As with volume II of Arabic Literature of Africa, work on the present volume began several decades ago. A primitive version of it was privately circulated to selected libraries in 1979 under the title Handbook to the Arabic writings of West Africa & the Sahara, and it consisted of a simple list of authors and titles, with some indication of the location of manuscripts and the existence of published editions, covering the whole of West Africa and the southern Sahara.

Serious work on preparing volume IV of Arabic Literature of Africa was initiated after a visit to Timbuktu in 1992 when…