbo's rule and legitimacy (Chapter Four and Chapter Five), which illustrate why the ‘prophecy’ was needed in the first place; and finally how Ahmad Lobbo and his administration used the Târîkh al-fattâsh as a discursive matrix (Chapter Six).

Farewell, then, to the Chronique du chercheur, which must henceforth be considered an apocryphal Timbuktu chronicle. Some may lament that we have lost a major monument of African literature. However, thanks to Mauro Nobili's groundbreaking book, we now have a set of securely attributable historical documents, instead of a mishmash of plagiarism and forgery. Historians will appreciate this achievement, and be grateful for a much better understanding of how political agency and narrative creativity were deployed within a precolonial African state.