Agadez

Agadez (in the Aïr mountains, Repub-lic of the Niger), has played an important political, economic, and religious role in central Sahara and central Sudan since the ninth/fifteenth century. It is the seat of a sultan and a religious centre with a famous mosque. It was a crossroads for caravans travelling between North Africa and Hausaland and between Tim-buktu and Egypt. The region is inhabited mainly by Tuareg, although the popula-tion of Agadez is mixed, mostly Hausa and Tuareg. It was Hausa (Gobirawa) territory before Tuareg settled in the Aïr and in Agadez. Agadez is first mentioned by Leo Africanus (957/1550). The first detailed description by a European trav-eller was written by the German travel-ler Heinrich Barth (d. 1865), who visited Agadez in 1850.

The dynasty of the sultans of Aga-dez began with Yunus (r. 807/1404– 5-827/1424). The official court version traces the origin of the dynasty back to Constantinople. A Tuareg delegation begged the sultan to give them one of his sons as their sultan, in order to impose an

external authority on the Tuareg groups in conflict with each other. This version, which is still told at the court in Agadez today, is wrong, but it is correct in suggest-ing that Tuareg were involved in founding the sultanate and that the sultan does not belong to any of the groups living in the Aïr. In the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century, the sultan moved his seat to Aga-dez. He was (and still is) elected from the original dynasty by various Tuareg groups and was often deposed. He controlled Agadez and its external trade, but he had no military apparatus of his own and could only mediate amongst Tuareg tribes.

In the following centuries, the sultanate had relations with the rulers of Songhay, with Bornu, and with the Hausa king-doms, and, in the nineteenth century, also with the caliphate of Sokoto. In the tenth/sixteenth century the sultan was obliged to pay tribute to the Songhay empire. This was a period of security and prosperity for the sultanate. The subsequent centuries were marked by wars and raids involving various Tuareg groups, as well as Arabs and Toubou (Ar. Tb).

Agadez owes its economic importance to the caravan trade. The west-east route

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led from Timbuktu to Egypt via Gao, Agadez, Bilma, and Murzuk, while the north-south route ran from Tripoli to Kano via Ghadames, Ghat, and Agadez. Duties from the caravan trade were the sultan’s most important source of income.

At the time of Barth’s visit in 1850, Agadez was at a low point. Barth esti-mated the population at seven thousand, whereas it must have been nearer fifty thousand at the height of its prosperity, in the tenth/sixteenth century. Of great eco-nomic importance at all times was the salt trade between Bilma, Agadez, and Hausa-land. These caravans often consisted of several thousand camels and were thus an attractive target for raids. The salt trade still exists, albeit on a smaller scale.

The first minaret of the mosque of Agadez, today the town’s best known landmark, was built in the early tenth/sixteenth century at the bidding of Sheikh

Zakariya (Shaykh Zakariyya). Just as the sultan had little control over the Tuareg tribes, the mosque of Agadez, though renowned, was not the centre of learning and piety in the Aïr. To this day, Mus-lims in the Aïr venerate Sidi Mahmud Al-Baghdadi (Sd Mamd al-Baghdd), a f mystic who came to the Aïr from the east in early tenth/sixteenth century and preached there before he died as a martyr. To this day, the inisleman (Islamic scribes) influenced by him contrast with the warriors of the Tuareg imajeghan (aristocracy). Sidi Mahmud’s influence stretched beyond the Aïr, as far as Sokoto.

With the beginning of the French colonial period (1905), the sultan lost his power, but the sultanate still exists today. A Tuareg uprising led by Kawsan (d. 1919) in 1916–7 tried in vain to defeat the French colonial forces. During the colo-nial period, vegetable gardening began

Illustration 1. The mosque of Agadez in 1850. Drawing by Henry Barth.

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in the valleys of the Aïr and is today the most important economic activity of the population. Its development was due not least to Islamic clerics who preferred the sedentary occupation of gardening to a nomadic way of life.

After the 1970s there was an increase in tourism, boosted in 2013 by the decla-ration of the Historic Centre of Agadez, with the mosque and the sultan’s palace, as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Since the 1990s, however, tourism has declined. Agadez and the Aïr have been the scene of several Tuareg rebellions, although, unlike in Mali, they have had no Islamist support.

Uranium has been mined in the Agadez region since the 1970s and has become the most important source of income for the government. The traditional caravan trade has lost its importance, but, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Agadez is the hub of a modern, largely illegal, trans-Saharan trade in drugs and migrants from neighbouring countries to the south who travel through the Sahara with the aim of reaching Europe.

BibliographyAboubacar Adamou, Agadez et sa région, Nia-

mey 1979; Henry (Heinrich) Barth, Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa. Being a journal of an expedition undertaken under the auspices of H. B. M.’s government in the years 1849–1855, five vols., London 1857–8; Djibo Hamani, Au carrefour du Soudan et de la Berbérie. Le sul-tanat touareg de l’Ayar, Niamey 1989; Leo Afri-canus, La descrittione dell’Africa, in Giovanni Battista Ramusio (ed.), Navigatione et viaggi, Venice 1550; Henri Lhote, Suzanne Bernus, and Salem Chaker, Agadez, in Encyclopédie berbère (Aix-en-Provence 1984–), 229–36; H. T. Norris, The Tuaregs. Their Islamic legacy and its diffusion in the Sahel, Warminster 1975; H. T. Norris, f mystics of the Niger desert. Sd Mamd and the hermits of Aïr, Oxford 1990; Jean-Louis Triaud, Hommes de religion et confréries islamiques dans une société en

crise, l’Aïr aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 23/91 (1983), 239–80; Y. Urvoy, Chroniques d’Agadès, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 4/2 (1934), 145–77; Issoufou Yahaya, Agadès, 1000 ans d’histoire. Splendeur évanouie d’une ville romantique au cœur du Sahara, Saarbrücken 2012.

Gerd Spittler

Arif Çelebi

Arif (rif ) Çelebi (eh-nameci Fethul-lah Çelebi/eh-nmeci Fetullh Çelebi, d. after 971/1563–4) was the first holder of the post of eh-name-guy (eh-nme-gy, c. 952?–71/1545?–63), established during the reign of Sultan Süleyman (Süleymn) I (r. 926–74/1520–66). The eh-nameci, a term used interchangeably with eh-name-guy in Ottoman sources, was the composer of eh- names (eh-nmes, king’s books), historical works composed consciously in the liter-ary style of the Shh-nma of Firdaws and generally containing a chronological nar-rative of part or all of Ottoman dynastic history. Arif Çelebi was also the author of Shh-nma-yi l-i Uthmn, a Persian history of the Ottomans.

1. LifeHis name was Fethullah, but he wrote

under the pen names Arif and Arifi (rif). He was the grandson of brahim Güleni (brhm Gülen, d. 940/1534), the founder of the Güleniye (Güleniyye), a branch of the Halveti (Khalwat) f order, with whom he is known to have had a very close relationship. His place and date of birth are unknown; he may have been born in Cairo, where his grandfather and his father, Dervi Mehmed (Derv Memed) Çelebi, both lived.

For many years, modern scholars believed that Arif moved to Istanbul in