Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

Baghayu'u); there are no other records of his activity until 1594, when he was deported to Morocco over accusations of sedition, after the Moroccan invasion of Songhai where he remained in Fez until the death of Ahmad al-Mansur.

[8] A fair amount of the work he was noted for was written while he was in Morocco, including the biography of Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Maghili, a scholar and jurist responsible for much of the traditional religious law of the area.

According to William Phillips, al-Timbukti essentially advocated religion-based slavery instead of racial-slavery, with Muslims of any ethnicity being immune from being enslaved.

He goes on to use the analogy that when one country is conquered and contains nonbelievers, then those persons could be enslaved as part of his stance on any other outsider or religion besides Islam.

This is a different kind of thinking in comparison to the works of William D. Phillips Jr., who wrote The Middle Ages Series: Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia.

Another contradicting idea, discussed in the article Slavery in Africa by Suzanne Meirs and Igor Kopytoff, was that enslavement was based on people who are forced out of their homeland into a completely foreign area, tying into Ahmad's beliefs.

But in Ahmad Bābā's perspective, if one converted to Islam and were once an “unbeliever” before being enslaved, then that individual would still hold that title of being a slave.