Timbuctù e le sue sorelle : città mirabili nel bilād al-Sūdān

Timbuktu and its sisters: Marvelous cities in the bilād al-Sūdān · The present article discusses some images and clichés of sub-Saharan West African cities that can be found in precolonial Arabic sources in the light of Angelo Arioli’s Le città mirabili (2003), which identified some distinctive traits of (real or imagined) “wondrous cities” in medieval Arabic sources. Analogies and variations on the same themes are highlighted, alongside absences and significant differences. In cases like Timbuktu, the wondrous is declined not so much in terms of exotic Otherness as, instead, in terms of Islamic exemplarity in an alien context. In other cases, shared conventional images like “refounded” “impervious” or “multiple” cities are apparently even more related to issues of liminality between the world of Islam and the world of the Other. Overall, the acknowledgement of a local pre-Islamic urban tradition arguably contributed to represent West African “wondrous cities” in terms at least partly familiar to the Arabic literary tradition.