"This book is a study of the West African chronicle known as the Tārīkh al-fattāsh (The Chronicle of the Inquisitive Researcher) and its role in advancing a political project, the legitimation of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (1818-1862), located in what is now the Republic of Mali. In reconstructing this story, I have brought together two bodies of literature that have often crossed paths, but whose relationship until now has not been fully exploited. The first is the critical scholarship produced over the past hundred years or more on the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The second is the scholarly literature on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa Islamic revolutions and the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi"--