Al-Sahili

The man beside him on the barge that day, watching the same rooftops with an entirely different kind of attention, was not Malian at all.

Abu Ishaq al-Sahili had been born in Granada, in the sun-washed hills of Al-Andalus, into a world of horseshoe arches and carved plaster and courtyards where water moved in channels cut precisely to catch the light.

He was a poet by training and reputation, celebrated in the courts of the Maghreb for verses that could turn a patron's ear the way a key turns a lock.

But it was not his poetry that had caught Musa's attention in Cairo.

He turns from the terrace and makes his way down through the palace, past guards who incline their heads without meeting his eyes, past servants already at work polishing the brass fittings of the doorways his craftsmen installed after his return from Egypt.

The palace itself has changed since the Hajj.

No longer simply a fortress of packed earth and timber, but a structure with genuine architectural ambition, its walls faced with the burnt brick technique his Andalusian architect, Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, taught the local builders before his death some years past.

Al-Sahili is gone now, but his methods remain, carried forward by Malian masons who learned quickly and well, and Musa takes a quiet satisfaction in knowing that the knowledge did not leave with the man who brought it.

Yep, exactly.

So, um, for instance, Mansa Musa brought an Andalusian poet named Al-Sahili back to Mali with him from pilgrimage.

Um, so around 50 years after the pilgrimage, so of course long after Mansa Musa has died, um, another Andalusian Muslim scholar, a guy named Ibn Khaldun, um, who never went to Mali, um, and wasn't there at the time of these events happening, wrote for some reason, um, that he had heard from a guy who was in Mali that, um, this guy Al-Sahili had designed and decorated an audience hall for Mansa Musa in the capital of the Mali Empire, and that Mansa Musa had paid Al-Sahili around 50 kilograms of gold after this, um, took place because he was so delighted by this poet's work because there was quote, uh, because quote, "Architecture was unknown in this country." [laughs]

I'm gonna be an, I'm gonna be an annoying architecture nerd and say, well, if you've ever seen a building-

[laughs]

... which is not an explicitly Muslim style of architecture.

It's traditional and evolved from vernacular, so sort of local, um, styles of architecture that drew much more on, you know, the building materials and the environment than on sort of conscious, like, design, but then did evolve into something quite sort of architectural and complex when it was used in, uh, mosques and other mon- monumental bits of architecture.

And it's, yeah, just a bit of a farce to say that a random Andalusian guy, who was a poet, by the way, he was not an architect-