Al-Aqib ibn Mahmud ibn Umar was chief qadi of Timbuktu in the second half of the sixteenth century, and he is the closest thing the city's building record offers to a named architect. The Sudano-Sahelian tradition was carried by hereditary guilds of masons whose members are almost never recorded individually. What the seventeenth-century chronicle Ta'rikh al-Sudan does record is that al-Aqib directed two mosque campaigns: from 1570 he rebuilt the Djinguereber, and between 1578 and 1582 he had the sanctuary of the Sankoré mosque demolished and reconstructed to dimensions he had measured against the Kaaba while on pilgrimage. He was a jurist and not a professional builder, and the masons who executed the work are anonymous. The decision that fixed the building's form, however, is attributed to him by name.
