Mauritania's Chinguetti: a city holding eight centuries of Islamic heritage
A historic Mauritanian town whose name designated the entire country across the Islamic world for centuries, Chinguetti played a leading religious, cultural and economic role along the old trade routes.
Today it preserves cultural treasures in libraries holding rare manuscripts, while facing a harsh climate and the stalling of Mauritania's development plans.
Name and history
The origin of the name "Chinguetti" remains unsettled. The most common view derives it from "the springs of the horses" in one of the region's now-extinct local languages; another traces it to the name of a nearby mountain.
A third reading links it to the Arabic word shaqit, which dictionaries generally render as pottery, or as the ceramic jars in which water is stored — though it is unlikely that classical Arabic influenced place names at so early a date.
In the local dialect the name is pronounced "Shingîti" (with a hard g), but over time the form "Chinguetti" prevailed, particularly through the written tradition and the spread of the name abroad.
Oral traditions — heavily contradictory — date the town's origins to the 8th century CE / 2nd century AH, with the founding of the settlement of "Abweir" in 777 CE / 160 AH, near the site of present-day Chinguetti.
According to these accounts, "Abweir" was the "first Chinguetti," as Ahmed Mouloud al-Hilal reports from the manuscript Tarikh Ibn Habt, by one of the town's scholars. These traditions connect the town at this stage to the rise of the Almoravid state in the desert of the veiled Lamtuna.
Whether or not the town inherited an older settlement from which the urban and human centre of gravity shifted, most sources date the founding of present-day Chinguetti to some eight centuries ago — around the mid-13th century (1262 CE / 666 AH) — when it was among the important commercial centres on the caravan routes crossing the Sahara between West and North Africa.
One of the earliest references to the town comes from the Timbuktu historian Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di (d. 1656) in his Tarikh al-Sudan, introducing the Timbuktu judge "Muhammad Nadd," of Chinguetti origin, who wielded great influence under the Tuareg chief Akil.
Akil ruled Timbuktu around 1433, meaning the town existed in the first half of the 15th century — as Ahmed Mouloud al-Hilal reports on the authority of Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh.
In the early 16th century, the German author and translator resident in Portugal, Valentim Fernandes, referred to Chinguetti as the third most important inhabited town in the country at that time.
Chinguetti saw periods of prosperity from the 13th century onward, but its most striking flourishing began in the 18th century. The town secured its place as a scholarly and spiritual centre and served as a departure point for pilgrimage to the Holy Cities — a renown that spread far enough for its name to be applied to the whole country, especially in the lands of the Muslim East.
Several intertwined factors drove this: the pilgrim caravan that set out from it toward the Holy Cities; scholars travelling east to perform the hajj, debate with fellow scholars and acquire libraries — some of whom settled there, in Egypt, the Hijaz, Iraq and Sudan.
With this shift, Chinguetti no longer meant only the desert town hemmed in by the sands and mountains of Adrar; it lent its name to a vast human and territorial space, where the Sanhaja and Banu Hassan tribes fused with other components, and where social institutions took shape.
There gradually emerged the type of "the Saharan of Chinguetti, embedded in a desert civilisation shaped by Islam," in the words of the late Mauritanian historian Mohamed Ould Mouloud al-Shinnafi.
Geographical setting
The town lies in the north-western corner of the great African Sahara, in the wilaya of Adrar, about 90 km east of Atar, the region's administrative centre.
The Adrar mountains flank it to the north and west, while it opens eastward onto the vast desert, some 660 km from the border with Mali.
Chinguetti sits on the Adrar plateau in central north-western Mauritania, more than 400 km east of the Atlantic Ocean, at close to 500 metres above sea level.
Climate and water resources
Daytime temperatures are high and fall sharply at night, reaching 49 °C in heatwaves while lows drop to 10 °C. The annual average maximum is 35.7 °C and the average minimum 24.7 °C.
The climate is arid, evident in the scarcity of rain throughout the year, with rainfall not exceeding 8.5 mm annually — a major contributor to desertification and encroaching sands.
The town has fresh groundwater sources, but their level is threatened by continuous decline, as extraction increases and rainfall is too scarce to replenish the reserve.
Economy
The town's economy historically rested largely on trans-Saharan trade, which made it a commercial hub and sustained its prosperity for centuries through goods of which gold and salt were foremost.
Chinguetti was a key stop on the caravan route known as the "Lamtuni road" of trans-Saharan trade in West Africa, linking African lands to the cities of the Maghreb by way of the main desert towns.
It formed the link between the settlements strung along the caravan routes; the mines lent the desert town economic weight, placing it at the centre of commercial exchange alongside the goods passing through — dates, hides, cloth and camels.
As Atlantic trade gathered momentum over time, caravan trade through the Sahara's historic towns dwindled, amid scarce resources and outward migration, leaving these towns in economic difficulty.
The town's standing declined accordingly, as the need to carry goods on camelback gradually disappeared with the rise of maritime transport and Atlantic commerce.
The European presence on the Atlantic coasts turned into colonisation, which came to control several countries, greatly altered patterns of global trade, and transformed the means of production and transport.
Despite these challenges, the town has kept standing against storms and sands. Its people seek to improve their circumstances while maintaining activities including oasis farming, alongside the "cultural tourism" drawn by its manuscript-rich libraries and its historically valuable sites, which attract researchers and history enthusiasts. These factors modestly drive the local service economy.
Population
Chinguetti has seen unstable population figures, owing to the economic and climatic shifts it has passed through.
While the town had settled inhabitants, part of the population alternated between urban settlement and movement around it, according to the conditions of bedouin life.
Settlement was affected by severe droughts, the most recent in the 1970s, which sharply reduced the population — at some points leaving only around 400 residents.
Its population stands at roughly 6,800, according to 2013 data from Mauritania's National Statistics Office.
Landmarks and monuments
Chinguetti holds many sites of interest to visitors and tourists, especially those drawn to cultural and historical heritage.
The old mosque is a 13th-century architectural landmark, embodying Saharan Islamic architecture and exemplifying the town's flourishing Islamic heritage and spiritual radiance.
The mosque's square stone minaret has acquired national symbolic value: its images and models now express Mauritanian identity in its Islamic and historical dimension.
UNESCO lists Chinguetti as a World Heritage site alongside other Mauritanian towns such as Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata — these towns standing as unique testimony to bedouin culture and to trade in a desert environment since the Middle Ages, having been thriving centres of rich religious and cultural life that preserved their exceptional architectural pattern for seven centuries.
The town contains many libraries that have done much to protect manuscripts of works by some of the earliest Muslim scholars. Most are family libraries, whose preservation and the upkeep of their precious contents pass down through the generations.
These libraries draw researchers and academics interested in studying the cultural heritage of Islam in West Africa.
The catalogue of the Mauritanian Institute for Scientific Research records 3,968 manuscripts across 20 libraries in the town, most notably the Ahl Ahmed Sharif library (1,302 manuscripts), the Ahl Habt library (1,172 manuscripts), the Ahl Ahmed Mahmoud library and the Ahl Hamen library, in addition to the library of the Chinguetti mosque.
